Whether you conduct online courses or workshops, there's something we fail to consider. It's called the Safe Zone. If we just want to play Internet guru, we don't care if the clients can actually implement the information or not. But if we're keen to be real teachers, it's the ONLY thing we care about. Find out how the safe zone helps clients to consume and apply your material. And that's what makes them come back for more. In a world filled with "experts", you're creating a true learning experience. -------------------- Useful Resources   Email me at: [email protected]  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ This episode is available at: http://www.psychotactics.com/31 --------------------   Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem 00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode / 00:02:30 Table of Contents 00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions 00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem 00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem 00:14:07 Summary 00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing 00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review   -------------------- Transcript   Sean D'Souza:In 2010, I decided to go for a walk at 6am, except it was Paris, and my wife was fast asleep. I decided, well, I could go and explore Paris a little bit, and so I did. It was a nice place. It is a nice place. It's full of people and markets and it was great. I walked for a couple of hours, and then I turned around and I found I was lost. I had taken some kind of road somewhere and I couldn't find my way back no matter what I tried. There I was in one of the most well-documented cities on the plant and I was feeling extremely unsafe. There were all these people around me and they were speaking a different language, and I didn't even know how to get back to where I was supposed to be.   This is a lot how students and participants feel when they're doing a course with you. Whether it's an online course or if it's a workshop, it's the same kind of feeling. They get this feeling of being unsafe, and your job as a teacher is to put them in the safe zone. In today's episode we're going to explore the safe zone. What is the safe zone? Why is it so important? How do you take the steps to get people into the safe zone? As usual, we're going to look at three things. The first thing is isolation. The second is mistakes, how do you make them make mistakes. The third is the group size. These three elements are critical to get people into a safe zone.   First, what is a safe zone? When you're doing a live course, you'll notice something, that people from the same company, they seem to sit with each other; or people that know each other, they seem to sit with each other. The reason for this is that they feel unsafe. Now they're there for a course; they should not feel unsafe. No one is coming to bite them, but that's how they react. On an online course, you can't see this activity, and so it's very difficult to realize how incredibly unsafe people feel when they're on the Internet. What you've got to do is you have to create that safety.   Safety is when people feel comfortable. They feel comfortable with their group. They feel comfortable with the pace of the stuff they're learning. They don't feel that intimidation. Mostly, they feel comfortable with you. You'll know they're comfortable with you when they start questioning your behavior. You're the teacher. You're the person training them, but they start questioning the system. They start questioning the way you've approached something. That's when you know that they're in the safe zone, because that's what happens at home, right? When you're at home, people don't just take your word for stuff. They'll ask you, "Why do you want me to do this? That's when they feel they're in the safe zone, when they can come back to you.   For you to create this safe zone is very critical simply because it enhances learning. Instead of it just being top-down, which is you, you're the boss, you're the teacher, it's now back and forth. When a student or participant realizes that there is flexibility in the system and there is safety in the system, they really relax, and that's when they learn. We all learn when we are completely relaxed, not when we're uptight.   Let's explore those three things. Let's start off with the first one, that is, isolation. What is isolation? When I teach the article-writing course, which I call the toughest writing course in the world, I have a responsibility as a teacher, and that is not to say that three people finish the course or five people finish the course. I have to take everyone across this minefield. What is in this minefield? You have headlines, connectors, disconnectors, storytelling. You have so many elements, and it's very easy to just throw it all together and say, "Okay, let's write."   What we have to do is we have to isolate. We have to take step-by-step. Often, just for the first fifty words, we'll take a week, two weeks, and this gets the fluency, the practice, and mostly it's about the isolation. Instead of looking at the entire article, which has so many elements, we focus on one tiny little bit and then we pull out that bit and then break it up into smaller bits. When you do that, what you get is this feeling of isolation.   The reason why isolation is so critical is because your instructions are always going to be misunderstood. For instance, when we do the cartooning course, we ask people to draw circles. Now how many ways can you draw circles? A lot of ways, apparently, because people will draw circles with crayons or colored pencils or large circles and small circles. Some people will do circles with some kind of design with it and some of them will be spartan. The point is that when you give an instruction, it can be interpreted in many ways. The moment you have multiple interpretations, you have creativity, but when you have creativity, you also have confusion.   I'll give you an example. Let's say I asked you to take a step. Now, obviously, you think I'm going to ask you to take a step forward, right? What if I meant you to take a step to the left or what if I meant you to take a step to the right or to the back? There are all these permutations, and the only way to reduce these permutations, to reduce their confusion and to create a safe zone is to have this factor of isolation.   A good example of this would be when I was learning badminton and I had this coach. If you looked at someone smashing the shuttlecock across, you'd look like one fluid motion, but, in fact, there were about five different steps. What he made me do was to work on the first step, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, and then the fifth, but not in one go. This was in five different sessions. This is what isolation is all about.   What happens is you get very, very good at executing and becoming very fluent at that one step. Clients get an enormous amount of confidence. Instead of you just rushing through a course or rushing through a workshop, you're isolating the steps. They master those steps, and then you move to the next one. If this sounds very Eastern, almost like karate or making sushi, then it's exactly that. Instead of this rush, rush, rush, get to the end, finish line, you're slowing things down. That creates a safe zone, because when the client shows up, they know they're not going to be intimidated; they're going to be taken through one little step. If they make the wrong step, you can gently nudge them in the right direction.   The goal for every teacher is to get their students to the finish line. When you do isolation, you get the students to the finish line in a state of fluency, and there's a big difference between someone at the finish line and someone who is fluent at the finish line. What you've got to do, really, is you have to sit down and look at the sections that you're teaching. Maybe you're teaching web design and maybe you're teaching about the home page. The home page might seem like a single page, but it has seven different components. I'm must making this up, of course. What you're going to do is sit down and work out how each component works and break it up into tiny little bits. Then the client takes one little step at a time, and they master it; and the next step, and they master it. This is isolation. This is the first step towards creating the safe zone.   Let's look at the second step, which is making mistakes. Ever since you were a little kid, you've been told you should make mistakes. You should learn from your mistakes; you should make your own mistakes. Then you go to school and you make mistakes and you get everything wrong, and the adult says to you, "Why did you make all these mistakes?" We learn very quickly that it's not a good idea to make mistakes.   Talent is a reduction of errors. When someone learns to fly a plane, it's very easy to technically fly the plane, but it's very difficult to pull a plane out of a crisis situation. The way a pilot is trained is through mistakes. They are put on a simulator, and the simulator is doing something crazy like crashing the plane and you have to pull out. The hydraulics have failed; you have to pull out. Something has happened and you have to pull out. You have to learn from the mistake.   How does the client learn from mistakes? Obviously, they don't want to make mistakes in the course. They don't want to get things wrong. What you do is you design a mistake session. On our courses, we design mistake sessions where if you get it wrong, you get it right. I'll say that again. You get it wrong, you get it right. If you get it right, you get it wrong. You can sense the feeling of fun here, can't you? You have to write headlines, but you don't write them correctly; you write them wrong.   What we do is we teach people how to write headlines. We show them why the headline works, how to deconstruct it. Then when they are proficient at it, we get them to break it. We get them to write headlines that are completely wrong. Of course, they have a lot of fun. They also get very frustrated, but the mistake highlights their skill and it creates fluency. When they have that fluency, they feel safe. They also feel safe just to make the mistake.   In a uniqueness course that I did in California and London, we did the same thing. I gave out a sheet in the first five minutes, and I said, "This is something that you have to solve. The only thing you have to know is that none of you are going to get it right." Everyone in the room immediately knew that they were not going to get it right; they were going to get it wrong. Crazy as it sounds, the entire mood of the room lifted. Then I was able to show them how uniqueness mattered and how copywriting, as it were, didn't make as much difference. What you're really doing is you are creating a situation where you're enabling the client to make a mistake.   In the article-writing course, which is another example, we have a situation where I'm teaching them to boil down the article to a single word. Even though I use the word, one word, one word, one word, which is a single word, but you understand that as a teacher and they don't understand what happens when they go and they boil it down to a couple of words or two or three words or a term. What you've got to do is you've got to help them make that mistake.   In the instructions, I say, "You can use one word or two words or a term, but I recommend that you use one word." Invariably, about fifty to seventy percent of the group will do exactly that; they will use one word, but a few will use two words or three words. That's when you highlight the mistake. You say, "Here's where you went wrong and here's why you went wrong and here's why I put you on the wrong path on purpose so that you could learn from the simulator exercise." Of course, you may get a little pushback, and the only reason you'll get that pushback is because they feel they're in a safe zone. They can push back. Then you explain things to them.   Sometimes, this mistake-making exercise, it needs to be highlighted. This is a mistake-making week. You cannot get it wrong unless you do it right. Sometimes, the mistake needs to be slid in quietly. They need to make the mistake by themselves, and then you need to help them fix it and explain why you put them through that exercise. Both of these elements of sliding the mistake or announcing the mistake is what helps people get into that safe zone. They now know they can make a mistake and not be penalized for making that mistake, so they relax. When they relax, they learn, and that's really what learning is all about.   This take us to the third part, which is the group size. Whenever you go to a conference, whenever you go to a workshop, or even when you're doing a course online, one of the greatest achievements of the people who have conducted the conference, who have organized the conference, is that they've got so many people in the room. This is like going into a classroom when you were five and to find two hundred people in that room. It is horribly intimidating. It's great for the organizer. It's great for the person that's having the workshop or the training course online, but it's terrible for everyone else. This is where you've got to understand that groups size matters.   At Psychotactics, when we do workshops we never take more than thirty-five people. When we do course like the article-writing course, we'll never take more than twenty-five people. I thought that was fine. I thought twenty-five people, that's not a lot of people; it's a whole lot better than two hundred people, but I was wrong. You have to get in from a mind that is intimidated by being in a group of twenty-five people. There was this one woman from France, Catherine, and she told me, "I'm not comfortable in such a large group." I'm going, "It's not such a large group." She says, "For me, it is." I had to ask her, "What do you mean by a smaller group?" She said, "Well, about ten people, that's okay-ish for me."   Eventually, what we found was that the group of six to seven people, that is ideal. Whenever we have our workshops, even if we have thirty-five people in the room, they are broken up into groups of six or seven people. The reason why it's six or seven is because if you have just two or three, a couple of people can dominate and they can go beyond their bounds. When you have six or seven, you have this little balance. It's important to note that just because you do this in a workshop, and we've done this in a workshop for many, many years, we didn't necessarily figure out that we had to do this online as well.   When I first started doing the article-writing course, I used to have twenty-five people in the same group. Again, because of the safe zone, someone said, "No, no, no. I want a group of six or seven." The moment I got this feedback, and this was in the middle of the course, I thought, "I don't really want to do this. This is going to increase my workload four hundred percent because now instead of looking at everyone's work at the same time, in the same area, I have to go into four sub-areas and click and unclick and do all those kinds of things."   Because of the safe zone, the client becomes a little adamant, and this is really good. This shows you that there is this feedback. There is this back and forth even as the course is going on, even as the workshop is headed towards day one or day two or day three. What we did was we broke it up into six and seven. The moment I did it, I realized that it works. You've got to create the safe zone, and big groups don't create a safe zone. They create a feeling of anxiety, of being just one among many, many people. We think that it's okay to be in a big group because we won't be noticed, but no learning happens. If you're really a teacher, you want learning to happen; you want fluency to happen; you want mastery to happen. That happens in a small group.   Let's summarize what we've learned today. The first thing that we tackled was this concept of the safe zone and how people get very comfortable in that safe zone and there's feedback back and forth. The three elements of the safe zone were isolation … What you do is you take one section like if you're teaching about web design, just take the home page, break it up into five, six, seven components and see how they gain fluency. Think of yourself less as this modern day guru and more as a teacher that's teaching a skill like karate, or karate, as we know it, where the little bits like in Karate Kid, "wax on, wax off," that was isolation.   The second thing to consider is that clients don't want to make mistakes, and they yet want to get their assignment right, so you create assignments where they make mistakes, where the only way to get the assignment correct is to make a mistake. If you have a photography course, make them take pictures out of focus, ;make them take pictures with the wrong ISO setting, and you will see that they will gain fluency. The third thing is the group size. If you really want to teach people, if you really want them to get fluency, you have to break it down into smaller group sizes. About six or seven people in a group, that's more than enough. Two or three is too small; six or seven is just about right.   This brings us to the one thing that you can do today. If you are like my badminton coach, then you will take that one action and break it up into five small actions and get your clients to work through those actions. The reason why it's so powerful is you can do this yourself. You can see for yourself that you've been speeding through things and you need to take one step at a time. Isolation is where you need to start.   This brings us to the end of this episode. Now to go back to France, how did I get back? I was lost. I did get back. What I did was I found an Internet café and I went in there and I punched in my address onto Google Maps, and it told me how to get back. There I had printed instructions on how to get back to the apartment, and I was back in my safe zone.   If you want to get more of these episodes, you can find them on iTunes; that's for all those on Apple. You can find them on Stitcher if you're on Android. You can also find it on our website if you go to psychotactics.com/podcast. To get the transcript and the download of this particular episode, and this is episode number thirty-one, you go to www.psychotactics.com/31. This is true for every episode, so if you want to find the transcript for any episode, just go www.psychotactics.com/29 or 43 or whatever. We're not up to forty-three yet, but we will be.   It's 5:22am, and I have to head back to writing my book on pricing. I finished the first book, kind of. It's one book out of three books, and it’s not the usual book on pricing, which is all these measurements and all this kind of stuff, but it enables you to increase prices without losing customers. We're doing a trust-the-chef offer at this point in time, so it's at its lowest price, and with Psychotactics, the prices always go up, up and away. They never come down; they're always going up. If you want to get to the pricing book, this is a good time.   If you haven't already done so, leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It really helps boost our ratings and gets other people like you to listen to this. Go to iTunes or go to Stitcher and leave a review.   That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye-bye.

Most of us use benefits or solutions when presenting our products or services?and not the problem. So why bother with the problem? Will it actually improve the conversion on our sales pages? Will it improve our e-mail marketing? Will it get more attention when we're making our presentations? The answer is yes, yes and yes. And you can do it without being negative in any way. So how do you do it? Let's find out in this episode. /   -------------------- Useful Resources   Email me at: [email protected]  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem 00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode 00:02:30 Table of Contents / 00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions 00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem 00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem 00:14:07 Summary 00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing 00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review   ------- Sean:            Have you ever been in the situation where you've been in the shower, it's nice warm water, and then suddenly it's freezing cold? That's because someone else turned on a tap somewhere else in the same apartment. No? That hasn't happened to you?                         How about a computer? Have you had a computer that went vroom, vroom, vroom, ready to start and it started to go slow and slow and then boom? These are problems and problems get attention. The problem is that we don't make use of the problems when we're getting our message across and we certainly don't use it the way it should be.                         How should the problem be used and why not use the solution instead? That's today's episode on attention getting. On the last episode of attention getting, we talked about how you can use the two concepts of novelty and consequences, but here's another way, using the problem.                         What are we going to cover today? You like the three things, don't you? We'll cover three things, then we'll do the one thing that you can do and then we'll wrap up. Just in case you haven't heard Episode No. 24, well, listen to it again. I had to do it twice. The first time I did it, I was half asleep and then I had to re-edit the whole thing all over again because the first one really put me asleep. Imagine that? The irony. It was about attention getting and the voice was so slow.                         If you got that episode or you thought this is really slow, well, there's a new episode. Delete the old one, download the new one again and you'll find that it's much better, much better music, much better tone, and yes, I'm awake in that one. That was Episode No. 24 on how to get attention through novelty and consequences, use the problem.                         We're going to cover three things in this episode. The first thing is why solutions are less effective than problems, and second is why problems get your attention. The third is the mistake that most of us make with implementing the problem.                         Let's start with the first one which is why solutions don't work as well as problems. To understand solutions, you have to understand your day-to-day life and your day-to-day life is simply a whole bunch of solutions. When you sit on the chair, that's a solution. When you switch on your computer and it works perfectly, that's a solution. When you get in you car and you turn on the ignition, that is a solution.                         What is the problem? The problem is the opposite of the solution. Let's take those instances and you know where I'm going with this. You sit on the chair, it breaks. You turn on the car ignition, it won't start. That's where your brain gets activated.                         You don't think of your chair, you don't think of your car, you don't think of all the things that work. That's because the brain is focused on the problem. It's not focused on the solution. When we get into marketing and when we get onto our website and we get into networking and we get into our presentations, what we tend to do is we start to lead with the solution and that's a problem.                         The reason why we put our audiences to put is because we're leading with the solution. When someone asks us what we do, what we so is we immediately talk about our solution and you notice that immediately those people start to fall asleep. They are very polite.                         Let's say you're at a networking meeting, so let's say you're a software developer and let's say you make time-tracking software. Someone asks you what do you do? Well, you spit out your solution. You say we make time-tracking software and this helps you keep track of your time when you're working. That's your solution.                         Notice how your brain doesn't get very activated by something like that. Now the reason why we do is because we've been taught to talk about our benefits. We've been taught to bring out the solution but the brain kind of goes to sleep every time someone brings out a solution. When you turn that into a problem, that's when your brain gets activated.                         Now, to be very fair, there is nothing wrong with solutions. Problems increase the heart rate, solutions decrease the heart rate. The question is now that we know that solutions aren't as effective as problems, how do we go about creating the problem?                         That takes us to the second part of today which is creating the problem because we don't really want to be negative, do we? Here we are in the second part which is how to bring out the problem. Now the biggest objection is what we have to deal with at this point in time and that is we do not want to be negative. We do not want to highlight a problem, and yet to get the customer's attention when we are writing that email, we have to bring up the problem. When we are on the sales pitch, we have to bring up the problem.                         What is this problem? How do we get to this problem without being negative? Let's take the example of that time-tracking app that we talked about earlier. Let's say you're still a software developer and you have the solution for a time-tracking app. As we go through the internet and look at different time-tracking apps, we find that the solution pops up everywhere.                         One will say log, learn, optimize your life, every second counts. That's a headline, by the way. The second one says the ultimate timer, it's insanely simple, it's built for speed and ease of use. The third one is find your ideal work/life balance, and it goes on to talk about understanding your daily habit so you can focus and be more productive. The fourth one is a time-tracker that makes it easy to record your work hours and to calculate your income, and to build a customer if you're self-employed.                         Are you still awake? You shouldn't be because all of these solutions have put you to sleep but then let's go to letsfreckle.com. That's L-E-T-S-F-R-E-C-K-L-E-dot-com. Immediately your brain is locked in because the headline there is my team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. What is so precise about that headline? It's precise because it's not something that was invented by someone sitting at their computer.                         You can be the best copywriter in the world but when a client speaks, they have a totally different voice and this one shows the pain of the team going through time-tracking apps and getting frustrated with it. This is some kind of manager and that is what makes it so powerful, that emotion-built voice of the problem they've been having with time-tracking apps.                         We looked at both the problem and the solution. We've seen that the solution is very important because it reduces your heart rate and the problem increases the heart rate. The issue here is that your problem cannot be manufactured at your desk. It needs to come from a customer. It needs to come from a real customer. They bring up an issue that you would not think of.                         The best copywriters in the world, they don't sit at their desk and they write. They go out there, they meet the customers, they speak to them on the phone, they take them out to lunch, and then they get the words from the customer. They get the problems from the customer which they then put on a webpage, which they then put on emails. That has more power than you could ever dream of just by sitting at your computer and thinking what I'm going to write today.                         When you think of it, at Psychotactics, we have an article writing course and what is the problem with article writing? Usually you think, well, it has something to do with article writing. It is about the fact that you can't write quickly enough or you can't complete an article, things like that. Yet, when you go there, it talks about how to stop knocking on clients' doors and to get them to call you instead.                         Now, you might have a fluke and think of that sitting at your desk but most of the time it's the reason why customers are motivated to do something and they need to tell you that. They need to bring out that pain. You need to put that pain in the headline.                         Notice it's not negative, not any more negative than, say, the newscasts are telling you that there's a storm or a cyclone or a hurricane headed your way. Not any more negative than someone telling you, hey, your tires are balding and you might skid off the road.                         When the problem comes from the customer themselves, you will find it is very powerful and it's not negative, and it brings out this whole emotion that you would struggle to work on if you were just sitting at your desk and trying to figure it out.                         With that, we come to the end of the second part. We did the problem and the solution. We found out that the problem is more intense than the solution. We notice the dog poo, not the sidewalk. We notice the rain, not the sunshine as much. This takes us to the third part and the most important part of all, which is sticking to the problem. Just because you have a problem doesn't mean that you're going to stick to it.                         What do I mean by sticking to a problem? To go back to that problem of the software developer that has the time-tracking app, well the problem was that the team has gone through four time-tracking apps in the last 2 1/2 years. Now, you want to drive home that problem.                         Why has the team gone through that? What have been the frustrations of your team as they have gone through the time-tracking app? What have been the consequences? What happened? This is a story. This is an unfolding story. It's like a movie. It's like drama. It's amazing, it's got power and detail that you don't want to let go of. You don't want to jump into the solution right now. You want to drive home that problem before you get to the solution.                         The second thing is you definitely don't want to go into another problem. You want to stick to the problem. You want to drive home the problem. You want to drive home the consequences. Once you're done, then and only then do you move to the second problem, or if you like, to the solution.                         What I tend to do is I have a problem in the headline and a very brief solution because you want to increase the heart rate and decrease the heart rate. From that point on, you just stick to that problem. For instance, when you looked at the article writing course, it was how to stop knocking on clients' doors and get them to call you instead.                         Now, that was the problem. There's a bit of a solution there. It is learn why articles do a far superior job of attracting clients you want and how the right articles make you the expert in your field. Now that's a very brief solution there and now we stick to the original problem, which is how to stop knocking on clients' doors.                         Knocking on clients' doors can be the hardest way to get business, yet we do it all the time. In order to get the clients' attention, we send out sales letters, we make presentations, we do everything we can to get clients. The more we try to sell, the higher the clients' hackles go up. The more we try to convince, persuade, the more the client wants to say no or avoid you.                         That's just the first paragraph. Then it goes on to why clients put off the purchase. The first reason why they put off the purchase, the second reason why they put off the purchase, and only then do you get to presenting the article writing course.                         Sticking with a single problem is very critical and the reason why it's critical is because the problem, which was in your headline, got the customers' attention. Now when you stick to that singular problem, it gets the customers' attention and keep that customers' attention. That's what you're really doing. You're getting their attention with the headline. You're keeping it with a couple of paragraphs. Then you're moving to a solution.                         That brings us to the end of this episode but let's summarize. What are the three things we covered? We started out with the solution. We found out why the solution is very important. It's important simply because it reduces the heart rate. If you just have a problem, it just gets the heart beating so quickly that the customer's not able to focus for very long.                         It does attract. The problem does attract but the solution has reason to be there and that reason is that it reduces the heart rate. The problem and the solution both co-exist. The problem comes first, then the solution.                         Now, the problem is very critical and the way to get the problem is not to sit at your desk but to go out there and speak to your customers and they will come up with something which is mind-boggling, something that you would not have thought of.                         The third thing that we covered was simply that you cannot just have the problem there for one second and then disappear. Most people do that. They put in the headline, they may sneak in a line or two, and then, poof, they're gone off either to the next problem or they've gone to the solution.                         You want to make it linger. You want to make it stay there for awhile. People need to know that you know how they feel about this problem. When you drive home the consequences of not dealing with that problem, they can feel those consequences and so it becomes more powerful but it also becomes more natural. This is exactly how life pans out.                         We look at a problem, we figure out the consequences, and then we take action. If we see a solution, there's nothing to fix so we go about our lives as it were.                         What's the one thing that you can do today? Maybe you're going for a networking meeting. Maybe you have to write a sales page on your website. Maybe you just have to write an email.                         The question to ask yourself is this: Do I have a prospect or a client and can I speak with them? Because when you speak with them, they will give you a list of their problems. All you have to do is make them pick which is the biggest problem. When they pick the biggest problem, ask them why it is the biggest problem, how it became the biggest problem, what did they think are the consequences of that problem.                         If you just stick to those three questions, you'll get at least a couple of paragraphs if not three or four paragraphs. The best part is you don't have to do any of the writing, just a bit of polishing and you're done. You're ready to go with your problem and your solution.                         To get attention, the brain requires a problem, so use a problem, get to the customer and get cracking.                         If you would like to learn more about problems and solutions and consequences, then you should get yourself the Brain Audit Kit. You can get this at www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and I would recommend that you get the Brain Audit Kit. You can get the Brain Audit at $9.99 but what you miss out is on the entire workshop experience so there is an entire workshop in the Brain Audit Kit, and it also has additional audio from all the questions that we've got over the years.                         The Brain Audit by itself is a very comprehensive book but the Brain Audit Kit goes several levels deeper. It explores the mistakes that people make. It explores the trouble that they've had so your experience is richer and you don't make the same mistakes.                         I'm not suggesting that you don't get the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit by itself is very powerful but if you get the Brain Audit Kit, you will find that you're able to go deeper and get greater benefits in a shorter amount of time. Not at first, you still have to go through the information but you will find that there is enormous depth that you don't want to miss out on.                         The Brain Audit, as you know, was one of our first books and since then we've gone on to write many books. The book I'm writing right now is about pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers but it covers the psychology of pricing, how to increase your prices, and then how to maintain and manage your prices. It's a very comprehensive series.                         The key to actually getting this book out is what I'm going to explain in the information workshop so it's the structure. Most people think that it's the content that matters, that if you have it in your head, that's fine, but as writers, as creators, we have a big problem.                         That problem is that we spin in our head. We have so much information that we don't know how to put it down on paper. We just stack it up and when you stack it up, the client gets overwhelmed. When they get overwhelmed, you know what happens. Nothing happens. They don't act on it and they don't consume your book or your product or your workshop, and then they don't come back.                         The information product workshop in Maryland does just that. We spend three days and not two days or one day because we don't want to hurry through it or we want to make sure that you get it, that you actually work through it. That's on May 5, 6, and 7. You can find out more at www.psychotactics.com/dc.                         Finally, if you haven't already left a review on iTunes, please do so today because it's really helpful to us. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying get attention today and get it with the problem, and bye for now. 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When you're making a presentation, how do you fire up your audience? There are many ways to get that Powerpoint or Keynote presentation going. But one of the most effective ways is to issue a challenge. The audience then waits for you to succeed (or fail). But you can't fail, can you? You're a magician who has practiced the tricks to perfection. This episode is about creating a challenge?then bringing the entire audience alive with the magic trick. ------------------ Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / / Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc / Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver / / For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ / / -------------------- 00:03:48 Creating the Challenge 00:07:48 Space Between Challenge and Demonstration 00:09:04 Never Let The Heckler Win 00:11:01 Summary 0:12:52 Maryland Workshop on Info-products   ------------------ Why Creating and Meeting Challenges Fire Up An Audience   When you're sitting in a magic show, you don't doodle. You don't take out your pen, a sheet of paper and draw weird, funny squiggles.   And that's because a magician creates action. And most of the action is centred around a challenge. And while a presentation is no magic show, there's a way to take your audience from doodle-zone to challenge-zone in a matter of minutes.   So what is the challenge-zone? The challenge is something almost magical. Something that the audience would find hard to believe. Like for instance, a magician would make an elephant appear in the room. But the audience is skeptical—yet anticipating some action. This is the challenge-zone. In a world that's full of noise, the challenge immediately ramps up attention.   Let's slip into an early example When I do the presentation for The Brain Audit, I will often start off telling the audience, that at about the 17 minute mark, I will get everyone in the room to think of the same question. To a skeptical audience, that seems impossible. How could any presenter know what every audience member is thinking, let alone making you think of the very same question?    But the question is based on a trigger And if you've read The Brain Audit (which you should, if you haven't) you learn how to create the trigger. It's composed of the problem, solution and target profile. And when you string these three together, you get a single question, "What do you mean by that?". Once the trigger is sprung, curiosity takes over, and you have the "What do you mean by that?" question at the top of your mind.    And that's just one example—so let's take another When I do a presentation on "Pricing", the challenge question is similar. I tell everyone that by the time I show them the price-grid, everyone will want to pay 15% more—instead of 15% less. And I'll create this desire for the more expensive option, without changing the core product. This means that if the core product is a workshop on ballroom dancing, the core product will stay the same. And yet, almost everyone in the room will choose the more expensive option.   You see the elephant in the room, don't you? There's no elephant, but you as a magician are creating the challenge. And the audience loves the fact that there's a challenge coming up. What they love even more is that you're promising to "mess with the minds" of the entire audience. They think the guy next to them may be susceptible, but they're not going to fall for some silly trick. And this is what gives the challenge more power. The more skeptical they are, the more you're able to convert them from skeptics to fanatical fans.    There's just one itty-bitty problem: How do you construct the challenge? The challenge must contain a method to get from A to B. It can't be just a concept. It must be something they can try for themselves. So for instance, there's this company called ioSafe. They make hard drives. And the beauty of their hard drive is that they can be dunked in water, blasted with a torch, or crushed under a road roller—and still survive. You can see how the challenge works, can't you? The challenge would be for people to try and destroy the drive.   But sure, that's a product and quite a unique product... What about if you're selling a service or even a concept? The core of any product/service or training should be that you're able to bring results. Yet, instead of picking many points of your service or product, you pick just one. For instance, we teach a course in Photoshop colouring (for cartoonists). And the way the demonstration goes is like this—we get rid of Photoshop—and the computer.   And imagine we're at the cafe, instead And the audience is asked to pick a letter for the "brush" tool in Photoshop. Of course, you chose B. And then to choose any number (on the keyboard) that represents 60% opacity. You may fumble, but you'll settle on 6. And then you ask them to choose between the left or right square bracket, to increase the size of the brush.    And they choose the right one—they always do. Whammo! You've shown them how to use the three core tool to colour, without so much as going next to a computer.    But it's not enough to create a challenge You have to make sure there's a space between issuing the challenge and showing them the "elephant in the room". Usually a good way to do this is to issue the challenge right at the start of the presentation. And give them an approximate time when you'll solve the mystery. e.g. In 17  minutes, or at the end of the first section. This keeps them focused not only on what you're saying, but on edge, anticipating the moment when you solve the mystery.   But won't the gap distract them? Yes, there's a gap between issuing the challenge and solving it, but the audience doesn't get distracted at all. Why? Because you've been clear. You've told them the time at which the problem will be solved. Now they're ready to focus on anything else that you have to say, expecting fully well that you will keep your promise at the right time.    And even if you're an expert, you don't want the audience to take over Notice how the magician doesn't ask your opinion when he does the magic trick? Well, the same applies to you. In every audience, there are likely to be hecklers. Or super-skeptics. You could put twenty elephants in the room and they'd still find fault with your method. If you ask the audience to raise their hand, or do something that involves audience participation, you're more than likely to run into the heckler.   That's when you've lost control Now your carefully executed challenge is the mercy of the heckler and his agenda. It's better to meet the challenge, pause for a few seconds and let the awe seep through the crowd. Then, move along. The ones in the audience who've felt the change will come along with you, and the hecklers won't—but at least they won't get a chance to drive you off tangent.    Every product or service has a bit of magic  Every product or service can demonstrate that magic, but you can't fiddle with all the features. You have to pick one feature—the one that creates magic. And every product or service has to have this amazing "something" or it's just another me-too offering. Finding that magic is what causes the audience to gasp in amazement and come along for the rest of the ride.   So let's summarise, shall we? 1) Look of ONE element in your product or service. What is that one?  2) Introduce the challenge right at the start of your presentation. 3) Then DO NOT solve the problem. Let it linger. 4) The lingering should have a fixed point. e.g. 17 minute-mark or end of first section etc. 5) At that point, not earlier, you should reveal the solution. 6) Do not get the audience to participate. You're opening yourself up to hecklers. 7) Losing control is one thing. A heckler can make you lose status. And that's death on stage. 8) Once you've got the audience gobsmacked, linger for a few minutes. Let the moment sink in, then move along.   When you read this piece, it may seem almost impossible to figure out what to do next. Does your product or service really have a magic trick. Yes it does. And you will find it only if you stick to ONE feature or benefit.    That one trick is a pure attention-getter! It pulls the audience along with you, and sure stops the doodling!

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. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected]  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/   -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: The Secret of Happiness 00:01:23 The List, the list, the list 00:03:56 Obstacle 1: Inefficiency 00:07:07 Obstacle 2: Greed 00:09:32 Obstacle 3: Self-doubt 00:11:30 Summary 00:12:29 US Workshop + Book on Pricing ------ Transcript:   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?

It might seem that it's impossible to get ideas for your articles. And it is. You go completely blank. Of course, there's a reason for all this blankness. And just as you can go blank, you have more ideas than you know what to do with. Wow, can this really be possible? Can you really have tons of ideas? Yes, you can. Provided you use all, or at least one of these systems. But hey, find out for yourself. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/   -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Where To Get Ideas 00:02:05 Table of Contents: Input, Brainstorming, Client Questions 00:02:46 Element 1: The Importance of Input 00:07:46 Element 2: Brainstorming 00:10:39 Element 3: How To Get Clients To Pitch In 00:16:00 Summary 00:17:13 Announcements / 00:18:29   ----- Where to get article ideas: An endless source The moment you see a ray of sun, you know it's something magical. That single ray has bounced back and forth like a billiards ball and taken well over a 100,000 years to get to earth. But even as you look, there's another ray, and another. In fact, we get so much energy from the sun, that in one day, it provides more energy than the world’s population could consume in 27 years. If only we could tap into some of that endless energy when coming up with ideas for an article. Instead we sit there, transfixed at the screen. We think. We trash around in our seats. We drink copious amounts of coffee. And despite sitting in awesome sunlight, we're trapped in some dark corner. So what are we to do? Where do we go to get an endless source of ideas? I can't speak for every writer, but I can speak for myself. And I know that dark place very well. There are days, weeks even, when you think you're never ever going to come up with a single idea worth writing or speaking about (yes, I do podcasts as well). Stomping, screaming and coffee doesn't help. So what does? Three things actually—three brilliant sources of sunshine - Reading/Listening - Brainstorming - Client Questions Let's start off with the first ray of sunshine: Reading/Listening You know how you make coffee, right? You have to have ground coffee, water and a source of heat. Well, that's input. Without input, you're staring at an empty mug that isn't going to fill itself. And the same applies to ideas. Those ideas are going to swerve right around you, unless you decide to get some input. Actually, not some—quite a lot of input. You want to soak yourself in input And the way to do this is reasonably obvious. You turn on the TV, read Facebook and listen to the crappy stuff on the radio, right? Ha, ha, that was a joke. Instead you have to get your nose in a book—a good book. A book that's related to your set of topics to begin with. The moment you get stuck in that book, you go through two stages: agreement and disagreement. Yet, even when you agree, you have your own spin on things. But when you disagree, it's like your head is about to burst. You have fire coursing up and down your veins. You're now ready to write. Except there's a bit of a problem Unless we're jumping on a bus or train, we rarely have time to read—in the morning. And the morning matters. It's precisely the point in time when your brain has rested and is more likely to remember and process things a lot better than the evening (and for sure, better than the afternoon). So if you don't have that time to sunbathe in the written word, you have to turn to audio.  Audio? Ugh, you say. Audio... And ugh is right. I'm listening to an audiobook right now, and ugh is probably the most suitable description. With a book, I could simply flip pages if the author gets too technical or boring.  A quick scan and I'm on my way. But audio is linear. You're stuck, not knowing what to fast forward and how much to fast forward. And that's provided you can remember anything at all. Most of us can't. And you shouldn't The goal of input is to get ONE idea. O-N-E. That's it. With a single idea you can bound off into article writing land. And yes, even though you may like your quiet time in the car, or when you're walking, you also need time to get in input. Or else you get too much quiet, and there's zero input.  Suddenly you're thrown back into that dark corner, unsure what to write about. So yes, text is great, audio too. But what about our second ray of sunshine? Ah yes, let's mosey along to brainstorming. So how and where do you use brainstorming? I'm doing a podcast, possibly a book on the "myth of inborn talent". I could read a ton of books, listen to audio etc. but that may not help me. And clients, well, they wouldn't be of much help either. There's no recourse but to do the brainstorming, all by myself. So you sit in the cafe and list out the topics, the sub-topics and the sub-sub-topics. And suddenly it's like you've opened up a vein. You have a lot you've been thinking about and you've got a ton of topics to cover.  But what if you don't end up with a bonanza? Clients and friends can help—with objections. Given a basic framework, they can come up with objections and then you have to spend your time dismantling those objections. For example: Let's say we take on the objection of 'why one person runs faster than another' or 'one person does geometry faster than anyone else in the room'. These are objections and clients and friends are full of these objections.  Yes, you can do your silent brainstorming, but also consider roping in some deeply skeptical friends and clients to bring in your second ray of sunshine. Which of course takes us to our third ray—clients. Clients? Didn't we already consider clients? Sure we did. But you nudged them, didn't you? In a lot of situations the clients will ask you questions as you're working with them. I've been doing the Article Writing Course since 2006. Every year the course changes by about 20%. It has more content than ever before. More clarification, even.  But that doesn't stop the flow of questions They come thick and fast. And it's up to you to see them as a pain or a blessing. I get my shopping trolley and stack up the questions. And then, for good measure, I answer them as fast as I possibly can. This impresses the heck out of clients, but hey, they're doing me such a great favour, by asking the questions. Without the questions, I have to tax my own brain—and that's a real pain—that brainstorming bit. With clients, I have the questions served up. All I have to do, is answer them in detail.  But isn't all of this stuff turning out to be an overload? Sure, we're apt to get tired just thinking about it. But let's look at it simply. You need some reading/listening time. Even 30 minutes of dedicated time is good enough. You then can head to the cafe and wring out your brain, if you like. And while you're at it, an e-mail may slide in, or a client may meet you at the cafe. And yes, solve their problem. Speed is critical, though... If you wait too long, the outline seems to fall apart and the article turns to mush. So you need to write, and write as quickly as possible. At first, the writing will be a pain (all stuff is a pain when you're just a "beginner"). In time, you'll get an article out in about 45 minutes, maybe an hour, provided you stick to your outlines.  I've been miserable. I've run out of ideas. I've found darkness in bright sunlight.  But to get ideas, you need input. Clients, your own brainstorming and most of all, the reading and the audio (ugh as it may be).  Focus on ONE point. Outline it as quickly as possible.  Then write.  

We are prone to think that the opposite of success is failure. And it's not. It's decay. The opposite of moving forward, isn't standing still. It's decay. Like a pool of water that gets stagnant, we decay. Our businesses, whether we're in an online business, or offline?it decays. So how do we overcome this decay? Contact Details and Links To e-mail me: [email protected] For the crazy newsletter: http://www.psychotactics.com Finish your book: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (yes, that's the workshop) Chaos in your life? http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos Time Stamps  00:00:20 Introduction 00:01:58 What's The Opposite of Success? 00:02:53 Table of Contents / 00:03:10 Part 1: Learning Decay / 00:06:03 Part 2: Fitness Decay / 00:09:24 Part 3: Achievement Decay / 00:13:46 Summary / 00:15:36 The One Thing You Can Do Today / 00:16:26 Final Announcements + Workshop DC Transcript: Sean: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. What is 15,000 multiplied by 365? Why would you ask yourself such a question? I'm not really sure but I ask myself the question at the start of the year and the answer was mind boggling. It was 5,475,000. That's 5,475,000 steps that you can do in a year if you do 15,000 a day . It was mind boggling to me for a very simple reason: I could never reach that goal. At least that's what I thought. I could never, ever reach that goal.  Then I thought about my parents. I thought of my grandparents, my great grandparents and all of them would have reached that goal. Every single one of them would have reached that goal every single year.  My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they'd never known what it was to go to a gym. They never knew what it was to diet. They ate pretty much anything they wanted and any amounts of it and then they drank stuff. In the case of my dad I know that he smoked a lot as well and at 75 he was still riding his motorcycle.  So why did I got down this bizarre path of calculating these 5,000,000 steps a year? The reason I went there was because I heard an interview somewhere. This doctor was talking about the opposite of success. In his case, he was talking about obesity and weight issues. He says, "The opposite of it is not standing still. The opposite of it is decay." That struck me like a thunderbolt. The opposite of success is not not being successful. It's decay. It's almost like you've decided not to brush your teeth anymore and what happens. We're not really talking about standing still, are we? We're talking about decay. We're talking about stuff going really bad. In today's episode I want to talk about three things. The first is about learning, the second about fitness and the third is about achievements. Let's start off with the first one which is learning.  I'm not a neuroscientist but I know enough about the brain to realize that the brain works on a [dimmer 03:20] setting. When we don't learn something it doesn't exactly forget that something, but it sets it on dimmer.  Last year, my niece Marsha and I we learned 150 countries and 150 capitals in sequence. We would go at high speed going across the continents Europe, Africa, North Asia, South Asia, The Pacific and of course, South, Central and North America.  A year has passed and if you asked us to go through that sequence at high speed, first we couldn't do it but also, we can't always remember the capitals. We know where they are. We haven't forgotten, but our brains are on a dimmer switch. When you look at most of us, our real learning took place when we were in school and university and we spent many hours a day learning. Then after that we've done very little. We've learned to program here and there. We've studied some course and done some workshop, but that's about it. Technically, we're in a state of decay. The problem with this lack of learning is that we're not working at our full efficiency. We're working in our full capacity but not our full efficiency because full efficiency means that you could do the same job in one-fifth a day or maybe one-tenth a day, but you're spending all day doing stuff.  Like writing an article for instance. Most of us would spend a half day or a day writing an article. You might spend a month or two writing a book. You could do it in a week. Better still, you could do a better book in a week than most people could do in a month or two.  The decay really takes its toll and it takes its toll in terms of energy because now we're so tired that we can't do much. Of course, because we're working all the time we don't take breaks. I'm not even talking about weekend breaks or month-long breaks. I'm just talking about breaks during the day. Just half an hour here, an hour there, two hours there.  We've entered a state of decay. We no longer have control over our lives. It's almost like being unable to brush our teeth. We're not really standing still. We're moving backwards. Of course, the same thing applies to our fitness. Several years ago I went to the doctor and he called in my wife and he said, "This guy, his blood sugar is up, his cholesterol is up, his pressure is up. I don't know what you've been feeding him but he's got to change his habits." I'm a bit of an iconoclast. I didn't actually change my habits. I wasn't that bad, anyway, but I definitely wasn't exercising as much as I should have been and so I started working. We started doing 10,000 steps a day.  I got a Fitbit about two years ago and that caused me to park further away from the store instead of getting the closest spot near the store. It caused me to walk to the store. Often, I just leave my car behind. In fact, the car got so useless I had to sell it. We still have one car but the point is we had a couple of cars but I was using the car so infrequently that we had spider webs on it. Even so, it was inconsistent. We'd walk a few days then not walk some days. If it is raining we wouldn't walk. That consistency wasn't in place. Then I realized we could do 5,000,000 steps. Actually, you could do 5,475,000.  To do 50,000 steps a day is phenomenal. It is very hard to keep up to that level, but almost all of us could do about 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year. 3,000,000 steps a year that most of us aren't doing. The reason why we aren't doing it is because we're not tracking it. We're not tracking it because we don't have a goal in place. We don't have those 3,000,000 or those 4,000,000 or those 5,000,000 steps. Track it. Get a pedometer of some kind. It doesn't have to be a Fitbit, but start tracking it. The reason why I chose Fitbit is simply because it sinks up with all my friends and of course, we are competitive and that causes me to do better. If I'm trying to compete with myself it's very easy to just give up. The Fitbit works for me, it might not work for you. Choose whatever you like. Get those 3,000,000 steps in, get those 5,000,000 steps in because the opposite of that is decay.  How do we know this to be true? Well, in my case, at least, I went back for the next test. The doctor said, "Whatever you're doing, that's great. Whatever you're eating, that's great." But I hadn't changed anything. I just changed the walking. The opposite of success becomes decay. We have decay in learning, we have decay in fitness and we have decay in our achievements.  Let's talk a bit about achievement, shall we? I was sitting at the barber the other day and I had all these papers and pens in my hand and he was cutting my hair and he says, "What's all this stuff?" I said, "Well, that's my planning." Of course, you can see the amused look on his face, but that's what we had to do. We went through maybe a year or two years of not planning on a regular basis. We'd make a plan but then we wouldn't look at that plan again. It didn't work for us. We pretended that Fridays didn't exist. Fridays weren't the day that we could meet any clients or do any stuff. We were going to plan on Friday. Of course, you don't take the whole day to plan, but in the morning we'd go out, we'd sit at the café and we'd plan. It takes an hour sometimes, an hour and a half to plan the month and the year that's about to unfold.  It's bad enough to plan the week, but the month and the year, everything starts to shift and all your priorities start to shift and suddenly it's taking a good hour and a half to just get that plan moving. Then as you're going through the week you're looking into your plan you'll find that hey, the plan is going off tangent. So even during the week you have to keep looking in the plan and you have to keep shifting your priorities and things that you have to do and the things that you haven't done.  A lot of people get very stressed with that. They go, "Well, I haven't done this." The idea is that you're re-negotiating. Most people think that somehow they have to conquer that to-do list and you never have to conquer the to-do list because you're never going to conquer the to-do list.  A to-do list is like the Himalayan mountain range. You climb to the top of one mountain and what do you see? There are hundreds of other mountains. It's a mountain range. That's your to-do list. All you have to do is re-negotiate it.  When you haven't achieve certain things, well you might see it as a sense of failure. But in reality, it's how life unfolds. There are millions of things to do and they're not going to go away and all you have to do is to keep planning and keep re-negotiating. As someone once said, "Planning is priceless but plans are useless," and in planning too we have decay. The opposite of planning is just randomness. The more you're planning, the more you're keeping control over things, the less you're allowing decay to set in. The biggest problem with decay is we're not able to see it as it's happening around us. We moved into this house 10 years ago and it was a beautiful house. The garden looked pretty good and the fence looked pretty good. I never really saw the decay. As we lived in the house I didn't really notice that decay happening. We were tending the [inaudible 13:01], we were pruning the hedges, mowing the lawns, doing what you do.  Then we had someone come in and do a landscape design and redo the garden. I took some photographs. I took some photographs before and after. It was amazing, especially when you look at the photograph several months later. It's absolutely gobsmacking amazing. It's amazing how much decay had set in in the previous gut; how terrible the tiles looked; how battered the fence looked. I couldn't believe. It. Our lives are filled with things that we need to learn, the fitness that we need to keep and the achievements that make us who we are. If we don't have that time to learn and we don't have the money and we don't have the resources to learn, then decay sets in. The same thing happens with our fitness. We may be told by everyone that this is okay and yet we know when we're unfit. We know exactly when we're overweight. We know exactly when we're obese. We know that we have to make some changes. You set the goal, in our case it's the 5,000,000 mark, and you go for it. Finally, you look at your achievements and all of that planning make such a big difference because the future is now.  We all hope that in the future we will write a book, we will go and visit some place, we will do this and we will do that. That future depends so much on the planning that we do today. The re-negotiation that we do every week and probably every day or two. All of this stops to decay the rot from setting in.  I used to think that the opposite of success was to be unsuccessful. Now that whole paradigm has shifted in my head. The paradigm is that it's decay. It's rot. We are the only people who can stop the rot.  What's the one thing that we can do today? Well, there is the 5,000,000 Club and it's not $5,000,000, it's 5,000,000. Those 5,000,000 enable us do a lot of other stuff as well because I'm able to listen to audio books while walking or a podcast and so I learned and then the achievement comes from there. From that fitness of body comes a fitness of the brain and the fitness of our business and our downtime, our vacation time, our relaxation time. The first of January has long passed, but we can have our resolution today. Get on the 3,000,000 step mark or the 5,000,000 step mark or the 5,475,000 step mark. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you like this episode you probably also like episode 14 and that is about getting things done and how the trigger plays a role. There was also a very popular episode, that's episode 17, which is how to slowdown even in the midst of chaos. If you haven't already done so, when you leave a review on iTunes or if you send us your review, you can also get a free book which is Outwitting Resistance. It's a really cool book and of course, it stops you from this whole rot and decay. There's also the workshop in Silver Spring. That's outside Washington, D.C. at the Sheraton on the 5th, 6th and 7th of May. This is about information products on how to construct that book. It's not about writing the book. That content you already have in your head. This is more about what makes the book consumable. You'll learn how to construct a book that customers read from start to finish or a course or a webinar or a report that they go from start to finish just like you're doing on this podcast right now. What is it that causes people to abandon stuff in the middle and not complete it? That's what we're going to cover in this workshop. It's pretty much one speaker and we're going to cover one topic and we're going to go three days. You're actually going to implement stuff rather than just sit there in the audience and listen. To meet us and to meet Elmo go to psychotactics.com/dc.    That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye from psychotactics.com and the three-month vacation. Buh-bye.  

Why did we have so many great artists, painters and sculptors in the Renaissance? Why does Brazil produce so many great soccer players? Is slow learning better than fast? Learn more by reading "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. / / For more: http://www.psychotactics.com / / [email protected]

If you're struggling to get attention on your website or when you meet a client, it's because you're not using two core factors: novelty and consequences. When you use these two concepts back to back with each other, something magical happens?you get attention! http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (Finish Your Book Workshop in Washington DC) http://www.psychotactics.com/denver (Where I'm speaking at the Copyblogger conference). http://www.psychotactics.com/magic (for magic, of course) === Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're 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.  On January 15, 2008, Steve Jobs stood in front of an audience and in his hand he had something that seemed quite boring. It was just an envelope, a yellow envelope, a manila envelope but, still, quite boring. Then he proceeded to take out a computer from that envelope, and that's when the audience gasped. What did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? It's what you should do as a presenter no matter where you stand in front of an audience. It's what you should do when you're presenting something, a product or a service, and that's something that you should work on. It's called attention.  While we all seek attention, we don't seem to get as much of it as we'd expect. The reason why we don't get that attention is simply because we don't understand the elements of attention. Attention has two elements, novelty and consequences. We'll start off with the concept of novelty. What is novelty? Let's take the example of Sara Blakeley. She started this company called SPANX. SPANX is an undergarment that smoothes the contours of a woman's body, making clothes more flattering, making them more comfortable.  Sara was having a problem. She was having trouble making her first sale. That's because when you're presenting something, it's usually in a boardroom and some buyer is looking at your stuff and you're in a list of seventeen buyers or seven hundred buyers. For some reason, Sara decided to change the tactics. She decided to go with novelty. Instead of making the presentation in the boardroom, she decided to take the buyer to the Ladies' Room. There she was at a Neiman Marcus in Dallas and they go to the Ladies' Room.  To really make a point, Sara had worn some form-fitting white pants, and because it was form-fitting and white, well, you can tell it wasn't that flattering for a woman. Then she pulled out her product, which she had called SPANX, and she put it on and the buyer saw the before and after. Right there and then, there was a moment of conversion. There was this flashing bolt of light and suddenly she was able to sell this product that she was having so much trouble selling before. What she found or stumbled on or figured out was this factor of novelty. The whole scenario of the Ladies' Room, the white pants, it being form-fitting, all of that combined to form this moment where it was impossible for the buyer to ignore. That's really what you're doing. You're making it impossible for the buyer to ignore you.  In this episode we look at the methods that you can use to get novelty going. We'll look at the length of the novelty and finally, we'll look at the connection. Once you've done your novelty act, how do you connect? How do you stay relevant? Where do you go from there? Let's start off with the first one, which is the methods that you need to use to get to novelty.  When I make the Brain Audit presentation, I do something very odd. I'll step into the audience and pick up a chair that no one is sitting on. Then I will get the chair to the front of the room and I will say, "I'm going to sit on this chair, stand up." Sit on the chair, stand up. Sit on the chair and stand up. Then I turn to the audience and say, "Did any one of you expect this chair to break? Why didn't the chair break?" What you've seen there is a demonstration of novelty. It's breaking that cycle of whatever people are doing. The method that was used in this system of novelty was to use the demonstration.  You can use stories, analogies, and demonstrations. Those are the most common uses of novelty. Whether you're writing an article, you're doing a presentation, you're in front of a client and you're selling some product or service, one of these three methods, stories, analogies, or demonstrations, are extremely powerful. The reason why they're powerful is more important, and that is because it breaks the pattern. When an audience or a client is expecting something and you've come out from left field, they are forced to pay attention. You are forced to pay attention when someone walks onstage and pulls out a computer from an envelope. You are forced to pay attention when someone starts to pull up a chair and sit on the chair and stand on it.  In another example, when I was speaking in Chicago, there were about two hundred fifty people in the audience. I don't know about you, but it's very hard to get two hundred fifty people to pay attention to you. The topic that I was speaking about was pricing, about how to increase your prices without losing customers. How would you start such a presentation? I started the presentation with a video of New Zealand. That is novelty. It breaks that pattern in a matter of seconds. It doesn't matter what you are thinking or doing or thinking of doing. The pattern is broken. You have to pay attention.  When Tom Dickson wanted to sell his blenders, well, how can you break a pattern with blenders? When an iPhone comes out, it's extremely coveted. To destroy an iPhone is crazy. It almost flies in the face of reason, so that's what he did. He broke the pattern by going the opposite way. What he did was he took that iPhone and put it in a blender and crushed it to pieces. That got everyone's attention. He became a sensation on YouTube. The sales have soared since then. Whenever you look at this factor of how people have got attention, it's by going almost counterintuitive, that everyone expects you to go one way and you're going the other way.  When we go back to the sixties and we look at Bill Bernbach, he started up an advertising agency which is now called BBDO. He had a lot of these things. We had the Volkswagen, which is the Beetle. All of America was thinking big, big cars, big everything, Big Mac. His campaign was completely the opposite. it was think small. They started selling these Bugs, the Beetle Bugs, and they were about thinking small. In the car rental business, Avis and Hertz have been at each other's throats forever. It was such a delight, such an attention-getter when Avis said, "We're number 2. So why go with us?" Immediately, that gets your attention.  What we're looking at here is this attention-getter, which is this disruption in what people are expecting to get and what you give them. It's done through stories, analogies, demonstrations, and just plain counterintuitiveness, but at the very core of it, what gets attention is the novelty. If you're expecting me to say something and I say exactly that, you fall asleep. You have to find something that's going to wake me up. Yes, novelty wakes me up, but what about the length of that novelty? How long should I go before I stop?  When we read a novel, we tend to find a lot of description; the character is being built up. The same thing applies to movies; the character is being built up. When you're communicating, you don't have that build-up time. Let's say you're writing an article, you've got maybe a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs of telling a story or a demonstration or creating some kind of analogy. That's it. Then you have to go and connect. You have to continue. You have to go to the next section. You can't stay in the novelty for too long because the novelty wears itself out.  The same thing applies with presentations. When you're standing there in front of an audience, you don't have half the presentation to get the novelty across. In fact, it would be boring. When you sit on that chair, stand up, sit on the chair, stand up, that's quick. When Sara Blakeley went through the whole routine of changing into SPANX and showing how it made a difference, that was quick. The same thing applied to Blendtec where he spun those iPhones around in the blender. Again, it's quick. It doesn't have to be very quick; it just has to be quick enough. The novelty lasts for a few minutes, and this applies to reading or speaking or anything.  If you're standing in front of a person, making a presentation, you've probably got a few minutes, maybe three or four minutes. If it's an article or a sales page, you probably have less time; you have twenty seconds, thirty seconds. The novelty of a story, demonstration, or analogy doesn't last very long. It's best to get there, not to be too hurried about it, but to tell the story and get out of there. Pretty much like you've heard in the podcast here. There's a story, it shows up, you get the point, and then we move on to something else. That something else is the third part in today's episode, and that is the consequences.  When you look at a story like Little Red Riding Hood, yes, it's a story. It's a novelty, it's very interesting and kids love it. The little girl is headed to her grandma's place and she's taking some goodies for grandma. Then along the way, she meets the wolf and there are consequences, not just for the girl but for the grandma as well. There is a moral to that story, but before we get to any kind of moral, we are looking at two distinct phases. One is the whole novelty of the girl meeting the wolf and then the consequences.  Sometimes the consequences are not so apparent. When Sara Blakeley shows the before and after of SPANX, those consequences are apparent immediately. When Steve Jobs took the MacBook Air out of the envelope, there didn't seem to be many consequences. In the Steve Jobs presentation, the consequences are in the lightness. When you don't have that light MacBook Air, which was billed as the lightest notebook, well, you've got a heavy computer.  These messages are driven through the media and in the presentation. When you went with Avis instead of Hertz, it was to show you that Hertz is number one; they don't care. Number two, we have to care. In many cases the consequences are either stated or implied. When you're making a presentation, when you're speaking to a client, you cannot afford to let it be implied. You cannot afford to let the client figure out what the consequences are. You need to tell them.  When I'm making a presentation on pricing and I show them this video of New Zealand, the next thing I talk about is The Three-Month Vacation and how pricing affects your ability to go on vacation and how you have to work a lot harder and money is not easy to come by. What happens is a very unconnected topic like the video on New Zealand then connects nicely into pricing with consequences. When I do the Brain Audit presentation, sitting down, standing up, sitting down, standing up, what are the consequences there?  Again, the consequences are explained. It's how a chair is built on science and how marketing doesn't work on science, how it falls apart, how we raise thousands of dollars just buying some crazy system that's supposed to be working tomorrow instead of understanding the science behind it and why things work. Then the audience gets it. We've gone from a stage of novelty to a stage of consequences, and that's how you get and you keep that attention. You can do that very, very quickly. It does take some practice. All of the great stories and demonstrations and analogies, all of them have to have this little practice routine before they go live. Once it goes live, you'll see the results for yourself. You'll stand up and people will pay attention. Then you'll drive home the consequences, and they'll want to know how do I buy into whatever it is you're selling?  Yes, that brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out with the methods of getting attention. We saw that the methods are usually a story, an analogy, or a demonstration, but at the very core it has to be almost counterintuitive. It has to be something that the audience or your client is not expecting to hear, and that gets the attention. It snaps the person to attention.  The second thing you want to do is you want to figure out the length. The length needs to be short enough. In an article, that means a paragraph, maybe two paragraphs. When you're meeting a client face-to-face, you'll get three, four minutes. Anything more and you're just pushing the boundaries. Novelty lasts only so long, and then you have to move to the next stage, which are the consequences. That was our last section, which was the consequences. Sure, you can have implied consequences, but it's very dangerous because the client needs to know specifically what are the consequences of not taking that action. You should bring that in your presentation, in your speech, in your article, in your sales letter.  There you go. Novelty and consequences, and you get attention. What one thing can you do today? We covered quite a lot. The important thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you're saying. Whatever you're saying is what you'd call intuitive. It's what you've trained yourself to say. How about going counterintuitive? Let me give you an example. I started writing a series on writer's block this week, and maybe I'll make it into a booklet, maybe a book, but I went counterintuitive. How would we do this intuitively? How would we come up with a title? We'd say, "How to avoid writer's block." Mine was counterintuitive. It said, "How to get writer's block." Notice how it gets your attention? That's what you want to do, that one thing.  This week, try and do one thing that is counterintuitive and you'll see how it just gets the attention of your audience. Then move to the consequences.  Yes, that's the end of this episode. If you haven't already rated this podcast, please do so at iTunes. If you have a list and would like to share this podcast with your list, please do so. I'm telling you because unless you tell, things don't happen. On another front, if you've been struggling to finish your book or your e-book, then there is a workshop and this is at Psychotactics.com/dc. It's three days. It's a lot of fun. More importantly, it helps you understand the structure of how to finish a book.  A book is very frustrating to write, and the reason why it's frustrating is not because of the whole factor of the content. You already have the content in your head. It's how you structure it. When you are able to structure it quickly, put the book together quickly, your client is able to do the same. They're able to read it, to consume it. As a result, they come back for more. They come back for more consulting, for more training, and for more books and products.    That's Psychotactics.com/dc. We'll see you there on May 5th, 6th, and 7th. That's it from The Three-Month Vacation and Psychotactics.com. If you haven't been to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now. 

We often wonder why the sale gets killed. Why the customer walks away. Sometimes it's because we're doing a lousy presentation. Or we forget the facts. But often, we get everything perfectly right. And then it's time to ask for the deal. And we freeze. We get needy. We hope the neediness helps to get some empathy. And in reality, it kills the deal. Or at least puts us in a weak spot. So where does this neediness show up? And how do barriers help to avoid being needy? Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Speaking at Copyblogger: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver Contact me: [email protected] Zany newsletter:  http://www.psychotactics.com   Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:25 Table of Contents: Status and Urgency 00:04:27 The Story of 5000bc.com 00:07:58 How Good Should You Be To Put Up Barriers? 00:10:02 Increasing Level of Barriers 00:12:43 Final Announcements   Transcript Sean D'Souza:            Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com, and you're 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.                                     You've probably heard of Pilates, but maybe not of Joe Pilates. Who was Joe Pilates? He was the guy who started up the Pilates system, except when he got to the United States he wasn't that popular, so he rented a studio right under the studio of some dancers. They would practice, and as you'd expect, as you dance more frequently you get more injuries. Joe's system, of course, would make sure that you were more fit. Now the important part is that he didn't have any clients. Yet, when someone called in and wanted to make an appointment, this is what he'd say: I can't work with you right now. I'm busy and you'd have to wait for a couple of weeks. He was busy. He was busy doing nothing.                                     That makes no sense, does it? Why not take someone who's willing to pay right now instead of waiting for a couple of weeks when they could change their mind? That's the whole point about neediness. If you are needy that's a deal killer. That's the number one deal killer no matter what you're selling, whether it be a service, a product, a workshop, just about anything. If you are needy, it's going to go down in flames.                                     Why is neediness so bad? There are two reasons why neediness is terrible, and the first is that it reduces your status. The second is that it derails urgency. Let's talk about status for a second. We don't even have to go very far to look for examples of neediness. Let's say a friend of yours wants to go for ice cream, and they get needy at that point in time. They are trying to convince you to come for ice cream and you're not that keen on going for ice cream. Immediately their status level goes down and your status level goes up. They need you to come along. You don't need to go.                                     But at the same time, the second factor kicks in, which is urgency. They want to have that ice cream right now, so the more urgent it is, the more they're going to pull you and the less urgency you feel. Yes, you might say, "Fine, we'll go for the ice cream," but notice how your status level has increased. Notice how your urgency has decreased. Whenever we're selling anything, the moment we're needy it doesn't work for us.                                     We think that the buyer is going to feel a little empathy for us, they're going to feel a little sorry for us, but something else happens. A switch turns in their heads and suddenly they don't feel any urgency. They don't feel the need to buy anything from us. Instead, what happens is the other person, they feel this need to pull out. That is just human nature. The moment we feel that we're in control and the other person is not in control, we don't feel the need to go ahead and follow their agenda. We think our agenda is more important. It's all because of this little switch of turning needy.                                     In 2003 we started out a website, a membership website, at 5000bc.com. Right at the start we decided that we were going to have only a fixed number of members. The second thing was that you needed to have read The Brain Audit, which is our book, before you joined 5000bc. Now think about it for a moment. It's a brand new website. Hardly anybody knows us. We've just started out in 2002. Psychotactics was brand new. Why would you put barriers in the way? Why would you tell them that they had to read a book before they could join? No matter where you go and what you read they tell you that you should reduce the friction. You should reduce that friction so that people can sign up for your product or service. Here you're getting barriers.                                     The barriers is very important, because it removes that sense of neediness. It's like okay, we're going to have five people in this workshop. It doesn't matter. We're still going to go ahead and with the workshop. Today our copyrighting course, our article writing course, it fills up in about 30 minutes. Those courses are in excess of $2,500. Almost no one on the internet fills up their courses as quickly as we do. How are these courses billed? The article writing course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world, and yes, you have to read The Brain Audit anyway, and yes, the notes are sent to you three months in advance and you have to go through the notes and listen to the audio. There are all these barriers.                                     Clients, knowing these barriers, still want to get there. They still want to do the courses and they sign up faster than ever before. By putting the barriers in place we are less needy, but there was a time when we used to be needy, when we used to do all the things that we were told, which is reduce the friction. So we reduced the friction. We had four people on the copyrighting course, nowhere next to full, nowhere next to half full. When you look at our website and you look at the form you have to fill, most forms have just a name and email address. Ours has the name, last name, where are you from, what city, country, where you found us. Why bother with so much stuff? Again, they're barriers. The more needy you are the less likely I am to feel any urgency. We saw that with Pilates as well.                                     When Joe started up his studio he worked on that concept of increasing his status level. Even though he had no customers he still increased his status level. Secondly, he made sure there was an urgency factory. They could come in only three weeks from now. You know this when you go to a doctor for instance. You go to a dentist and the dentist goes through his list and there are all these blank spaces but he goes, "No, no, no. It's March now and you can come in July." You are desperate to go there in July, especially if the dentist is really good.                                     You think wait a second, you said, "Provided the dentist is really good," and I'm not that really good. I'm not so good. But think about it, was Joe Pilates that good? When we started out were we that good? Are we still that good? People are always in a state of evolution. No matter where you are on the road you're always able to help your client in some way that is useful for them, but they have to feel this need. They have to feel needy. They have to sign up. It's only when they feel needy, when they feel this urgency, that they feel wow, this was great.                                     This is because how our brains are wired. We are happier with the chase than the reward. Once we get the reward we're like okay, but there's also a downside to neediness, and that is haughtiness. No one is saying that you need to be haughty or impersonal or rude. Say you go to a gas station and the person there is really rude. Does that make his status higher? Does that increase your urgency? No, it doesn't. We're not saying that neediness needs to be rudeness. The definitely of neediness would be more about putting in a barrier, several barriers if you can. It really depends. The point is that when a client comes in they have a small barrier. They jump over that better. Then they go to the second level and they jump over more barriers. The funny thing is that when they get to a higher level you increase the number of barriers.                                     When people join Psychotactics they just have to fill in the form, which is five boxes, but they still have to just fill in the form. Then when they join 5000bc they have to go on a waiting list. They have to be sure that they have read The Brain Audit, so the barriers increase. If we have a program like we used to have, the Protégé Program, they had to read The Brain Audit, they had to be on the list, they had to pay $10,000 in advance, they had to submit to an interview, they had to fill in a whole bunch of details and send it back. When it was free they just had a form, but then when they got to the point where they were actually signing up for a year-long program they were doing a lot more.                                     Not everyone wanted to do a lot more. One of the participants that signed up decided that she was just going to pay the $10,000 and she was not going to buy The Brain Audit. Renuka wrote to her and said, "You've got until Friday. If you don't get The Brain Audit by Friday the money goes back, right into your bank account." I want you to think about it for a second. What would have gone through that client's mind? She thought we were bluffing, so that's what we did. On Friday we returned all her money. She came back with this enormous sense of urgency. "I bought The Brain Audit. I was stuck. I couldn't buy it."                                     She bought The Brain Audit and she became the protégé, and she paid the $10,000. But if we were needy, we had to deal with her for the rest of the year. She would take advantage of that situation. This is not about domination. This is just human nature. You're dealing with human nature all the time. The more you reduce your status, the more the chances that someone is going to trample all over you. You can be polite. You don't have to be haughty or rude, but you'd never want to be needy.                                     This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered how neediness reduces your status level. It brings you to the point of begging in a way. Immediately people change their behavior, their attitude towards you. The second thing that neediness does is it reduces the urgency. The moment you need them, they're not ready to move. But if they need your stuff, they're ready to move. Just by putting in those barriers in place it creates a sense of urgency. It reduces the need to trample all over you.                                     Let's face it, you have a far superior relationship with your clients. There is respect between both parties. If you're standing on stage and you're asking your audience to please subscribe to your website, well that's being needy. If you're selling something to someone and you're not creating a sense of urgency, you're not putting any barriers, well that's needy. Even on a website your language, your tone, if it doesn't have these barriers in place, it doesn't have this "Wait, we are fussy about our clients. Wait, we are fussy about our systems," then you're being needy.                                     Sometimes you have to be needy. Sometimes you have to ask for things, and immediately it reduces your status. It works but it's not as effective. It's very slow going. I'm not saying that you never need to be needy. The situation changes. It depends on a day to day situation and what you need, but as far as possible you want to make sure that your not needy.                                     What's the one thing that you can do today? Put a barrier, find a barrier. What is your next project about? What is the barrier that you can put in. Maybe a small barrier, business still, put in the barrier. The barrier increases your status and definitely increases their urgency factor to sign up for whatever it is you're selling.                                     That brings us to the end of this podcast. Now one of the ways to reduce neediness is to have uniqueness. When you have a uniqueness factor it means that you're standing out from the rest of the public. You're standing out from everyone else. If you would like to learn more about uniqueness, we have a program. It's not cheap. It's in excess of $800 but it's a really good program. The reason it's good is it shows you not only to get the uniqueness, but how to get to second level uniqueness. Second level uniqueness is so cool, because your competitor can't just step in and rob it away from you, can't take it away from you.                                     In fact, one of the stories there is about a property manager and how she was charging 6.9% for a commission, versus the others that were charging 8.5%. What was the difference? The one that was charging 6.9% was actually better than the other ones, but she didn't have this factor of uniqueness. Those set of words that you use, they make the difference between your product being just another me too brand, another property manager, versus something that stands out. That's what you can find at the Psychotactics site. If you haven't subscribed to the Psychotactics site, do so. Fill in the form. There are about four or five boxes, but you already knew that, didn't you?                                     One last announcement. The workshop at D.C., that's starting to fill up reasonably quickly. You know where to find that. It's at www.psychotactics.com/dc. Now it's time to go. Shall we play some mariachi? Possibly. I'll say bye for now. What's the next episode about? It's about attention and how tension is the critical part of attention. 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The hardest thing in business?or life is the factor of confidence. Whether you're in online marketing, selling products or services, or run a physical store, the confidence goes up and down. And yet, confidence is what creates sales. Sales, after all, is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So how can we create this enthusiasm without confidence? And where do we start looking? http://www.psychotactics.com http://www.psychotactics.com/dc ===== / 00:00:20 Introduction: Biryani Disaster? / 00:02:36 Table of Contents / 00:03:14 Part 1: The Root of Confidence / 00:08:14 Part 2: Getting Confidence Back / 00:12:59 Part 3: Confidence is a Rechargable Battery / 00:16:01 Summary / 00:18:25 Announcements: Book on Pricing + US Workshop-InfoProducts ===== Transcript: There are lots of things that I like doing: dancing, painting, cartooning, but one of the things I like the most is cooking.   Of course I invite people over to dinner. On this evening I'd invited one of my friends and I was making this very special dish. It's a multi-layered rice dish called a biryani. If you say the biryani to most people they get a little afraid because there's so much preparation involved, and you have to get so many things right.   Anyway, I got a few things wrong that day, but only I knew that I'd got those things wrong Andd yet when I went to serve the dish I mentioned that it was not up to standard. Now this friend of mine, he had never had a biryani before. He didn't know what a biryani was supposed to taste like, but what I said, it really affected him. My lack of confidence spilled over and he didn't feel that the biryani was up to standard.   For ages after that, whenever we met he wanted all the other dishes except the biryani What did I do wrong? The answer doesn't lie in the recipe for the biryani or the way the biryani was made that evening. What it lies is in a factor of confidence. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another, and that evening I wasn't transferring any enthusiasm, so I wasn't selling my dish. This is what we do a lot when we're at networking meetings, when we're at presentations, when we're selling a product or a product or a service to a client. We lack that enthusiasm. We don't appear confident, and then the client wants to think about it. They want to ask their mother, brother, sister about it before they decide.   Today we're going to talk about three aspects of confidence We'll start out with the root of confidence. Where does the confidence come from? Is it inbuilt or do we have something that we have to learn? The second is how to deal with this whole set of confidence issues when things don't seem to be going your way. The third and most importantly, to realize how confidence is like a rechargeable battery, how you need to charge it up all the time.   Let's start out with the first, which is the root of confidence Your background, that's the deepest, strongest root that you can have in confidence with anything. As you're growing up you don't realize it, but as you're sitting around reading some comics or watching TV and the adults are going about doing their own things, you get an education. When I was growing up my father ran a secretarial college and he used to train people to be secretaries.   I used to sit around; I used to eat; I used to read some story books, type on the typewriters because he had a lot of them. Essentially I wasn't doing anything, yet a lot was happening. A lot of the information was going into my head and I was getting confident about teaching, about speaking, about meeting people, about doing a lot of things that I didn't realize until it was much later.   Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because when you grow up in a different kind of family you have different experiences. If your family was largely job-oriented and it was about safety and not making mistakes and not taking too many risks, then it becomes quite hard for you to do that and you have to learn that confidence. If you grow up in a family where people are cooking, or they're painting, or they're doing some woodwork, what you're doing is you're getting the confidence just by sitting around. You're absorbing all that information but you also get information.   For instance, when I'm sitting with my nieces and there's my palette in front of me and I'm painting some cartoons, they're getting information about what yellow ocher looks like, how the sky is not really blue but it is blue at the top and then blue and yellow ocher in the middle and then yellow ocher towards the horizon. They get all this information so they get confident. When you don't have that confidence then you have to build up that confidence. Because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm for one person to another, all the things that you're selling depends on you being confident about it because you project that energy.   What I used to do is I used to go to networking meetings and I was quite terrified I was in a new country when we moved to New Zealand. I would play "Simply The Best." I had a tape player in my car and I'd play that over and over again. That gave me confidence. That just boosted my energy to the point where I could last the meeting and then go back home.   There are certain areas where you have confidence because you've grown up around that environment, that family, that atmosphere. There are other areas where you don't have the confidence. One of the things that you have to do is artificially boost that confidence somehow. Listen to some music. Listen to someone who is talking about confidence making you more confident. Because the lack of that confidence often leads to people not buying from you.   How does this confidence play out in real life? We don't stand in front of an audience and say we're terrified, but we say little things like, "Oh, I'm sorry but we didn't have a good night last night," or I would say things like, "Oh, that biryani didn't turn out as well as it should. It's missing these spices." Or right after making a presentation and getting an applause we'll say, "Thank you. It was so good, but ... " But? You use the word but. It's these little clues that give away the fact that we are not as confident as we should.   The moment we are confident people get this surge of enthusiasm from us and they're more interested in buying. Now sales is a lot more than just enthusiasm, but we doubt the confidence, it's almost impossible to sell anything. While some of us have our deep roots in confidence because we've grown up with that atmosphere, the moment we're thrown into an unknown space we have to get that enthusiasm building within us and not apologizing. That's how you get to a level of confidence. The moment you apologize it kills everything. Everything you've done just before that, it's dead.   It's like the song from The King and I: "Whenever I feel afraid I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one will suspect I'm afraid."   This takes us to the second part.   What do you do when things really go wrong? For about 10 years the musicians and rock star Sting was in what he called a writer's block. He wasn't able to produce any music, write any songs, and then he wrote this album called The Last Ship. Then they went to Broadway and they spent four or five years putting together everything.   The musical cost about 15 million dollars to just bring to the stage, and then about $625,000 in running costs; that is per week. Yet, they were losing. People weren't showing up for the play. You put in all of this effort, all of this time, and what happens? At this point in time it's very easy to say, "I'm a failure. I'm not supposed to do this." But it's not true. It's always a stepping stone for another learning.   We've had situations where our confidence has been badly beaten. I can remember the time very early in my career when I went to Australia. It was this kind of pitch fest and I was not used to pitching from the podium. Everyone around me were selling tens of thousands of dollars of product and when I stood there I couldn't manage anything. I think about 10 people bought the product. It completely shattered the confidence.   At that point in time you have to step back and reevaluate and say, "What did I do wrong?" Not "What is wrong with me," but "What did I do wrong?" Because more often than not it's got nothing to do with you. Back in the year 2000 if you published an article on someone else's site, on a big site, you'd probably get 200 subscribers. If you published it in 2010 you'd probably get 50 subscribers. Now you'd probably get 10 subscribers.   The point is that the distraction has increased tremendously You look at some of the bigger sites and you find that the comments have gone down. You find that everyone is having to fight the same battle. Because you're just starting out, because you're struggling you think, "It's me. It's got something to do with me. I'm not writing well. I'm not doing stuff well." That's possible, but it's possible the technique, which is what I found out on stage in Australia. I found out that my technique was wrong, so I had to learn from that technique. I had to build up that confidence, and then when we went to Chicago a few years later I outsold everybody in the room.   Now admittedly I don't do this pitching from the podium anymore, but in the early years I did a lot of it I had to get the confidence because it was very unusual for me. This is what you've got to understand. Most of the time there's nothing wrong with you. You probably don't have enough experience so you don't have enough confidence and you don't have enough technique. Of course if you're buy into hype from people who say that you're going to get hundreds of customers or thousands of customers, or Facebook fans, and you buy into the la dee da, that's your problem. At the very core of it it is about boosting yourself up, getting the technique, and that's how you get confident.   Because you will run into a whole bunch of potholes in your career, and every single time you have to pull yourself out. That's what Sting has done as well. He's gone on tour now with Paul Simon. You pick yourself up, you dust yourself, and you walk on. Because there is no option. When your confidence is battered it's no point staying in the mud. You just pick yourself up and walk on.   This brings us to the last part, which is the factor of how your confidence is like a rechargeable battery. Just yesterday I got an email from my friend Bryan Eisenberg. Bryan said he really liked the podcast. He mentioned how it was getting better and better with every episode. That's a charge. That would keep me going for at least two or three days, but just like there is a charge, there's also a discharge, and there are people around you all the time that don't exactly encourage you. They don't discourage but they don't encourage you. As soon as that happens your confidence starts to go down.   These might be people you love: your husband, your wife, your friend These might be people that are almost always in your favor, but in this one aspect they don't exactly encourage you. Like yesterday I was helping my wife do a handstand and she's been struggling with the handstand for ages. I said to her, "I don't think you're going to get there." In that moment she was quite angry, she was quite upset.   I realize today that I wasn't being helpful. If you look around you, in your house, in your friend circle, in your family, you will find people who are not discouraging you but they're not encouraging you, and you have to find people that will give you that charge. Because every single day that battery goes up and then it comes crashing down, and you have to have that charge.   We get confident because we recover from mistakes, we fix those mistakes. The icing on the cake is simply when someone says, "Wow, you made a great dish. That was a great painting. That was a superb podcast." If we're not getting this from our friends and our family, especially the family, then we have to find our source that will encourage us and get those batteries up and running.   When we do workshops, one of the questions that we ask is why are you attending this workshop. If you dig deep enough the answer is always confidence, always, always confidence. If you dig deep enough you will find that everyone attending your workshop, everyone buying your product, everyone getting anything from you is because they want to gain confidence. They want to get that charge from you. You've got to send out that confidence and you have to be enthusiastic. For that you have to make sure that you're not being discharged.   That brings us to the end of this episode. Let's do a quick summary. We started out today with the root of confidence. When you grow up in a family or in an environment where things are happening, you don't have to be part of it. You just have to be there. Of course it helps if you're given responsibility and taught stuff as you go along, but just being around makes you more confident than the average person.   The second element that we covered was what happens when you make mistakes. All of us make these mistakes. All of us make terrible mistakes, and really the only way to get over the mistake is to get up and make another mistake until you stop making mistakes. There is a technique, and people learn how to speak better, how to present better, how to write better. There is a technique, and what you need to do is buy into a system that promises you a lot of hard work instead of get rich quick or do this really, really quick. Because the quick methods, they lead to destruction. They don't work, and so your confidence goes down even further.   Finally, we looked at confidence as a rechargeable battery. If you find someone like me who's a scrooge who's saying, "You're not going to do that headstand," you're never going to do the headstand at least with me around. You know this one driving. You know when couples go driving? This is what happens. You want to find a source of confidence of inspiration because our confidence is so fleeting.       What's the one thing you can do today? The core of confidence is the ability to do something very quickly, like speaking a language. You get confidence from someone who has a method, a method that is slow, steady, that has tiny increments. The one thing you can do today is avoid anything that is super fast. When you see that red flag, someone promising you super quick clients, super quick this, super quick that, step aside and find something else that will truly build your confidence, truly build your skill, that takes a lot of effort. That's how you move ahead and that's how you get more confident in life.

It may seem like article writing is very hard. And it is. Good writing needs structure, it needs skill and it needs one more thing: input. Without input, nothing happens. So where do we get this input? And why bother with bad input? Finally, what if you don't like audio learning? Can't you just stick to books? Knowing these answers can dramatically change the way you approach article writing. And yes, make you a better writer. For more, go to http://www.psychotactics.com For the fun workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc For the Story Telling Product: http://www.psychotactics.com/story --------- Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're 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.                         Imagine you go to the café and you're sitting there and the barista is making this fabulous coffee. The machine is superb, the barista has just won the championship. This is the top of the line barista and then you get your coffee. You take one sip and you think, "Something is wrong with you," because it can't be. It can't be this bad. How come this coffee is so yucky. It's very simple. Bad input. In coffee land, that is bad coffee beans. Either they're over roasted or under roasted, or just inferior coffee beans. Input is what matters and the same thing applies when you're writing an article or a book. The most important thing of all is input.                         If you were to ask someone to write a story about their life, they probably could manage it. You would have to narrow it down, of course. You would have to say, "Tell me about when you were 10." You would have to narrow it down further, maybe some episode at school, but eventually, they would come up with some story and the story would have clear ups and downs. It would have a storyline, it would have everything in place. How did they do that? How did they conjure that up from nothing?                         Nothing is a silly word to use here, isn't it? They already had something. They had the whole story in their mind. They have the concept in their mind. That becomes input and then it's a matter of structuring it in an article, and you have to know that structure, or structuring it in the form of a book. Then, you have your material. Most of the time, when you sit down to write an article, we don't have enough input. We have knowledge but we don't have enough input.                         In this episode, we're going to look at what is input, where do you get it, and why structured and unstructured input is very important. Let's tackle the first burning question, which is: What is input?                         The thing with you and me and everyone is that we already have the answers. The problem is we don't have the questions. We don't have that thing that prods us in the side and gets us to answer the question. That is our problem. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer or in real estate or fitness or any business. You already have the answers. The problem is you're not getting enough questions. People don't ask you enough questions and so to get those questions, you have to go elsewhere. That elsewhere is really other books, other material, and that is input.                         To give you an idea of what my day looks like, I start off the day with going for a walk. Usually, I have a few podcast, different types of podcasts and my phone is loaded with audio books as well. I know a lot of people have aversion to audio and obviously, you're listening to a podcast so you don't have this aversion, but a lot of people think that they're not going to listen to audio books or they're not going to listen to podcasts because they're not going to remember anything.                         You're not supposed to remember everything. You're supposed to remember just one thing. That one thing is something that the author says and this could be something brand new, something that you've never thought of. That's input. Now, your brain is churning. Now, your brain is moving faster than ever before.                         What if it's old material? Old material, when listened to or read a second or a third time, is different from when it was read the first time or listened to the first time because so much has changed. You have learned so much in between and now, that seems like mundane material could be very exciting. Both old material and new material make a big difference. That becomes input. That becomes like the coffee bean. That becomes the great stuff that you can work with. That is your starting point. You want that ignition point and that ignition point comes from input.                         Of course, when we think of input, the input could come from a report, it could come from a book, it could come from audio, it could come from video. Why audio?                         Because you're always traveling somewhere. You're always going to the supermarket. You're always walking around. You're always doing something that is just dead time. This is when you want to get that input. You want to start making notes, get more input, make more notes, and all the time, your brain is readying for that moment when you're going to write. Book reading, on the other hand, is a dedicated amount of time. You probably sneak in 15 minutes before bed or 15 or 20 minutes in the morning if you're lucky.                         This dead time is there all the time for you. When you're waiting in the queue, when you're at the dentist, when you are picking up your kid, when you are driving in your car, there are literally hours in the day just waiting for you to get that input. If you think I'm telling you not to read and just listen to audio, that's not the point. The point is very simple: To be able to have output, you have to have input and to be able to have great input, you have to read great stuff or listen to great stuff and really crappy stuff.                         Crappy stuff? Why would you listen to crappy stuff? We know that when you are listening to great stuff, it really inspires you. It makes you feel on top of the world. You feel like you're going to write an article or you're going to write some chapters in your book. You feel that because that's what input does. It sends energy through your system. Why would we deal with crappy stuff? The reason why you're dealing with crappy stuff is because you want to see how badly people give advice because that also sends a charge through you. You get very excited. You get emotionally charged. You want to get rid of this rubbish that people have been spouting.                         That then generates another form of input, which is, "This is really bad, I need to fix it now." Crappy stuff could be just average information, but it also could be unstructured information. It might seem like, "Why do I have to listen to this?" Some of the great input comes from bad stuff. You can show people how to avoid that bad stuff, how to avoid that bad structure.                         However, there is a downside to input. That is we're all information junkies so we could be reading and we could be listening to endless amounts of stuff. The key is not to remember everything. I've said this before. I want to say it again. You just want to take away one idea. You will almost never get one idea. You will get more than one idea. If it's really crappy, you might get nothing. This is where the strategy of having several podcasts, several audio books, and several books maybe, if you're reading ... That's really why you need to have several of them, because then, if you're getting nothing for half an hour and you think, "This is rubbish," you can switch. You can switch to something else.                         I will listen to philosophy and psychology and marketing and all kinds of stuff on a single walk. It all becomes input. Most people think that article writing and content creation is about sitting down and writing. It's not. It doesn't matter that you have all the information in your head already. You still need an ignition point. You still need something to fire you up. You still need something to inspire you, something to get frustrated about. That is how you create great content.                         You can make coffee from any coffee bean or you can make coffee from great stuff. Even bad coffee teaches you a good lesson.                         That brings us to the end of this episode. What are you going to do? What's the one thing that you're going to do as a result? You definitely want to subscribe to this podcast. If you're on iTunes, you just press the subscribe button and therefore, you will get a lot of the content that is coming out on Three Month Vacation. Episode 5, 6, and 7 is about storytelling and one of the most critical thing in sales, in storytelling, in article writing, in book creation, product creation, is storytelling. You want to go back and listen to 5, 6, and 7. If you haven't heard it, well, here is a nudge again. Go there, subscribe, and that's your one thing that you need to do today.                         You want to stack your phone with lots of podcasts, lots of audio books. There is a ton of dead time. People say they have no time. No, they don't have efficiency. This is efficiency. Do it. Today. There is a series on storytelling. If you go to Psychotactics.com and search for storytelling, there is a really good series on storytelling. Yes, you have to pay for it, but it's worth it. It's all input and it will help you write better articles.                         There is also the article writing course. If you want home study for that, that's well worth it. We've been doing the article writing course since 2006 and we never promise that one person turned out to be a great article writer. Everyone turns out to be outstanding. That is because the article writing course is built on structure. It's built on a system. When you put those elements together, it's just fabulous. It's just amazing. You take the input, you take the structure, and you get great articles. You get great content and then you don't struggle anymore, which is the goal, isn't it?                         Finally, you know about the information products store, so that's on the East Coast of the United States, in Maryland. It's located at the Sheraton Silver Spring. It's the 5th, 6th, and 7th of May. We don't have 300 people come to our event and have 25 speakers. There is just one speaker and you spend 3 days actually working instead of just listening to more blah blah. We'll see you there. Bye for now. 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}                         This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three Month Vacation.  

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?   Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? He probably practices for two or three weeks, off and on, and then after that, he drives. 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 Malcom 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?

If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing 70% right. You can always come back to do the 20% later. Yes, read it again, and no, the math isn’t wrong. If you’re going to build a website, a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to do a presentation a 70% effort is fine. If you’re going to bake a cake, for that matter…do you need all the ingredients? The perfect cake? With all the perfecto ingredients? Or the cake with ’70%’ of the ingredients? Let's find out what the 70% principle is all about shall we? ==== LINKS: To subscribe: http://www.psychotactics.com To get to that amazing workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Storytelling? You want stories? http://www.psychotactics.com/story To subscribe to this podcast: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic ====  Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com and you're 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.  I was sitting in the café minding my business when this woman was sitting across from me. She looked up a few times and made eye contact. Then she summoned up courage and moved across and she spoke to me. Apparently she was a writer. She had written three or four books and never got them published, so I asked her why. You probably know her answer. She said, "Well, I'm a perfectionist."  This is the problem. We think that we are perfectionists, but everyone is a perfectionist. Everyone would like to do the best possible job, and yet some people get their job done and others don't. The reason why they do that is because of a simple concept called the 70% principle. This podcast is going to explore what is the 70% principle, how it helps you, and when you should stop.  Let's start off with the first one, which is the 70% principle. What is it? In 2004 we were headed out from Auckland to Los Angeles. It was the first time we were having a Psychotactics workshop internationally. Of course everything had been sold. We'd booked the venue. We'd got people to sign up. We'd printed the notes. We'd done everything. There was only one little hitch. We still hadn't got a visa from the US embassy. It wasn't because we were delaying or procrastinating. It was just that they were giving out visas just a week before departure. You can imagine the situation, can't you?  What if we didn't get the visa? What if something happened and the workshop couldn't go ahead? Life is full of so many what ifs. It becomes much simpler if you take a software developer's philosophy. A software developer's philosophy is very simple. It is get 70% right and come back and fix the rest later. So many of us don't complete our projects because we think that it's not good enough. Then having completed a project we don't sell it because, again, we feel somehow it could be improved. Of course it could be improved, but your 70%, the audience is already waiting for that right now. They're waiting for the information that you have and they don't care about the remaining 30%, not just yet.  We went ahead with our first workshop simply because we thought that's the best we can do, 70%. When I wrote my first book, The Brain Audit, it was only 16 pages. Today it's 180 pages. What's the real size of the book? To me I think it's about 1,500 pages. Well, not as a single book but as different courses and books. The point is that if you wait for that perfect moment, if you wait to get everything down, it never happens.  When you think like a software developer you go, "Okay, this is the maximum I can achieve." You go out there and you put it out there. Then you can come back and fix it. The brain audit started out with version 1 and then went to version 2, and is on version 3.2. Will there be a version 4? I don't know, but the point is very simple. You can always fix it later. We understand the 70% principle but why does it work? It works for a simple reason. That clients are waiting for your stuff right now. Your audience is waiting for your stuff right now. If you don't put it out there they still have to get it. They still have to get the information.  There's a story about Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson the musician. In a Rolling Stone interview Jack Johnson said, "A song like "Bubble Toes," I don't know if I would have written that song if a million people we're going to hear it." He said, "It was like a joke to my wife around the house. Then a couple of friends liked it and then people asked for it at shows, and it became popular." We're going away from the point. The point is the middle that comes in the middle of the song. It goes like this: la da dada da da, da dada da da da da, la da dada da da. Jack had been planning to put in words but when the time came to release the song there were no words, so he ran it as la da dada da da. Today that's the most endearing part of that album. In fact, if you just play the la da dada da people know that's Jack Johnson.  That's really what the 70% principle embodies. It embodies the fact that people are ready for your music as it is. It might be in version 1, it might be in version 2. It doesn't really matter. That whole concept of perfection, that's just a story you've been telling yourself. That's just another way to procrastinate. That's just another way to not put out that book, that song. That's just another way to hold yourself together. Exposing yourself with just 70%, that really works because your audience is ready for it right now.  The main point is that it's never going to be 100%. No one is ever satisfied with their work. When you look at a writer going through a book, by the time the writer goes through that entire book they have changed. They have physically changed. Something in their brain has changed. When they look at the first few pages it's totally different from page 200.  The late night comedy show Saturday Night Live, that runs on the 70% principle. They can rehearse all they want but then on Saturday night they have to go live. That's the best they can do. At this point in time they're in their 40th season just doing 70% of what they can do, and doing it by deadline. This brings us to the third part, which is how do you know that it's done. When do you stop? When is that 70% reached? The answer is very simple. We know that we've reached our 70% when the time is up. Let's say you have to write an article. You give yourself a couple of hours and at the end of those couple of hours you're done. You're doing a painting, you give yourself 45 minutes and at the end of 45 minutes you're done. Over the years I've wanted to write books on membership and pricing and presentations, and every single book I could have done better. Every single podcast that I've done I could have done better, but there is a deadline. When you have that deadline and it's an unshakable deadline, then the job gets done.  The reason why people call themselves perfectionists is because they never intend to put the book out. They never intend to have the la da dada da da out there. The ones that put it out there, they get the rewards. That's the one thing that you've got to do today. You've got to make sure that you have a deadline. Whatever you're producing, whatever you're creating, whether it's a book or an article or a song, or maybe you're just going to fix a tap or paint a ceiling, the point is you need to have a deadline and on that deadline it's done. It is absolutely incredible what a deadline can do for us. We would have never gone to that workshop in the United States if we knew in advance that the visa was only going to come at the last minute, but we had tickets. We had a deadline and we had to go. We had to go for the visa, and we got the visa. There's a happy story there. Sometimes you don't get happy stories, but if you take an average of just putting it out there like a software developer, you'll find that you have more happy stories than unhappy stories. That's what the 70% principle is all about. Get 70% done, have a deadline, and then you can always come back and fix it later.  That brings us to the end of this episode. For the last few podcast episodes I've been talking about the information product workshop. The most critical thing today is just how to put together information when there are so many experts out there. The goal isn't to get someone to read your stuff, but how do we get them to read right to the end and then come back for me. Most information isn't that compelling. The reason why it isn't that compelling is because it doesn't have a structure. When you have structure it goes flowing from one section to the other to the other and you get to the end. When you get to the end you want more. It's just like a meal. It's like an amazing ... You go back to the restaurant again and again and again. That's what we're going to cover at the information products workshop. It's at psychotactics.com/dc. All of this action is happening in the first week of May, so go to pscyhotactics.com/dc and find out for yourself. If you can't make it to the workshop, get yourself the home study and you can find this in the home study section at psychotactics as well.  That brings us to the end of this podcast. You want to hang around for one more story? Okay, we'll do one more story. Have you heard of the song "Second Wind" by Billy Joel? If you listen to that song, right at the end there is a flub. There is this mistake. If you just listen to the song you don't pay attention to it and you don't notice it, but of course Billy Joel knew he had made a mistake, and he was in the studio and he wanted to erase it, but that was the whole point of the song: to make a mistake. That was the 70%, so he kept it. Today if you listen to that song you can hear it. Now I'm going to play this piece of music because my wife absolutely loves this. Here we go.   

Clients aren't always keen to accept our ideas?no matter how brilliant or workable. And we have the same problem with product or services. The resistance is much too high and we struggle to get things moving. So how do we overcome this resistance from clients? How do we overcome the objections? / / 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:03:12 Part 1: Creating Expertise On Your Site / 00:04:48 Part 2: Pointing Clients To Existing Material / 00:06:48 Part 3: The Power of Demonstration / 00:11:33 Wrap Up + Information Products Workshop: Washington D.C.   I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the story of the white pants of Sara Blakely. Sara’s product was an undergarment. It smoothed out the contours of a woman’s body making your clothes more flattering, more comfortable but Sara was not able to sell the product. Yet as the legend goes she was at the store at Neiman Marcus in Dallas and she was wearing these form fitting white pants. She invited the buyer to join her in the lady’s room. At this very unusual place that Sara proceeded to show how those white pants looked with the undergarments that she was selling which were called Spanx and then she proceeded to show how they looked without it.  Sara didn’t stop there she went on to sell to Bloomingdales to Saks, Bergdorf-Goodman and today that brand is worth over $250 million, but what was Sara really doing there? Was she selling a product or was she doing something different? Sara was actually fighting resistance. Often as we go about our day to day business selling products and services we run into clients who are convinced that they are right and often they’re wrong. We then try to get into this debate, this mini argument as it were and that’s not the way to convince a client.  The way to convince the client is to show them proof. How do we go about this proof? In today’s podcast we’ll cover 3 ways in which you can get a client over to your side of the fence without any of that mini argument or debate. We’ll talk about 1 the proof that you create, 2 the proof that other people create and finally irrefutable proof demonstration. Let’s start off with the first type of proof which is the proof that you create.  Let’s say for instance you are a web designer and you’re completely convinced that responsive sites are very, very important for clients. Responsive sites as you probably know are sites that you view on a mobile or on a tablet and they readjust to fit the width and the height of the mobile or the tablet. There you are in front of the client and the client is old school. They built their site in 2005 or 2007. They’re not that keen to switch over to something that readjust their entire site. What are you going to do?  The first thing that you need to have is you have to have content of your own because clients have objections and usually they don’t have a lot of objections. They’ve had maybe 6, 7 different kinds of objections over the years and what you need to do is you need to put together information. A good form of information is a bunch of articles. You could have a booklet, you could have any kind of information that you’ve written and it’s very important that it comes with your name attached to it because that makes you the expert. As the client is battling a bit not a lot but just a bit with you, you can point out that information on your website or maybe you’ve got a booklet that you can hand out to them.  Now it’s easy to think we’ll I can just tell them. I can just speak to them right on the spot they are sensible people but a conversation doesn’t have the elements of an article or a booklet that has structure and form. You can’t just put together anything on a website. You have to have structure and form and you have to build that argument as it were. When they go and see that structure and form and it’s signed with your name because it’s on your website or your booklet that makes you the expert. That makes a big difference to have the client perceives you because now you’ve anticipated their objection and you’ve answered their question. That’s only 1 way to do it.  The second way you want to think of is external proof. Let’s say the client decides that “Hey it’s your website. You wrote all the information that’s nice but I’m not convinced.” At that point in time you’ll have to have external proof. The external proof could be again booklets, could be books, could be information on other websites and this becomes third party proof. You may say “That’s exactly the same as what I’m saying.” but it’s not. The moment it comes from a third party automatically it gets relevance. If it’s already published in a book it has even more relevance.  Even if you direct them to an authoritative site you will find that it’s relevant enough and what you’re doing now is bringing down that resistance. That’s really all you’re doing. The client has resistance and you’re bringing down their resistance. When we assume being … see the same thing over and over and over again it becomes true for us. Suddenly that client is no longer seeing the fact that you said that they need to have a responsive website could now suddenly google is sending out notices to website owners saying “Hey you need to have a responsive website.”  Suddenly everything is changed but it’s not likely [it’ll 00:05:54] just show up and expect the client to buy into your idea or your product or service. There’s huge amount of resistance and it’s only when you have these couple of things together your own proof and external proof that makes a big difference.  Imagine you're Sara Blakely. Imagine you don’t have any of your proof. You don’t have any external proof .You just have this product that you want to sell and no one has ever seen it before except maybe your friends, maybe your relatives. No one has ever seen it before how do you sell that’s when the power of demonstration comes into play. That’s the third part which is demonstration, actual physical proof right front of the buyer. Three’s a story about Corning glass. You’ve probably heard it. It’s about how they tried to sell Corning glass many years ago. Now Corning glass was unbreakable at least this kind of glass was unbreakable and all of the salespeople were talking about how the glass was unbreakable. One of the salespeople was doing better than everybody else and so much better that the management called him in and said “What are you doing?”  What he was doing was actually demonstrating that the glass was unbreakable. He’d take the glass, put it in front of the buyer then get a ball-peen hammer and swing the hammer towards the glass. As soon as he did that they would go back in horror because you’re about to smash glass and he bring that hammer down on the glass and it wouldn’t break and that was proof. That was irrefutable proof and that is through demonstration. You’re thinking “I have a website. I don’t have glass and I don’t have hammers.” You can have a before and after and it doesn’t matter which business you’re in. There’s always a before and after.  If you’re selling an article writing course, there is a before and after. If you’re selling a microphone, there is a before and after. If you’re selling Spanx like Sara Blakely well there is a before and after. The before and after is probably the most powerful instant demonstration you can get through anyone and the moment you do that whole resistance comes crashing down. Not the whole thing but most of it. Sometimes all it take is 1 demonstration but sometimes you need all 3 of these back to back.  You’re going to need articles or a book or a booklet that you have written that makes you the expert then you’re going to have some external information that some other expert has talked about that points exactly to what you’re saying. Finally there is going to be a before and after in your business. There’s always got to be a before and after an when you stack all 3 of these back to back, it’s very, very hard for a customer not to be convinced and that is because you’re prepared.  When you’re prepared, you’re full of confidence and the customer can see that confidence. They can feel that confidence. It’s not you just coming up there and refuting some objection. You’re actually prepped. That’s the kind of person you like to buy from, that’s the kind of person I like to buy from.  However there are situation where a customer will still argue with you. You can show them all the proof, you can give them all the information, you can do the demonstration and they still won't buy from you because they want even more proof. At this point in time we tend to back away and say that customer is really stupid. Is it just the customer being difficult or is the proof not as compelling as it should be? You’ve got to check this out with your target profile.  In the Brain Audit which is our book we talk about target profile in great detail and essentially it’s this. You want to go out there and speak to a single person. You don’t want to make up all these things in your head and they will tell you whether you’re communicating or not. You need to have this kind of audit from your customers especially when it comes to your own information. Especially when it comes to your own demonstration, you get rid of all the holds and then you get a story like Sara Blakely’s. It’s perfect.  Everything is engineered including the master stroke of going to the lady’s room and not selling in the boardroom. That’s all engineering and that’s what it takes to reduce the resistance and to get the customer to be convinced to buy from you and only you. As we jog to the end of this podcast, what is the one thing that we can do today? It’s very simple. Find a before and after. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling there will be a before and after syndrome. Your product or your service or even your idea it’s solving a problem so there has to be a before and after. Look for the before and after and start there and that will make a huge difference in convincing clients and reducing that resistance.  If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, where do you listen to it? Can you email me at sean@ psychotactics.com. Tell me, do you listen to it when you’re walking? Do you listen to it when you’re exercising or do you just listen to it in the middle of the day somewhere? Email me at sean@ psychotactics.com and let me know where you’re listening to this podcast.  On another note we’re having an information products workshop in Silver Spring which is just outside Washington DC in the United States. It’s in the first week of May and if you want to come Psychotactics workshop is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. We have a party. We have a great time and you learn a lot. You spend 2/3 of your time outside the room and that’s where you really learn. It’s not this blah, blah, blah that you have inside the room you’ll find out for yourself. If you’ve been through a workshop you know exactly what we’re talking about.  If you haven’t been to a Psychotactics workshop you should come and the reason why should come is it’ll show you how to construct information in a way that is extremely powerful. We have [inaudible 00:12:26] information and people are putting more and more information together and the information products workshop shows you how to put together less not more information and make it more powerful for your clients so that they consume it and come back for more.  How do we do it? We have a system that involves the planets, the sun, the moon and the lunar surface and if that sounds bizarre, it’s a lot of fun. You learn how to put together an information product that is very sound and customers love and they come back for more. Just like you do with a lot of Psychotactics product, you keep coming back to buy more and more. What is it that holds it together? What is that glue? That’s what we’ll cover at the Psychotactics information product workshop.    Information products have made the difference for us in our lives. It was the Brain Audit that started us on this journey and it’s what enables us to take our 3 month vacation. All the products then lead to clients buying and to consulting buying [inaudible 00:13:24] courses and we’ve made friends with many of our clients through the world. We travel with them, we enjoy ourselves and I wish the same for you. If you would like to come to the workshop the link is at www.psychotactics.com/dc. This podcast had been brought to you by psychotactics.com and of course the 3 month vacation. Bye for now.   

For most of us life is about work, work and more work. And no matter whether you have a small business, are in the online marketing space or in consulting, you feel rushed and hassled. This podcast is about how to slow down using the three concepts of "meditation, relaxation and vacation".   Sean:Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you’re 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 you work and enjoy your vacation time. Did you know that “medication” sounds a lot like “meditation”? Well, I didn’t know that, and I’ve been playing around with it in my head, “Medication, meditation. Medication, medication, meditation.”   When we talk about the three-month vacation, it’s very easy to just think of going away; but as you know, we don’t have to leave the desk to go away. We could just be here. Should we go away, or should we stay? Do we really have to choose? As you know, it’s summer in December here in New Zealand, and there’s a lot of time because we take time-off around December the 20th, and then we don’t get back to work till almost February, and this is pretty much the whole country. Imagine the entire country going on vacation.   As you walk around on the streets of Auckland, well, there are no people around or very few people around. My wife, Renuka and I, we never go away when everyone else is going away because what’s the point? Everything is more expensive, there are bigger crowds, you have to wait a long time in restaurants, so we stay back and we sit on the deck, get some beer. We have a good time, and we read. When I was reading, I ran into this book by author/speaker Pico Iyer. First, just to backtrack, before I ran into the book, I ran into his TEDTalk.   In the TEDTalk, he was talking about how he started to meditate, how he started to relax. In his talk, he gets you to imagine gong to the doctor, and the doctor is saying, “Well, your cholesterol is up. Your blood sugar is up, etcetera, and you’ve got to exercise.” He says, “Most of us will go to the gym. Most of us would go for a walk. Most of us would do stuff like that, but imagine the doctor said, ‘You need to slow down. You need to take time off and meditate.    Take about half an hour, maybe meditate.’” It’s unlikely that any of us would feel the urgency to meditate, would we? I mean, we have so many things to do already. Really, that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Three things, meditation, relaxation, and vacation. All the “tions” together.   Now, of all these three, mediation is probably the only stuff I know of because it seems like you have to sit in one place or stay in one place, and then just be quiet; and so what I’d do is I’d go for a walk, and I’d hum the same song over and over again, almost like a chant. I was happy doing that, and I thought, “Well, that’s meditation;” and it probably is. I don’t know, but I found that with TheEndApp, it was much easier to do this, and that is to just clear your head of all the thoughts. I’m not very ambitious to begin with, and I don’t suggest you get too ambitious because it’s very, very hard to meditate.   If you’ve ever tried meditating, you know exactly what I mean. It is extremely hard. The moment you decide, “Well, I’m going to be very quiet and clear my mind of all the thoughts,” every single thought comes rushing through. It’s like as if you opened the door and started screaming, “Come on, guys. Bring in all the thoughts.” That’s how meditation is. It’s so weird, and yet time and time again, you read about it, and you’re not sure how to go about it. I ran into this website at Calm.com. That’s C-A-L-M-.com. They had a lovely app. It’s free, and they also have a website.   You don’t need to have the app. You can just have your computer on, and they take you through a guided meditation. It’s very hard at first. It’s just this emptying out of your brain. Not sleeping, not dreaming, not doing anything, just completely blank. Just like looking at the clouds, one cloud after another, after another. Just completely blank, and so I’d recommend that you start there. What I started doing was every day, before I go for a walk, I meditate for 10 minutes. I just lie on the floor, and I go for 10 minutes. Then, I go to the café, and my wife started this. She says, “Okay, let’s be quiet for two minutes.” We close our eyes and sit at the café, and you can hear the coffee.   When your mind is that quiet, you can hear everything. It just screams through, and it filters out those thoughts. It’s very cool because in a day that’s completely chaotic, we need to have these moments of meditation, and it’s good for your brain. I mean, this is about business, but it’s also about taking that time off, just those few minutes in a day. That brings us to the end of the first part which is mediation. It takes us to the second part which is relaxation.   When you think of relaxation, you probably think, “Okay. I’m just going to lie on the bed, or I’m just going to lie on the safe, and read a book, and relax.” That’s nice, but what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t take you out of the house. What I found is that as long as you’re in the house, you’re not as relaxed as you could be. What we started doing was taking a day or two away. We don’t go very far. We could go just half an hour away from where we live, but we go away from our home, and this is very important.   Once you go away from home, everything about your home is left behind like the clothes that needed to be folded, the garbage that needs to be taken out, the coffee blender that needs fixing, the … Whatever issues you have, and there are many of these issues. The moment you leave home, those issues stay behind. Suddenly, you start to relax, and you find that this level of relaxation starts the moment you head away from home. What we found is that in about 24 hours, we feel like we’ve been away for a week.   By the time you’re away for a couple of days, it seems like you’ve been away forever, and most of don’t do that. In fact, right after we got married, we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t go anywhere for a long time, and then we decided that’s what we’re going to do. A lot of these comes from planning. All of your work comes from planning, but even the vacation, the time away, the meditation, the relaxation. Everything comes from planning. It doesn’t just show up like that. We have to sit down at the start of the year and work out when do we have these bouts of relaxation away from home and when we do we have the vacation which is a long way from home and for …  Along the previous.   The thing about relaxation is that those 48 hours can change the way you continue to work, the way you work with your clients, the way you deal with issues when you go back, and so having those little spots makes a big difference. Like for instance right now, we have the article writing course, and this is the toughest writing course in the world. It is very demanding for both the students and for me. You can be sure that once four weeks have passed, I’m going to need a couple of days off.   It’s very easy to say, “No, no, no. We don’t have that kind of time.” Just like we do with meditation, “We don’t have that kind of time. We don’t have two days off. We have to do this, and we have to do that.” The moment you allocate that time, it changes everything. The funny thing is that it changes your mindset even if you’re on vacation. This summer, we started out not checking email, not doing all those kinds of things, and you would think, “Well, it will take a few days, and you’ll be fine.” It wasn’t fine.   A week passed, and I was still waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I like to sleep a lot in the afternoons, especially on vacation. I’ll sleep two, three hours even, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than half an hour. I was still wound up, and it’s only when I got to Waipu, which is about a couple of hours from here that I relaxed. Two weeks into a vacation, the moment I stepped away from home, and I think the same thing applies to you as well. What we need to do really is stuff for ourselves because we’re always doing stuff, but it’s not stuff for ourselves, and it’s definitely not this relaxation that we desperately need. This takes us to the third part which is vacation.   Vacation has always been a big part of my life, but planning the vacation was what I learned from my friend Julia. What Julia would do was she’d book the vacation at the start of the year, and then they had to go. Everything was booked. I remember the year that we went to Japan, the year they had the tsunami, and I wasn’t keen on going there even though we were going several months after the tsunami; but it was booked, so we went. We had a really good time. We learned so much about a different culture, ate different foods. Something I might not have done if we hadn’t booked everything in advance.   Here I am, preaching to the choir as it were. We already know that mediation, that relaxation and vacation are good for us. We know that, so why doesn’t it work for everyone? Why don’t we end up feeling on top of the world? Why is it that we feel like we’re more tired than ever before? There are reasons why it doesn’t work, and the first reason and probably the most important reason of all is email. I have a friend, and she goes on vacation, and she say, “Well, I only check email and work for three hours in a day.”   No, no, no, no, no. You can’t do that. Vacation is nothing. It’s like mediation, nothing. It’s like relaxation, nothing. No email. Get someone else to check your email. You’re not that important. That brings us to the second point, of course, which is, “I’m the most important person here. Nothing can happen without me.” I have a very simple philosophy, and that is, “I can spend time at the beach or spend time in hospital,” and I choose to spend time at the beach. Sure, you’re important, but why are you earning all these money? Why are you doing all these stuff? It is to enjoy yourself.   If you’re going to have this self-importance that no one else can do the job you’re supposed to be doing, well, you’re a bit in trouble, and you need that vacation. Of course, the third one is the most obvious of all which is too much activity. You can’t go on vacation and see 300 cathedrals. You just cannot. They’re boring after a while, and they all will start to look the same. We have a vacation philosophy, “We’re called the five-monument people.” That means we look at five monuments or five places we’re interested, and we’re done.   If we go to Istanbul, five things, and we’re done. If we go to Washington D.C., five things, and we’re done. Friends who know us, they will drive us fast on some of these monuments and go, “There you go. One, two, three, four, five. We’re done. Let’s go to eat.” Of course, that is crazy, but you get the point. You don’t want to have too much activity. If you have all of these stuff packed back to back, you never get relaxed. You never get to nothingness. Nothingness is amazing, but only once you start to get a hold of it.   To me, a three-month vacation, not all three months together, one month at a time is part of my work. It helps my work get better. It helps me relax. It makes me want to do better stuff. I think that if there’s one thing that we could do today is to meditate. That’s one thing you can do at your desk. Go to that website, Calm.com, C-A-L-M-.com. Download the app or just listen to it on your computer. I think that will make a big difference. Five minutes, you can start off with five minutes. You can go with 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It’s up to you. It’s a much easier way to meditate.   I think the second thing, and here I am breaking my own rules saying one thing and telling you about two things. The second thing is just book a couple of days somewhere close by, 20 minutes away, 30 minutes away. Just go. Leave home. Leave the garbage. Leave the coffee grinder. Leave all that stuff home. Of course, leave your email for two days. I’m sure someone can manage it, and you will find that while you may not, at least at this point, make a three-month vacation a reality, that’s where you’re headed. You want to start right now. You want to start today, and you want to relax.   That brings us to the end of this podcast. Before we go, where are we headed for our monthly vacation? We’re going to Sardinia, Italy. We’ve been to the mainland before, and I know Italy is a big place. You can never get enough of Italy, but Sardinia seems to be a completely different space altogether. We’re going from one island to another island. We hope the coffee is good. Before that, we have the info-product workshop, and that is in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C.   It’s about information products. It is how to create powerful information products, whether it’d be a webinar, or a workshop, or a presentation, a book. The reason why it’s so important today is because there’s so much junk out there. This workshop isn’t about showing you how to write or create that presentation. It is the structure of what makes compelling information, how do you put everything together, so that customers go from one end right to the other end, and then come back for more.     That’s why it’s different. It shows you exactly what you need to do to make information structure compelling, so that you can take whatever you know, all of that knowledge, and package it in a way that customers consume from one end to the other because once they do, they come back. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three-Month Vacation. Now, if you haven’t been to iTunes and left us a glowing testimonial, then this is your chance, so please leave that testimonial because I’d really appreciate it. Bye for now. Bye-bye.  

Clients can be great?or monsters! And once you have a client who's a monster, it's easy to blame them for all the issues. Often, the problem lies with us. We don't put things in place, in advance, and then get into all sorts of trouble.   To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com TimeStamps 00:00:20 Start 00:01:35 The Riot Act 00:01:56 Part 1: The Barrier 00:06:57 Part 2: Your Philosophy 00:12:20 Part 3: Firing the Client 00:14:25 Summary 00:16:08 Your Action Plan 00:16:30 Final Comments + Psychotactics Workshop  Transcript Sean D'Souza:The year was 1998, I think 1999, and I had a massive headache. The reason for my headache was that I wasn’t being paid on time. Just to get paid, I had to follow up several times and then I was lucky if I got the full amount. These are clients that drive you crazy and often the question is, what are you going to do with clients like these? Whose fault is it? Our natural instinct is to say that it's the clients' fault. Really, is it? I think it's just our fault. Why is it our fault? How do we decide when do we get rid of the client? Shall we get rid of them now? Should we get rid of them 6 months from now? We're not very sure but The Riot Act puts everything into perspective and it saves you from the trouble that I had. I not only had headaches but I had hypertension and all kinds of things and I was not even 30 years old. If you want to avoid that kind of thing, you will need to know how to use The Riot Act. There are 3 parts to The Riot Act. The first is the form or the barrier, the second is the philosophy, and the third is the right to fire the client. Let's see how this all pans out. The first part of The Riot Act is the barrier. Without the barrier, without the form, nothing happens. When I started my career, I started out as a cartoonist and the clients always have the upper hand. I was just a teenager out of university; in fact I was still in university. At that point in time, the newspapers would tell me what to do and they would decide when they had to pay me and so I would spend a lot of time in this follow-up just trying to get my payments, just trying to get the jobs, just trying to just go crazy doing what I thought should have been easy and pleasurable. You get into this rock you think that there is never going to be another way. Then one day, I was sitting at the dentist and the dentist gave me a form. Here I was doing a transaction. I was going to pay this guy to drill my teeth. He wasn’t going to do it until the form was filled. Later, I went to a yoga class that is several years later. They weren’t going to allow me to the yoga class until I filled in this form and agreed to sit in a number of classes. I thought, "Wow, this is really cool." What's happening here is the expectations are being set right at the start. The barriers are being put in place. I thought, "This is incredibly powerful. I wonder if I could use this in our business." As you know, Psychotactics is mostly about books. It's about workshops. It's about training. What we had at that point in time was a consulting program. Because I live in New Zealand, this consulting is done by a telephone. Still, I got people to fill in the form. They had to fill in our big form and then get back and then we went ahead with the consulting. The same applied with the protege program. This was a year-long program. Again, they had to fill in a form. Because it was more detailed, more intensive as it were, they also had to go through a 45-minute interview. Think about it for a second. You are sitting there and you're about to take money from a client but you're putting them for a barrier. Would they agree to such a barrier? The answer is yes. When you look around you, most of the successful businesses have some contracted place. At that point in time, we only had a single document, a book called The Brain Audit and so we made that our biggest barrier. If you wanted to go to workshop, you had to read The Brain Audit. If you wanted to join our membership at 5000bc.com, again, you had to read The Brain Audit. You had to buy, you had to read it. At that point in time, I was still doing one-on-one consulting. What we had to do was put together a barrier and the simplest barrier of all is a form. You get the client to sit down and go through a whole bunch of questions. They answer the questions. They qualify themselves and that becomes the first barrier. That’s it that dawned for the relationship. You may not want to have a form. You might want to have some other kind of barrier in place. Maybe they have to read through a couple of pages of something. Maybe they have to listen to an audio. It doesn’t matter what it is. Having the barrier in place gets the client to qualify themselves and that is the first step towards getting rid of that headache. You know what's the sad thing? The sad thing is that we haven't always taken our own advice and sometimes we've let the barrier down. For instance, once we were having the workshop in Washington DC and we said, "It's The Brain Audit workshop. Everyone has read The Brain Audit. They're going to be here and we don’t really need to have any barrier in place," and we let that barrier down. Someone slipped through the net. She was just disruptive, asking all sorts of crazy questions, not participating in the group sessions properly. She drove us crazy. We had to send her home after a couple of days. This is not something you want to do in the middle of a workshop. The first step in your Riot Act is to make sure that, "Hey, you've got a barrier." This takes us to the second step which is the philosophy. Do they buy in to your philosophy? Do you know if they're buying in to your philosophy? Because if they don’t buy in to your philosophy, it's getting into relationship where you don’t the other person at all. Second thought, philosophy. What is so important about the philosophy and how do you get this across? You don’t have to write a book or have something sophisticated about your philosophy. Most of our philosophy is embedded within our documents, whether it's a report or a book or an audio. The philosophy is there. People have to listen to something specific before they join. This is the trickiest thing to achieve when you're in consulting, because the client is very eager to get ahead with the job and it almost seems like you're slowing them down. Getting them to read even a couple of pages or listen to something is very critical. Maybe you get them to read just a few pages of your website or maybe a single page. Having that philosophy in place makes a big difference. For instance, ours is a 3-month vacation philosophy, which is that we work for 9 months and then, of course, we go out for 3 months in the year. This doesn’t fit really well with clients if they don’t know this right at the start. Let's supposing you're a member of 5000bc and you join and you think, "Sean is going to be there right through the year." I'm not and I go on vacation for a whole month at a time and should I go back into 5000bc I get thrown out. I get thrown out by my own members because they go, "You're supposed to be on vacation." This is a complete fit of philosophy. They understand where you're coming from. You understand what you need to do. Unless you get this message across right at the start, you're going to run into a clash and you're going to lose. The client is going to get upset with you. They're going to recall your money. They're going to give you all kinds of trouble because they feel that they're in the right. You haven't let them know right in the start what your philosophy is all about. Let's take an example of this yoga class that I visited in South India. Their philosophy is very simple. You had to be part of that yoga class for a week, not for a few days but for a week. You had to be vegetarian for the entire week. You had to spend an hour or so in meditation every day. That was part of their philosophy. If you didn’t agree with that, then you couldn't be part of their group. When we do our courses, which is training which is different from a service like a yoga class, we do something similar. The philosophy is about tiny increments. It's not about big jumps. It's not about instant success. It's not about get anywhere quickly. It's about very, very tiny increments. For this to happen, the clients have to show up every day. They have to agree to this philosophy. They have to agree that they're going to be there 5 days a week going forward step by step as we go through the whole minefield of information and getting things implemented. In a way, a philosophy is your way of life but it's also the rules that you put together. While it's quite easy to put it, you're offering a service or training. It probably is a lot harder when you're selling a product. What do you supposed to do if you're selling shampoo or soap? There is a philosophy. If you go to this site at EcoStore.co.nz, you will find that the owner put together a philosophy and you can see the philosophy in the website. It's very clear. They do not want anything to do with chemicals so all their soaps, all their products are made without any chemicals whatsoever. They spend thousands or tens of thousands or probably hundreds of thousands of dollars to make sure that it's absolutely pure that it doesn’t remove the oils from your skin that it doesn’t affect you in any way. They don’t say it but I think you could drink some of their soap. That’s their philosophy. Your philosophy is the core of your business. It is why you started out in the first place. It is everything. If the client doesn’t get a complete dose of this philosophy, they don’t know what do you stand for. You get into this relationship not knowing how it's going to work out. That’s not a good thing. You want to make sure that the client reads or listens to this philosophy and make it short. Don’t punish them. This takes us to the third part, which is the right to fire the client. You probably don’t think of firing the client very much, do you? The client pays your bills, sends you on vacation. They're there for your benefit and yet you need to fire the client. When most of us start up in a relationship, we don’t outline the exit plan. In most cases, especially in personal relationships, it's not necessary. In a business relationship, it's very important that you have some exit plan in place. In the very first meeting, what you need to do with the client is sitting down and tell them that they have the right to fire you. They have the right to fire you if you don’t meet with the obligations, the specifications of the contract. Then you tell them that you in turn had the right to fire them if they don’t meet up with the scheduled payments, if they don’t behave like normal people should. When we do this, we are very clear about the fact that it's an equal agreement. Nothing is ever equal that’s always the shift-in power balance but even so, you're not making it so unequal that it causes you trouble. It also sets the benchmarks so you know that, "Hey, at this point in time, I have to get paid. If I don’t get paid, we're walking. We're firing you." If I had these systems in place when I first started out, it would have saved me a lot of grief. In a lot of cases, I didn’t get paid anyway. In other cases, the trouble of trying to recover the money, the hassle of having to deal with clients that suddenly reduced the font size from 17 to 3, it was not worth the trouble. When you set this whole agenda in place, it makes it much easier for the relationship to continue and to be very, very respectful. If you were just selling a product online or a physical product, yes it cost you money but it's not as damaging as training or consulting. Especially if you're in training or consulting, you want to make sure that you have this Riot Act in place. Let's go over the 3 parts of The Riot Act. The first part of The Riot Act was simply the barrier. You've got to have some barrier in place. This could be that they have to read a booklet or a book or filling a form or do something. The second step is simply to have a philosophy. This might be a short document. It might be a single page. The client has to know your philosophy and, of course, you have to know your philosophy and put it down so that they agree with it. Finally, you have to make sure that right at the start the client knows that they can fire you but you can fire them. This sets a benchmark, were you going to paid at this time, you're going to get this at that time. It sets this whole relationship right at the start and prevents all the hassle that most of us have had at some point with the other. We've run Psychotactics for almost 13 or 14 years now and we've had only 3 or 4 clients that have been toxic clients the whole time. That’s a very long time to not have clients that are real thing. The reason for that is very simple. For most of our products, our services and whenever we do consulting, we make sure that we have the system in place. You'll find that work is an absolutely pleasure, which is the way it should be, not being pushed around all the time by someone else, so put The Riot Act in place. The simplest thing you can do today that’s the one thing that you can do today. What is it? The one thing that you can do today is put a barrier in place. Even if you don’t have your philosophy in place, even if you don’t have the guts to go up to the client and say, "We're going to fire you," have the barrier. Small barrier, big barrier, whatever barrier, have a barrier in place. When the client gets over their barrier, they qualify themselves and that makes the big difference. With that, we are shuffling towards the end of this podcast. I just want to tell you, if you want more goodies, which are not available in the website, you can go to psychotactics.com/magic. On another note, we're having a workshop on information products. It's interesting but a lot of the stuff that you see free on the internet has very little value because there's so much free stuff. It is more efficient to get clients through workshops or training, something that they pay for and yet structuring a book or a workshop or a webinar is critical, how you make it so exciting that people want to come back time and time again and then buy more stuff from you. That’s what we're going to cover in the information products workshop where we show you how to reduce the amount of information and yet get clients to come back. This is nothing sleazy. It's what we really need at this point in time in our history. That’s happening in the first week of May 2015. We'll have more details on the podcast and on the website, so be part of the newsletter at psycotactics.com.   Finally, I'm writing a book on pricing, yes pricing, and how to get better prices without losing customers. That’s it for now. That’s me, Sean D'Souza saying bye from the Three-Month Vacation podcast and psychotactics.com. If you haven't already gone to Psychotactics, go there today. Bye for now.    

Whether you run an online or offline business, there's a point where the business will take control of you. And then it doesn't let go. All those marketing strategies and "four-hour workweek" formulas are totally useless. So what works? And why does it work? Here are three core steps that will get you out of the muck and back on dry land. And yes, on the road to the three month vacation.   00:00:00 Introduction: Getting More Control in Business 00:02:22 Element 1: Learning Core Skills 00:06:44 Element 2: Flying Solo is a Problem 00:12:19 Element 3: Input and Output 00:18:02 Summary 00:19:35 Ending Notes    ===== Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're 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.  If you go to a restaurant, just about any restaurant, and if you go to sit down you would notice that some days the restaurant is absolutely full and on other days it's completely empty. What's really happening here? What you're noticing is the lack of control over the business. It doesn't matter whether you own a restaurant business or a gym or you just have a service, you have to have control over your business. How do you have this control over your business? I didn't have to answer to this several years ago. I'd run a cartooning business since I was in university and I ran a business for about ten or 12 years without any control. I didn't know where the next client would come from. While I did some amount of promotion, sometimes I had enormous amounts of work so I wouldn't get any sleep. At other times a whole month could pass and I'd have nothing to do.  The only way to have complete control over your business is to use the concepts explained in the three prong system. Now if you didn't listen to episode number two then that's where you need to go right now, or just after you listen to this episode. That's because the three prong system has stood the test of time. When you look at all the religions of the world that have lasted 2,000 years they use the three prong system. When you look at businesses that have done really well over the years they too use the three prong system. You want to go back to episode two and listen to it.  The three prong system brings strategy but to your business, but on a day to day business you need to some strategy as well. This episode talks about the strategy that you need on a day to day basis. As usual, we're going to cover three things, and the first thing we're going to cover is the factor of core skills. The second thing we're going to cover is about how to get help or why you should get help, and the third is input is equal to output.  Let's start out with the first, which is learning the core skills. What is this all about? The biggest problem that we have and the reason why we can't earn more or take more time off is because we spend so much time not learning core skills. Let's say you were a golfer and you wanted to get really good on the golfing circuit. What would you do? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? You'd go out there and you'd practice and you'd get a coach, and you'd work that so that you were very good at golfing. Otherwise, you'd just your Sunday golfer, go there, hit some balls, and hope for the best. In a business, hoping for the best is not a good idea. It's not your hobby as it were. This is your passion. When you're passionate about something you have to be like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. When you're passionate about something you have to have that core skill in place. You know it's in place because you can do it exceedingly well and exceedingly quickly. For instance, if you had to write an article, say 800 to 1,000 words, how long would you take to write that? I'll tell you how long it used to take me to write it. I used to take two days. I'm not kidding. I would start on the first day and then write, and then stop and edit and write and stop and edit and write and stop and edit.  By the end of the second day I was not really sure that the article would be any good. I was a cartoonist, not a writer. I spent a lot of time just trying to get into that writer mode, because I knew as a small business owner that's what I needed to do. I needed to write books. I needed to write articles. I needed to get the word out there. Article writing, which wasn't my core skill, had to become my core skill. I had to communicate that way. I got all the material I needed to study. I got a lot of information that I was deconstructing, and then that didn't help me at all. I still had to write the articles.  Luckily for me, at that point in time there wasn't as much content on the internet. A website called marketingprops.com, they wrote to me and they said "Can you send us some articles?" Then every week the publisher would bug me and say "Can you send me some more articles?" Even though I was not keen on writing the articles I had this person nudging me all the time and so I was forced to write the articles.  Today I can write an article in 45 minutes, but not just an article, but a very, very good article. This is what you've got to do. You've got to figure out what are those core skills. Sit down and work out what are the things that I have to get very good at, and then you proceed to get very good at it. Another core skill, to just be updating your website or knowing more about your website. A lot of us have websites, and of course we have web designers and programmers and stuff. That's very important. We have that too, but you also need to know enough to fix your pages, to put in graphics, to do whatever you want to do. Because having to wait on someone for a day or two days, it slows you down. It frustrates you, and you don't get the results. While it's all very fine to say outsource this and outsource that, you have to also remember that there are certain core skills that you have to learn, and unless you get very good at these core skills you remain an amateur. You continue to be someone for whom the business is just a hobby. I'm saying hobby; I know it's not your hobby but that's how it ends up being. For me, that key component towards my three month vacation, and your key component, is going to be getting control over your core skills. You have to make a list of the few things that you want to do, not run after every shiny objective that comes your way - because there are lots of shiny objectives there on the internet - and develop your core skill.  This takes us to our second topic, which is about getting help. Our business is incredibly small. It's run by just my wife and I. When I started out it was just me. Then my wife Renuka came along and people said "I wish had someone like Renuka. I wish I had help as well." This is what I tell them at that point in time. I said at the point that Renuka joined Psychotactics she was earning $85,000 a year. By quitting her job what we were doing was talking a hit of $85,000. Remember, at that point in time I wasn't really earning a lot. I was probably earning about $1,500 a month in marketing. This is very important because you might think that you can't afford to get any help and it's just impossible to run a business all by yourself. There are far too many things to do, far too many things that you have to juggle if you're going to be running a business by yourself.  Now the first obvious thing to do is to outsource some of the things, and then you start outsourcing more things. At some point in time you just have to have someone on a consistent basis that does consistent jobs so that you don't have to do everything yourself. The biggest problem with a business is just that you lose too much energy. I've spoken about this before. It's not about time, it's about energy. Once you do task one and task two and task three and task four you're getting very, very tired. At the end of the day you may still have some time, but you just don't have the energy.  Think of it as a plane. Now if you ask a pilot, they don't need two engines to friendly that plane. But if one of the engines quit it's not such a good feeling. You can friendly your plane with one engine but it gets very frustrating, and there are times when that one engine fails and then it's more than just frustrating. I know this is hard advice to give. How do I give you this advice? How do I say to you: Go out there and find someone. Go out there and pay for the services. But the problem with trying to do it all yourself, this flying solo business, it just doesn't work in my opinion.  We've run our business now at Psychotactics since 2002. I really thought that it would get easier over the years, and you know what, it might have got easier if we were doing exactly what we were doing in 2002, if we were earning exactly what we were earning in 2002, yes. But given my aspirations, given the things that I want to do, given the books that I want to write ... and these are just passions. This is less about the money that we're going to make. I'm really fascinated with writing about pricing. I'm really fascinated about writing about talent. I'm really interested in doing something about Photoshop.  This is why we started a cartooning course even though it was free. We started out a cartooning course even though I'd been a cartoonist for 15 years. People knew about my cartooning, and it was free. Without that support that Renuka brings it would be impossible. It would be completely impossible for me to do the things that I really want to do. Over the years we've added bits and pieces here and there. We got someone to do our blog, as in post the information to the blog. Then we got someone to put together the reports, so I write all the information, I do the cartoons, but someone puts it together in an InDesign file and I showed them how to do that.  This is what allows me to do what I want to do. It allows Renuka to do what she wants to do. It gives us time. More importantly, it gives us that energy that we so desperately require. That's all I can say. This advice is like a halfhearted, half-baked advice, because I don't know how you're going to do it. I just know that you have to do it. If you want more control of your life you have to get that second engine. Don't go up in the air with a single engine because it's just too much. Yes, I can go on and on about how we take three month vacations but this is the big secret as it were.  The first thing is that you need to have core skills. You need to be able to do stuff that is critical to your business and do it very, very, very quickly. The second thing you definitely need is that second engine. I don't know how you're going to get it but you need it. The third thing that to me is critical is this whole concept of input is equal to output.  The other day I was in an interview and I was being asked how to be a good writer. It's very tempting to keep talking about the techniques and the methods and the secrets, and all the stuff that goes into great writing. I don't believe that to be true. I believe that the writing part is the execution of what goes in in the first place. I believe that input is equal to output, or at least input really helps the output. To me, reading is more important than writing. Or should I put it another way: it's equally important.  Without the reading part of stuff it's probably not going to end up with great writing. People make a mistake with input. They take in too much information, and that doesn't really work to your advantage. That just sends you scattering in every direction. Now don't get me wrong, at the same time that I'm learning how to use my camera I want to learn how to use InDesign and I want to learn how to do character design in cartooning, and lettering, and all kinds of things. Those are hobbies, and there is my work. When it comes to my work I'm doing something completely different.  My input day goes like this. I start out the day and I go for a walk. I make sure that I'm listening to stuff that is interesting to me or important to me. Ideally I don't listen to podcasts. I know it's ironic since you're listening to a podcast, but I don't listen to podcasts because a lot of people ramble on endlessly, so I listen to an audio book. I listen to a course where I know they're not rambling on. Mostly audio books because they're structured, they're edited, and there's less chance of this ramble. I'm not trying to remember. This is the mistake that a lot of people make with audio. They don't treat it like radio, and you should treat audio like radio. You shouldn't really try to remember anything. It's all sitting in your head bit by bit. Listen to one book and another book and a third book. Soon enough, all the thoughts become input; they sit in your head. Again, I'm not saying that you should not make notes. I'm not saying that you shouldn't make mind maps. I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything you do not want to do. I'm saying that there is so little time in the day that when you're driving, when you're walking, you need input. Then you get back to your office, your place of work, and then it's time for output. Over the years I've found that just by increasing the input and also cross-pollinating the input, so I'll listen to a whole bunch of different things on the way in. Then we get to the café, we discuss what we've learned along the way, and maybe we've not learned a lot, and then we turn round and come back. Then I will probably listen to something lighter or learn a language.  That's it. That's the input equals to output. If you want to become a great writer you have to listen to and read great writing. If you want to become a great artists you have to go to galleries. You have to look at art books. You have to do all that stuff. That's all the input part. The same thing is with business. If you're going to go chasing after some guy that promises you a lot of money, some guy that promises you a lot of customers and you think that's a good idea, well it might be a good idea but often, and especially if you're listening to a podcast like this, you probably not going to fit in. That input is wrong. That input signal becomes erroneous, and therefore you don't get the output. All you get is frustration. Control your input signals and then you start to get better output signals. The output is important as well. Every time I put out a book I'm not really sure that someone is interested in it. Every time I do a course I'm not sure that someone is interested in it. I do it for myself. I think that it really matters. I think that when you put your passion into it you then need to sustain it. It's the same thing with this podcast. I don't know if you've realized it, and I probably mentioned it before because I've been mentioning it to everyone, but it takes about 20 minutes to record a 20 minute episode, or 15 minutes to do a 15 minute episode. But it takes about two and a half hours to then put the music. The only reason why I continue to do this and will continue to do this is because I'm fascinated with it.  I'm listening to podcasts where they have great music and I'm listening to stuff where they have great content and great interviewers, and that becomes my input. That's why you're getting this output. Let's wrap up today and let's summarize. We started out with control. You have to know the things that are important. Writing is important. Being able to tweak your website, that's important. Your sales letters, what's wrong with it, what's wrong with your email, understanding that whole sales thing. I think these are critical for a business. If you don't have those critical elements at the tip of your fingers then you're struggling. The second thing is just an energy factor. If you don't have enough energy at the end of the day then it just becomes one mindless, endless loop. You have to get that second engine. How you get that second engine, whether it's by hiring someone or getting someone in your family to help out, that's something you have to figure out and figure out quickly. You can't friendly solo. I can assure you that. It's very, very, very hard.  The third thing is input is equal to output. The quicker you realize that you don't have that much time in the day and you need great input, the quicker you realize that there is no shortcut and all these guys who offer you this quick route to success, you need to get off that input because it's driving you crazy. It's distracting you. Listen to stuff that is important. Read stuff that is important. That is your key to a sensible future. That is your key to the three month vacation.  That brings us to the end of this episode. We're now on episode 15. Wow, that was quick. Anyway, if you haven't already subscribed ... I've said this a million times before and I'm going to say it again. If you haven't subscribed to iTunes, go there, subscribe; and yes, leave a review. Please do leave a review because it really helps us. I read the review everyday. If your reviews not there then I'm looking out for that review.  The second thing you want to do is you want to go to psychotactics.com/magic because even if you are subscribed to iTunes or Stitcher or anywhere else, the magic that's where you're going to get your stuff. There's a form there. Fill it up and we'll occasionally send you some magic from there. Finally, if you're not already part of Psychotactics, then get to Psychotactics. Get there and subscribe to the newsletter. It's really cool stuff. It's stuff like this, except it's written down. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. Oh, I almost forgot purpose of one thing that you had to do today. Yes, the one thing that you can control today is input. I am sure you can go out there and get someone over time and get control over all the things you do, but input, you can listen to stuff like this or you can get an audio book or start reading. Have that input every single day, 30 minutes of learning every single day. It will make a big difference for your life. Get rid of those idiots that promise you the world. Yep, that's it. I'm done, really done. Bye bye.    

Getting things done isn't as easy as it looks. So what gets in our way when we run our small businesses? Do we simply run out of ideas? The Three Month Vacation Podcast examines how to get out of your own way and get your online?or offline business working smoothly. The key to getting things done is the trigger. How do you create and sustain that trigger in your small business? To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Getting Things Done: 00:02:08 How Do We Make The Trigger Work? 00:04:03 Table of Contents 00:04:24 How To Activate The Trigger 00:09:29 How The Trigger Builds Momentum 00:14:33 Summary 00:17:47 Final Transcript: When I was little my uncle gave me a game. It was called Snoopy Tennis and it was a little console, a video game from Nintendo. All you had to do was play tennis. Lucy from Peanuts and Charlie Brown from Peanuts as well, they would hit the ball towards you and you as Snoopy had to return the service. Lots of people played those games. Millions of kids played those games across the globe, but mine was different, mine was unique. My console had a crack in it. It had fallen at some point in time, so I can see the ball heading towards me and I have to listen for it. It would go beep, beep, beep, and then I had to push down on the red button that would ensure that I hit the ball, got the service back over the net as it were.    What was interesting was that I wasn't looking for the visual anymore. I was listening to the sound and responding. That sound was a trigger. One of the biggest reasons why we can take as much time off as we do is because we have these triggers in place. Without the triggers it's very hard for us to get anything done. That is because as adults we have so many things to do and so many responsibilities that when we try to do something, when we try to finish a book or write an article or do anything at all, we struggle. We struggle because we don't have that trigger in place.    What is that trigger and how can we make it work for ourselves? Let's start with the things that I don't like very much. One of the things that really bug me is having to exercise. As I've mentioned before, I don't care much for exercise, and yet you'll notice that I'm reasonably fit. This is because I end up doing between 80,000 to 100,000 steps a week. You have to ask yourself how does someone who doesn't like exercise doing such a lot of walking. Well, I use a trigger. In fact, two triggers.    The first trigger is just the coffee. that is when I get up in the morning I am not headed for a walk, I am headed for a coffee. I'll wake up, I'll get my iPhone on, put on the audio, and then head towards the café. When I reach the café that's my reward. What's really happening here is that the walk is not something that appeals to me that much. However, the coffee does appeal to me. That sense of reward, that carrot and stick as it were, is what helps me.    That's the trigger.    The second trigger that I have in place is I have a little pedometer called Fitbit. I have other friends who are also high achievers who do 70, 80, 100,000 steps a week. I want to compete against them so that becomes my second trigger. What I'm saying here is that I don't care much for walking. I would rather sit here and do a podcast and do some music and draw some cartoons, and do all kinds of stuff. Yet no matter what the weather, whether it's rainy or windy or hot or cold, I end up going for a walk - and that is because of the trigger. Triggers work both ways. They work for good and evil.    What we are covering in today's episode are three things. The first is how to activate the trigger. The second is how it helps you build and sustain momentum. This is very important. The third thing is what happens when you go offtrack. How do you get back on track? Let's start off with the first one, which is how do you activate the trigger.   Now in a normal day what I have to do is I have to write articles, I have to draw some cartoons, I have to do a whole lot of things. While a trigger might seem like a reward, because I was talking about coffee earlier, well it's not necessarily a reward. It's just that beep beep headed towards you. How do you install that beep? One of the things that I found very useful for me and to get things done is to keep things open. Now I draw a daily diary in my Moleskin diary.    I do a painting every single day, and I've been doing this since 2010.    How do I achieve this? It's a very busy day. It's quite easy to put it off. It takes a lot of time to do it. What I do is I don't keep the diary in my bag. I don't keep the paints in my bag. I don't keep the pencils in my bag. They're all ready on my desk and they're open. Just before I sit down for breakfast, every single day I will say "Well, let me just sit here for five minutes. Let me just do a little wash. Let me just paint a bit." I'm always trying to fool myself there.    The thing is that the diary is already open, the paints are already there, the water's already there. If I were to spend just a few minutes trying to find the paints or the diary or the pencils and the pens, that could distract me enough for me not to do that painting for the day. I've tried this. I've kept it in the bag, and just that little distraction, that tiny distraction can slow you down.    Slowing you down often leads to complete derailment. It's the same thing when I'm trying to do a podcast for instance. At the end of the day I don't have much energy but I do have energy to keep my Garage Band, which is my software, ready and open. When I show up here at 4 in the morning, and that's just me, it's already open. Before I check any email I'm looking at Garage Band staring at me in the face. The moment I see that I know you've got to do this podcast now, and then you can do the other stuff.    This concept of keeping things ready and open seems almost remarkably too simple and yet it is a trigger. It is a trigger that helps you get things done. This is what successful people have known for a very long time. I once read a book by Twyla Tharp, and she talks about getting into a taxi.    Now Twyla is a very famous dancer and choreographer. She needs to practice. When you wake up in the morning you don't feel like practicing. What she does is just get dressed and gets into a taxi. Often she says "When I'm in the taxi that's when I realize I have to practice." The taxi becomes that little trigger. It's like that beep beep beep.    The mistake that we often make is we have our to-do list and we don't realize that the to-do list is not what gets things done. The to-do list is almost t end point. What gets things done is the trigger that leads us to that to-do list, the trigger that gets us on the bike, the trigger that gets us for the walk, the trigger that gets us to pick up that racket and hit the ball back to Lucy and Charlie Brown.    If you want to get things done you have to isolate that trigger. You have to figure out what is the thing that comes in between me and the task. What is that one thing that will start me off and get me to that task? Then you have to put the trigger in place.    to activate the trigger we have to have that isolation point. We have to figure out what is that one thing that comes in between that will help us to get to the trigger. It will be different for different things. We know email is a trigger. We know Facebook is a trigger. These are triggers that are designed to get our attention. That's why they flash on our phones. That's why they show up on our screens.    Because once we have that trigger we are forced to go to the next step. If these distractions help us waste time in the day, well there is a good chance that you can use the trigger to your advantage as well. It works for good; it also works for evil. Harnessing it for our good is probably the better way to go, isn't it?   That brings us to the end of the first part, but the second part is what is really critical, and that is the factor of how the trigger builds momentum. When psychologists look at how to improve your memory what they realized is that something that is not done takes up an enormous amount of energy. What they did was they took two groups of people and they gave them tasks. One group was supposed to finish their tasks and the other was not supposed to finish their task. At the end of the exercise they were supposed to write down the tasks that they had completed.    The groups of people who had completed the tasks didn't have such a good memory, as in they forgot some of the tasks that they had completed. But the groups who had not completed the tasks remembered stuff. What did they remember? They actually remembered the stuff that they had not completed. You see, in the exercise these people were given the tasks and then almost as they were completing the tasks, the tasks were taken away from them. That stuck in their head. Later on when they had to fill in the form they remembered the tasks that they had not completed.    What was happening was those incomplete tasks were taking up an inordinate amount of energy in the brain. They had to remember those tasks even though they were not trying to remember any of them. This is what happens to us all the time. For instance, I came back from the information products course that I had in Vancouver and I had to write a tiny little booklet about something. I can't even remember now. I've completed the task. It was a tiny bonus, and usually that would take me about a day, maybe two days if I was really slow.    But instead it took me a month. Everyday when I went for my walk that's all I could think of: I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. I have to finish this bonus. What that was doing was killing my momentum. Because I couldn't complete or wouldn't complete that task it was draining all my energy for all the other tasks, so it was like a game of dominoes. It was one task not being done, that was dropping into the next and the next and the next. When we look at the reverse thing, which is when we have that trigger in place and we get the task done, then the next task moves along and the third moves along, the fourth moves along.   One of the reasons why I go for a walk in the morning is because I complete so many things. I get my exercise. I listen to the audio. I talk to my wife. We also learn a language and we drink coffee. Before 8:00 in the morning a lot of stuff gets done, but then that leads to the second task and the third task and the fourth task. When people say "I'm not getting a lot of stuff done because I don't have enough time in the day," they probably are referring to not time but energy. Time is different from energy. The lack of completing one task leads to a depletion of energy, which then spills onto the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth.    You know it's energy because sometimes you have the time and you spend that time on Facebook, and you spend that time just lying there on the sofa saying "I'm so tired." That is a depletion of energy, not a factor of time. When you get stuff done, when you use triggers to get stuff done, your energy level is so much higher. You know this; I don't have to tell you this. Your energy level is just bouncing and you get more done.    This brings us to the end of the second part. The third part is just as important because often we go offtrack. Supposing you've gone on vacation for instance. The moment you get back you're offtrack, or say there's been some kind of problem or urgency and now you're offtrack. How do you get back on track? I wish there were a magic pill to tell you how to get back on track, but I've struggled with the same issues. I'll stop painting and then before I know it a week has passed or two weeks have passed and I haven't done a painting. I say I paint everyday. Yes I do but only if the book is open.    I have to go back to the same concept, which is what is that trigger. If the book is open then I'm going to get it done. If the program is open I'm going to write t book. That's just how it is. I wish there were a simpler way. I wish there were a magic button but there is no magic button. The magic button is to isolate the trigger. Whatever that trigger is, you have to isolate it.    This brings us to the end of this episode. In this episode what we covered was just the whole factor of activating that trigger. We activate that trigger by isolating it. We saw how the coffee motivates me, but it's not just a reward. It is any sort of trigger. Just keeping the book open makes a difference. Just keeping the program makes a difference. Just getting to the taxi makes a difference.    You might get on a bus or in a car and when you get in that car you switch on, not the radio, but listen to some audio that helps you learn instead. That's your trigger. That trigger helps you get smarter. You go to your networking meeting, you go to your meeting, you go to your office. You know more, you feel better, that sets off the other triggers, the other tasks that get better and better everyday.    This is the key to getting things done. A lot of people think that getting things done has to do with the to-do list, but it doesn't. The to-do list is at the end of the rainbow. Now you saw what was happening there. I had the trigger. That was my trigger to go for a walk. That was my wife calling up and I'm off right now. Even though I might feel like finishing this podcast I'll have to come back to it and complete it, because that was my trigger.    Just before we I go I want you to know that I'm not always like this. I'm not always hyped up, ready to go. There are some days when I'm just lazy, and that's okay to be that way. Not because I'm saying so but because it's okay to just have down time. Just know that when you're working, work out the trigger that gets you to work more efficiently. That is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. That's the one thing that you can do for yourself: find that trigger.    Here we are at the end of this episode. If you're keen on learning more about planning, then I have a book there for you. It's called Chaos Planning. I find that most people plan without taking chaos into consideration. It details how we go about our three month vacation and how we plan stuff, and why is it so important to plan with chaos in mind. Now chaos is your best friend. It may not seem like that but if you make time for him then he does help you out a lot. Look for Chaos Planning.   Now if you're ever wondering how do I get this podcast on a regular basis, we have it on iTunes, we have it on our website, we have it all over the place. There's one central point; that is Psychotactics.com/podcast. It doesn't matter whether you're on iTunes or off iTunes or any other way. You can get all the details on that page, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast today. And yes, send me questions. If you have any questions I'd be more than happy to take them on, and feedback. Whatever you'd like to improve, whatever you'd like to see, send it to me at [email protected]. That's it from the three month vacation land. Bye for now. Bye bye.   

When we set about creating a new product or service, we look for a catchphrase. And while a catchphrase or slogan is very useful, it's not a lot of use when it comes to driving home our uniqueness or positioning. So how do we create that USP or uniqueness? The best way to go about this exercise is to avoid the line completely, because really, your clients can't remember it any way. What you need to focus on, is the story. But how do you create this story line? What's the secret link between storytelling and uniqueness?  ---------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Uniqueness and Story: Introduction 00:02:11 Table of Contents 00:02:25 Element 1: How The Story Helps in Uniqueness 00:07:57 Element 2: How To Create The Story-Emperor 00:11:40 Example: Psychotactics Article Writing Course 00:14:39 Example: Golden Moon Tea 00:16:19 Element 3: Why Is the Story More Important Than The Slogan? 00:19:01 Summary 00:20:25 Final Resources + Goodies   ---- Speaker 1:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're 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.  When someone tells you their name, do you remember it? Often when we meet someone they introduce themselves, we introduce ourselves, and then later we cannot remember their names. We think we're really bad with names, but as you know, that's not true at all; no one is good with names. The reason why we don't remember names is either because it's not important or we don't have a story. How important is this story when it comes to uniqueness?    What I'll do right now is I'll read out a whole bunch of slogans from airlines and see if you can remember which airline they come from. I bet you won't remember any of them, or very few of them. That's because they don't have a story.    Here it goes. Number one, making the sky the best place on earth. Number two, the proud bird with the golden tail. Number three, world class, world wide. Number four, we really move our tail for you. Number five, something special in the air.    You're getting that blank feeling aren't you? It's like when you meet that person again and you can't remember their names. That's because there is no story to it. The key to remembering someones name is to assign a story to it. That's exactly what you have to do when you're creating your uniqueness. If there is no story, it becomes impersonal and you can't remember it. More importantly, your client can't pass it on to someone else.   In today's episode we'll cover three points, as always, and that is: how does the story help, how to construct that story, and finally, why it's so important because  it needs to be passed on to someone else.   Let's start off with how the story helps. One of the worlds best know slogans is simply, "Thirty minutes or it's free", and that came from Dominos Pizza. That sounds like just a line, doesn't it? When you think about it, is it just a line? There is a story behind it.    there is a story of this pizza guy desperately trying to get the pizza ready right after you've put the phone down, and then getting across to you and ringing your doorbell at the 29th minute. Then you hoping, somehow, they'll miss it by a couple of minutes and then you'll get it free.    Notice how easy it is to tell this kind of story to a friend. The reason why this whole slogan seems to work is because the try is unfolding in your brain. You can actually see this story unfolding even with that single line. The line doesn't really matter, what really matters is the story behind the line.    Let's take a product like ioSafe. These are indestructible, or seemly indestructible, hardware - external drives that you use for your computer. They sell for a lot more than the drives that you get anywhere else. What's the story behind it? It's boiled down to this one word, which is indestructible. I don't think they have a great line, but their story is really powerful.   They take the drive to a shooting range and shoot at it, they take a road roller and run it over, they take it and throw it in the swimming pool, they do all kinds of things that would normally destroy the data in the drive. Yet that data is completely secure.    We may not remember the line, and who cares if we remember the line or not, because we're now telling the story to someone else. We're telling them why they should buy this product or service.    Every morning when I go for a walk I usually have an umbrella; it's a red umbrella. It rains a lot when I go for a walk, so I have to take an umbrella. What's different about this umbrella? For one it costs about $100, when the other umbrellas you can get them in the story for about 10 or $15. Why buy and umbrella for $100 when you can get one for $10?  The answer lays in the uniqueness. Because New Zealand is a set of islands and it's pretty narrow, we get storms and winds and often the umbrella just turns inside out. Not the Blunt Umbrella.    To test the Blunt umbrella what they did what run it through wind tunnels. A wind tunnel will probably demolish your $10 umbrella; it will go to pieces. Often you'll find umbrella in garbage cans all over the place. Just thrown always because  people are so sick of them. They're twisted, broken, absolutely useless. The Blunt Umbrella has been tested so that it works under crazy wind conditions and doesn't turn inside out.    You may say that's a lot to pay for an umbrella that doesn't turn inside out, but as you look on the street more and more people have a Blunt Umbrella. More and more people feel the need to stay dry in the rain. It's not so weird after all, is it?    I'm pretty sure that you will agree with me that all of theses three products are pretty unique. Let's go back and look at what their slogans are.    We start off with Dominos Pizza, and everyone remembers that it's "thirty minutes or it's free." that I can remember. What is the slogan for ioSafe? It is "Disaster proof software." It's less on the memory scale, but I can still remember it a bit. Finally we go to the Blunt Umbrella. Their slogan is, "The worlds best umbrella."   You see the problem here, don't you? The slogan doesn't matter at all, does it? It's the story behind it that makes all the difference. You remember the story about the Blunt Umbrella, and how those windy conditions and the wind tunnel makes all the difference. You also remember Dominos offer of giving you a free pizza if they're not on time; that's another story. Iosafe dropping their hardware from a height, or throwing it tin a swimming pool, or getting a road roller to go over it.    What you remember is the story. This gives us a clue as to how we should go about creating our uniqueness. The slogan doesn't matter; what matters is the story behind it. Now that we know the story is more important, how do we go about creating that story?  I personally don't think that any of the great stories come from an advertising agency. If they do come from an advertising agency, it's because someone in the advertising agency had the sense to actually look at the product or the service and figure out, "Hey you guys, this is what you're doing really well."   The story can come from you, the business owner, the creator of the product or the service. You do this by playing emperor.    When you look at the story of Dominos, it was back in the '70s, and if you ordered a pizza it could take and hour or more to get a pizza. What they did was they decided that they're going to have a pizza that wasn't the tastiest or the spiciest or the biggest, it was just the fastest pizza delivered to your door. That got peoples attention, but they decided that. They decided that we're going to set up this system that is build around speed.    When you look at ioSafe, which is that indestructible hardware, it's the same thing. External hard drives have existed for a long time, but now we have this hard drive that is just so indestructible. In effect, they're trying to find ways to destroy it.  While nothing is completely indestructible, they come pretty close to showing you what would happen if you had a fire. What happens when you have a fire? For starters you're hardware is toasted, then right after it's toasted the ire brigade comes in, the fire truck comes in and then they pour water all over it. That toasted hardware is now soaked as well.   Do you think any of the data is going to survive that? Yes, it's find to say you can do an online backup, but what about those big files that you wrote to your computer just 30 minutes ago? They're all securely backed up.   What they're demonstrating is how indestructible it is. The way the go about it is to say, "Let's create something like this." Rather than, "I wonder what we can find in our product or service that's unique."    We look at the third example, the Blunt Umbrella, we get the same scenario. The scenario is someone got sick of umbrellas that had to be tossed away every time the wind blew a little harder. They create a great looking umbrella, but predominately an umbrella that could withstand a wind tunnel blast.   This doesn't solve your problem, does it? You're still wondering, how do you play emperor? Imagine this situation, imagine that you are standing on the edge of a cliff and that was your city sprawled before you. At this point in time you're supposed to ask yourself, "If I could change this city, what would I do?" Naturally you would come up with a list of things, maybe the list would be 10 things, or 15 things, or 2o things. What you want to do is you want to whittle that down to 5, and then to 3, and then to finally the one thing that the city desperately needs.   The same thing applies to your product or service. Let's way you're about to create a product or a service, you have to ask yourself, "How would this product be completely  different from any other products or service?"   For instance, when we create the article wring course, our article writing course was approximately the same as every other article writing course. It wasn't the same, but from the outside work it was just another article writing course.    we had a lot of trouble filling up those courses. It would take 3, 4, 5 weeks to fill up a course. When you think about it from a business point of view, that's a lot of energy that you have to spend just to fill up a course.    We got lucky, the first thing that happened was one of my instructions was misunderstood. In earlier courses clients would write four or five articles for the duration of the entire course - which meant for about 12 weeks. In this course one of the participants misunderstood the instructions and they thought that they had to write 5 articles a week. They started writing 5 articles a week and then others in the course looked at what he was doing and thought, "That's what I have to do", so they followed along.    Soon enough it became very very hard. Try writing one article a day, five days a week - in this case it was 6 days a week. You will know what I mean. It's very very hard. By the end of the course one of the clients who had done the course said, "This is the toughest course I've ever done. It's almost like having a baby. There's a dog level course, a cat level course, a baby level course."    There was the story in plain sight of us. There was the cat level course when you don't have to do much, just like cats; they take care of themselves. then there's the dog level course, where you have to go out with the dog for a walk; there's more maintenance involved in having a dog. Finally, a baby level course, where you kept up half the night, you don't sleep very much for three months - that's how the Psychotactics article writing course became the toughest course in the world.    That slogan is not as interesting as the story of the dog level, the cat level, and the baby level toughness. That's the part that you remember, that's the part that clients remember, and that's why our courses fill up in probably half an hour or 45 minutes.    you'll say, "wait a second, you didn't come up with whole scenario", and sometimes you don't. In this case the client came up with the scenario. We had a whole bunch of happy misunderstandings and we got a great story from it. Then we ran with that story and it had run ever since.    While my advice is always, play emperor, sometimes it just pays to listen to what the client is saying and how they perceive the product, or the course, or the service to be. Then use it as your story line.   Another good example of this is Golden Moon tea. This is run by Marcus Stout. Marcus is a friend and client of mine. When he started out the tea company it was just like any other tea company, but he decided to play emperor.   A couple of years ago he decided that even in the tea there were so many chemicals. You can get away with a lot with the label "organic"; you're actually allowed to put in a whole bunch of chemicals, even if it's organic. He decided to make his teas chemical free.    This took a lot of work because you can't just say, "Hey, this is chemical free." You have to be there at the farm, figure out stuff, you have to travel a lot. He wanted to create a tea company that he could be assured he could say, "Yup, this tea is chemical free. There's not a trace of chemical in it." Not 3%, not 5%, not nothing, just chemical free.   Do you know how hard it is to find tea that doesn't have some kind of chimerical, genetic modifications, artificial flavors, or toxins within it? That's the tea that we've been drinking all this while.    By playing emperor, Marcus has decided this is how it's going to be. Now you don't care what his slogan is, you don't even remember his slogan, what you remember is the story behind it.    This brings us to the end of the second part of this episode. In the first part of today we covered how does the story help. Then we went on to, how to construct that story and how to ignore the slogan completely if we need to. Now we move to the third part, which is why is this so critical, why is so important that we create a story before we create any kind of slogan, if we create a slogan at all. I think you already know the answer to that question.   The answer is just that it's memorable. You don't remember peoples names and you don't remember slogans of airlines because they're just words strung together. Sure, every now and then you get a slogan that's memorable like, "thirty minutes or it's free", but for the most part, you don't remember it. Yet we spend hours, and days, and weeks, and some people spend thousands, and tens of thousands of dollars coming up with a slogan that no one remembers.   The story really helps because it's helps people to transfer the message across. It helps people to tell people why they buy this product or service over the next product or service. When you're buying a $100 umbrella instead of a $10 umbrella, you need to know why you're doing that. More importantly, you need to justify to someone else who's going to laugh in your face when they see you with such an expensive umbrella.   The story really makes a difference. You feel like owning an ioSafe because you know someday there might be a fire at your place, you know that you're out with that umbrella, you know that you drink tea and you would prefer to have tea that has no chemicals - not just organic, but no chemicals whatsoever.    It's the same story that drives people to buy into the article writing course, even though we sell it 6 months in advance and at a reasonably high price. This story takes a lot of time to create. Once it's in place, you get better customers, you get higher prices.    Of course all of this adds up in the sense that you can now put all that money and time towards your vacation, which is critical. Vacation is not just something you have to do because you can do, it's something that enables you to calm down, to relax, and to just come back fresh so that you can tackle your work with even more gusto. it's not just going eating, drinking, it's also just relaxing your mind and coming back refreshed.    Let's get back to today's topic. The three things that we covered today are: story helps, we figured how the story helps and how it's more powerful than those terrible slogans that you heard at the start. We also very briefly connected with the construction of that story line. Whenever you're coming up with a product or a service, play emperor and create the story line rather than some slogan that no ones going to pay attention to. Finally, we saw the importance of this story line. It enables people to pass it on, to justify what they bought, and get better use out of it as well.   That brings us to the end of this episode. What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to play emperor. Make that list; make the list as long as you need to then cut it down to 10, then to 5. Then you'll really struggle because you'll want to talk about everything, but then cut it down to three, and then finally to one thing.    What is that one thing that you really want to do for this product or service. Do this every time you start up a new product and service, because every product or service requires it's own uniqueness. Play emperor, or get a client to play emperor, and you'll be amazed how that very same product or service gets an enormous amount of power and clients are immediately attracted towards it.   Now it's time to close the episode, so if you haven't already done so, go to Pyschotactics.com/magic. That's where you get some magical stuff and some goodies that we won't offer anywhere else. Go there, there's a form, fill out the form - it's a very short form. It's Psychotactics.com/magic. If you've already started the year and you need to do some planning, you're frustrated with goal setting, there is chaos planning which is built around chaos.    Go to Psychotactics.com and there in the product section you'll find a product called chaos planning. It's very unusual, and I think you'll like it.   I'll say bye for now, and thanks for being on the show. Bye bye.    Are you still listening? You remember that thing about not remembering peoples names? You can remember peoples names if you assign a story to them. To try and find some new people to meet today and see if you remember their names - you'll do very well. You'll find that your memory isn't as bad as you though after all.    

So you're new. No one knows you from a bar of soap. And everything that needs to be said has already been said before. Whether you're in online marketing, health and fitness, or just about any small business, it's been done. Or has it? Why would customers continue to seek you out even if you're seemingly a nobody. It's because customers don't necessarily seek out just a name. Instead they seek out a voice; a system; and the way you explain that system. =======  Time Stamps:   00:00:20 Introduction 00:01:31 Table of Contents 00:01:57 Element 1: Your Voice Matters 00:06:39 Element 2: The System That You Follow 00:12:41 Element 3: Your Examples 00:16:40 Summary 00:19:52 Action Plan: The ONE Thing 00:20:42 Final Statements Including Info-Product Workshop in Washington D.C. + Goodies ======== Transcript Sean: One of the biggest things that we seem to battle with is our own minds. It doesn't matter how good we are or how good we get, there is always this battle in our own minds. We always wonder about the things that we are writing, about the audio that we're creating, of the video that we're creating because there is so much information out there isn't there?   You think, "Well, surely someone has done this before. Surely, someone has covered this before. Surely my work is just going to be irrelevant. No one's going to pay attention. No one will want this." You know something? You would think that this feeling goes away. It never goes away. Here are the three main reasons why you should persist nonetheless.   The three main reasons why you should continue to write, to create audio or video or a presentation is simply because people want to hear you. The three things that they want to hear are, your voice, your system, and the third is your examples. Let's go into a little detail about what these three things signify and why they are so important to your customer.   The first thing that we're going to cover is just the factor of your voice. When I write an article, people know that that article has come from PsychoTactics. When I draw a cartoon, you know that you can recognize my cartoon from everyone else's cartoon.    You know this for a fact because there are thousands or tens of thousands of cartoonists out there, probably even a few million considering the population of the world. Yet, when you see a cartoon from me, you know instantly this is Sean's cartoon or someone that is trying to copy the same style. If that were to apply to cartoons, that also applies to writing, to speaking, to video, to audio.   This audio for instance is constructed in a completely different voice. It's a different way, there is no hype on it. There is no fanciness. But there are clear tiny increments that you can implement, things that help you move forward. You will notice for instance that when I'm speaking, I don't bring up money. Now, there are no how to make six figures, how to make seven figures, even if that is the case, it never comes up. That's because I believe that it's crass, it's low class to talk about money that way. Talking about money and making other people feel miserable or feel uncomfortable because they don't have the same situation, I think it's crass to do that.   I also think that it's silly to have all these gaps. Today I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "OK you can build this product and all you have to do is just get one customer a day. The product costs $497 and you just have to have one customer a day." Wait a second, you don't even have to have one customer a day, you just have to have one customer every other day and you make all of this money and you gave her $191,000-something figure. He just managed to leave out, how are you supposed to have that [half 00:03:45] customer a day?   I think those things are crass. It doesn't come out in my voice. It doesn't come out in my podcast. It doesn't come out in me audio, or my video, or my presentations. For the most part, we will stay within how do you actually move your skill ahead. How do you get these skills? That's my voice. For the most part it stays consistent. I'm not saying that I've never brought it up before. I'm saying for the most part, it stays consistent.   This is what you've got to understand. That for the most part your voice is going to stay consistent and you're going to attract customers and clients that like that voice. It might be a voice that talks about money all the time. Yes, that's great because that attracts that kind of audience. Then yours might be about hard work. We talk about the article writing course, which is the toughest writing course in the world. Clients will write in and say, "You got me at that line." Why would I sign up for anything if it wasn't tough or if it weren't tough, that's right English.   They tell me that this is what they want from life. They want to work hard, they want to create magic, that is the voice that I'm sending out. That's the voice that your clients are responding to, that's the voice that my clients are responding to. Whenever you have that bully brain coming in saying, "oh no, this has been done before. Oh no you shouldn't be writing or speaking or doing whatever it is you're doing", then shut down that bully brain and say, "This is my voice. I have grown up. I have learned things. It is my duty and my privilege to pass it on."   Your voice will come out and your people will listen to you. I know this is sounding very religious or cult-like but I will listen to pretty much any music that Sting brings out because I like his voice. If someone else were to sing the exact song, I don't think it would matter to me as much. That's what you have to understand, that once you've created your voice you're going to have an audience that is willing to listen to you, that's the first thing. Your voice really matters.   Let's move on to the second thing which is the system that you follow. When I first wrote the Brain Audit, it was more about a factor of just writing something down on a piece of paper. Someone wanted the notes, I wrote the notes, it became a book and that became the Brain Audit. Today, that document has become like the Bible for us at PsychoTactics.com, for all our as well. What you've got to understand is just this, that when I wrote that book, I didn't have a system. I was trying to create a system. I was trying to create a system for myself because someone ask that question, I answer the question but now you have to put it together in a way that is consumable, that someone can use. That's what I did. I put it together in the system.   It not only became a system for me, but also for my clients. Maybe I should put it the other way. It not only became a system for my clients but also a system for me. This is true for everything that I do. When I did the info-product scores, it generated a system in my brain. When I wrote any of the products like, the about us page, or the homepage which is about website components, and you'll see this in our product section in PsychoTactics, all of those things I wrote because I wanted to write it because I've been doing things over the years and most of them are nice, they work. In retrospect, it's nice to look back and see how they work. But it's so much better to have that system, to have that checklist.  This is the kind of thing that people are looking for. Whenever they buy into your product or your service, they are looking for that system, not A system or B system or C system, they want your system. They like your voice, they like the way you operate, now, they want your system. If you don't give them that system, in a way, you're doing them a big disservice. You may think, "well, who am I to tell them how to do things?" But this isn't about how to thing, this is about a student in the 3rd grade teaching someone in the 2nd grade. If you know just a little more than the kid in the 3rd grade, you can help that kid.   If you know a little more about fraction, if you know a little more about spellings, you can help that kid in the 2nd grade. That's where you have to come from. The point is that you know your system is slightly different from any other system out there. That's all I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in the other systems. This becomes even more relevant in today's world where there are so many people who are totally hopeless of what they do but they are good at marketing. What they do is they'll do a lot of advertising, they'll do a lot of marketing, they'll do a lot of joint ventures, they'll do all that kind of stuff and people are buying into those products, sometimes the products are just $50, but sometimes they are $15,000.   It doesn't matter whether you spend $15 or $15,000, it's still a waste of your time and money. Those people are searching for someone who has a system. Those people are searching for someone who can put that system together in a cohesive way, and that is you. Put together that system and this is why you need to make sure that you get your information out there and you get it there sooner than later, that even if you get it 70% right, it's enough. You can go and fix it later.   Think of your system as software. Think of all the software you've used over the years. Think of how you've bought version 1, version 1.2, 2, 3, 4 and you don't feel bad about it do you? If you are such a perfectionist, which all of us claim to be, but of course, there is no such thing as perfection. Go back, just go back and fix it. Do version 1 then do version 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, go to 2. That's all we did. We did that with the Brain Audit. We sold version 1, we sold version 2, we sold version 3. The same people that bought version 1, also bought version 2 and they bought version 3 of a book.   It's not software, it's a book. You can do that as well. Believing your system, that's the second point. The first point that we covered was your voice. It needs to be your voice because want to listen to you. The second thing is just the system. Your system is totally different from everybody else's system.   The third thing are your examples and this very, very, critical. What is it about examples that make a difference? You can have a system, you can have a voice but somehow the examples that you use are going to be totally different from somebody else's examples. Maybe you'll give case studies that are totally different. Maybe you talk about stories that are your own personal stories or stories that you know from somewhere else. Maybe you'll use analogies that are different. People learn in different ways. When you give that specific analogy, when you give that specific story, the lights go off in the head and you felt this before haven't you? You feel this.   I was at a workshop once in Spain and there was this guy who is talking about values. Now, values are a system that you use in water colors top make your character stand out. I had read at least 50 books in water colors. I had gone to courses in water colors and I could never understand values. He came up with this system and these examples. The example was about how the values represent coffee and tea and milk and all that kind of stuff.   Of course it doesn't make any senses to you right now but the point was that that was my light bulb moment. That was the moment where I thought, "Wow this is so cool, I have never figured this one out before. I could go another 20 years and never figure this out." I figured it out at that point in time.   I'm sure that Spain helped. I'm sure my mindset helped. I'm sure that a lot of things helped. But the point is that you examples, your analogies, your case studies, they're going to be different. That's what you're going to take away from it. Just like I used the analogy of the Brain Audit. How we did version 1 and version 2 and version 3, you probably heard this whole thing about "Don't be a perfectionist". That story is going to stick in your head. I know it now. Even as I speak, I know that story is going to stick in your head. Every time you slow down, you're going to think of that story.   There you go, three things. Let's go over them quickly, shall we? The first thing that we covered was just your voice, people want to listen to your voice, it's very, very important. Whether that voice is a grumbly voice or a spammy voice or [inaudible 00:14:05] voice or whatever voice, that's the kind of client that is interested in your voice. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad, your audience will be attracted to that. The second thing is just the factor of your system. Your system is going to be different. Even if you move just one peg away from the other peg, from somebody else's system, it's still your system and that's what I want to buy into. The third thing is your examples, your analogies, your case studies, your stories, one little thing in your book, in your audio, in your presentation could trigger off that magic. That's the magic that you want to bring to the table.   This is why you should never give up. This is why you should never consider yourself irrelevant. This is why you should push that bully brain far into the background and say, "you sit in a corner and when you're 35 years or up, you can come and bug me again." That's what you do.   Well, this is me Sean D'Souza. If you like this audio and you like this information, pass it on to a friend, pass it on to someone, so that they can benefit from it as well. Do write in and ask me the questions about info products or marketing or anything specific that you want to ask because you never know, I might run in it in an audio podcast, in fact I will do that. You know where to find me, it's at PsychoTactics.com. Go to PsychoTactics.com and we'll meet you there.     

When you're a small business, you have what seems like a terrible choice: tactics or strategy. But do you really have to choose? How do online or offline strategies differ from tactics? Can you get by on marketing tactics alone? There is a difference and this podcast shows you how to not just tell the difference, but profit from it. To get hidden goodies, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to: http://www.psychotactics.com ===== Time Stamps:   00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:44 The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics 00:06:59 Strategy Leads to More Stress 00:08:39 How to Execute Tactics and Strategy 00:12:27 Summary 00:13:33 Action Plan 00:14:51 Final Notes. ===== Transcript  Sean D.: Hi this is Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics.com and you're 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. It's the new year and most of us are already thinking of not making new year resolutions so why do we hate new year resolutions so much? We hate it because it doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because we're not doing it right. Today we're going to talk about strategy versus tactics. Your new year resolution so far has probably been a tactic, not a strategy.  Back in 2008, I decided I wanted to play badminton. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, but I also enjoy sport. You see, I don't really like to do any exercise, I don't like going to the gym, I can barely tolerate walking, I only do it because I'm listening to something and it helps me pass the time, but sport? You ask me to play some soccer, or as I call it, football, or cricket, or badminton, well that's more up my street. I go to play badminton every day at 9 o'clock and then by 12 o'clock I'd be back. Now I wasn't playing all the three hours, I was playing just a couple of hours, but as you can tell, that's quite a decent workout. What happened at the end of a couple of months?  I didn't lose any weight. How could that be the case? How can you run about like a crazy nut, for two hours, five days a week and not lose any weight? The problem was I was reading it as a tactic, not as a strategy. I'd go and play for those hours every day and then I'd get back and I'd eat a little of this and a little of that and pretty much I was consuming as many calories as I was burning and doing it every single day.  After several months, I was exactly where I started, but not only did I goof up on the food, I was also goofing up on how I approached the game. After three months, I had so many aches and pains because I wasn't doing stuff right and I gave up the game.  Now I still have my racket with me, I still have my shoes, I still have the badminton shuttle I was playing with when I went from C player to B player which was quite difficult by the way. That is what today's podcast is about. It's about the difference between strategies and tactics. You've probably figured out the difference between strategies and tactics anyway. Tactics are like a new year's resolution. You decide you want to stop smoking, you want to go on a diet, you want to do something and it's that instant moment of deciding that you want to do something and then you move in a different direction.  Tactics might seem like just that one moment and strategy might seem like a longer period of time, but there's more to strategy than just the period of time and that is that there are different elements that feed into that strategy. When you look at something like what we're doing right now in podcasting, when I did podcasting back in 2010, I had what you call a tactic. I recorded a podcast and I put it up and people came there and they listened to it and that was it. However, this time around it's a strategy, so it's not just a podcast, it has different elements involved.  There is the podcast, there is the cartoon that goes with the podcast, there are the transcripts, there are the pages that have to be created for the podcast. There is the music that has to be put in, the music has to be bought obviously, it has to be tailored, it takes a couple of hours to put in all the music and then in this age of distraction, we have to get people to go there, to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to download, to continue to listen to them on a regular basis. This is something that I plan to be doing for a long time and that's the difference between a strategy and a tactic.  You have to think about all of the elements that are going to make it work, just like in badminton. It didn't just involve me going there and playing for a couple of hours, it also involved what I was going to eat, how I would improve my game so I wasn't struggling all the time and also how to not injure myself, because I'm an expert at doing that. By simply showing up and playing badminton, that was a tactic. By this point, you're probably wondering, do tactics matter or does strategy matter? Which one is more important? That takes us to the second part of the podcast, where we figure out which one is more important.  The thing with tactics, is that it becomes a springboard. A lot of people think once they listen to the whole concept of strategy versus tactic, that tactics are not important. Tactics are very important, but they're important as the springboard, they're the thing that light your fire, that start everything going. Once that is going, you suddenly get into a state of complete chaos. That's what tactics often do, they lead to chaos. You figure out, "I have to do something. I have to maybe do more webinars, or I have to do more workshops or I have to get more clients" and immediately you're out of your comfort zone and you're wondering what should you do, how should I go about it? At that point, we enter into the new year resolution zone.  We decide we're going to do something and we don't have the strategy and the strategy becomes critical. Now that we have our tactic, now that we've decided we're going to go in a certain direct, we've changed paths, now we have to sit down and work out a strategy and one of the best ways to work out a strategy is to educate yourself. Let's say you've decided to write some books on kindle. The first thing that you have to do is to be able to write really well. A tactic would be to just sit down and start writing. Nice, but quite difficult because there's a lot of editing that you end up doing, you end up wasting a lot of time.  A strategy would be, how am I going to make this more fun and less stress and you know you're actually in the middle of a strategy when you end up with a little more stress. You'd have to probably do something like a story telling course or an article writing course or a fiction writing course because that's what you're ending up doing, right? You're physically [inaudible 00:07:38] a book, so you need to know how you're going to sell the book, how you're going to write the book and you're educating yourself. This is what you do with your kids. You wouldn't say, "Okay let's get some books and learn some stuff and then we're done." No, you have a long term strategy. You send them to school for a duration, you teach them stuff on field trips, you educate them all the time and that becomes a long term strategy and the parents that have a better strategy end up with smarter kids and the parents that don't have a strategy end up with kids that are always trouble and struggling all along the way.  There are many definitions for tactics versus strategy and one of the definitions is tactics is the how and strategy is the what. For me, the difference is just that tactics are quick, there's stuff that you have to do right now, and strategy is the long term journey. It's all the stuff that you have to do to get to that destination.  Both of them are equally important in their own way, but without the strategy it's unlikely that you're going to get there.  For the third part of this podcast, let's talk about real examples. Let's say you've got situations and they're not working out too well for you, how would you execute tactics and strategy? Many years ago, around 2004, I was at this internet conference and I was selling from the podium, I don't do a lot of that anymore, but that's what I was doing and I noticed that a lot of people were making these offers and there was a stampede to the back of the room. I didn't have a strategy for that day. I just showed up on the podium and I used a couple of tactics and it didn't work at all. In fact it failed miserably, so I had to come back to New Zealand and then work out what did I do wrong? How should I have gone about it?  I created a strategy. In 2008 we went to Chicago and when I spoke from the podium, there were 250 people in that audience and that day we earned 20,000 dollars. If you sat there in the audience, you would have thought, how did he do it? How did he sell more than all the other speakers? If you were just looking at that one piece, that pitch that was done at the end of the speech, you'd have thought that there was some magic in that pitch.  But it wasn't. A lot of the planning had gone into what we had done before the speech, before we even got to that podium, before I even started to say a single word. There was a whole strategy. There was the stuff that we sent in advance, there was the stuff that we gave at the event itself, including a handout that the participants got the previous night. There was the video when the presentation actually started and what the video was supposed to do, there were the breaks in the middle of the speech where I just took a break for five minutes and what I did on that break and this was all part of the strategy.  A tactic would be just to make that pitch, a strategy would be all of the points that were required for that pitch to work. This brings up a very important point and that is anticipation, anticipation of chaos. When we execute a tactic, we're just doing what the situation requires at that point in time. When we go through a strategy, we're anticipating that things will go wrong, and how do we fix it? How do we recover and how do we recover quickly?  Over the years at PsychoTactics, things have gone wrong and have gone badly wrong. Through most of 2013 and part of 2014, we had several hacker attacks on our website. I don't know why, maybe it's because it's quite popular. It's in the top 100,000 in the Alexa rating and maybe that's why, but nonetheless, we didn't have a strategy in place and so we had to put a strategy in place and that involved moving all the websites from one type of system which was [jumla 00:12:08] over to Wordpress and reinforcing everything. As part of our strategy, we now have to redesign the whole look because times have changed.  We also have to look at the text and whether it reflects who we are right now. Our tactic was to make sure we were no longer in the blacklist and that clients were not compromised in any way, but our strategy was longer term, our strategy would take several months, probably over a year to execute and that is the core difference between a strategy and a tactic. To come full circle, I am now walking every day. I don't go for badminton and maybe I will at some point in time, but I walk every day and I walk for an hour, hour and twenty minutes, every single day.  The strategy is very simple, I have all my audio whether it's music or podcasts or languages and then at the end of that walk I get rewarded with a coffee. Then I turn around and come back.  A part of that system is also to anticipate when things are wrong. Some days I don't feel like it or I have too much work to do in the morning and so I get my wife [Re-nu-kah 00:13:36] to call me at the office and disconnect the phone and so then I have to go back home and we go for a walk. You may not have a companion, you may not have a situation, you may not have this and that. The point is that you have to work out a strategy that is going to work for you without excuses.  This takes us to our action plan and you really have to do just one thing. You have to figure out what you're going to do in the new year. What are the three things you're going to do this year? What strategies are you going to follow? Is it just going to be another tactic where you go out there and find someone who says, "I can bring you 10,000 new customers," or you can get to the top of Google instantly? That's not the way to go. The way to go is to go step by step, implementing your strategy and that's how you meet with success. That is how you get to your three month vacation. As you can figure out, once you start taking long vacations, even that requires a strategy, or you just come back more tired than ever before.  Get your three points, what are you going to cover this year and then what are the strategies? Start with one, work out the strategy, move to the next and the next. Start executing your strategy and not giving up. With that, we come to the end of this episode. To get more information, go to psychotactics.com/podcast. You want to subscribe to that newsletter because we send it out only twice a month, but you get a notification when we have any goodies and we do have goodies. You also get notifications of the new podcast, just in case you haven't been following it for a while, or something's happened.  Go right now to htttp://www.psychotactics.com/podcast and subscribe to the newsletter just on email. It would also be really nice if you could pass on this podcast to others, others in business or other people in your life. That would be really nice, thank you again for listening and remember this podcast has been brought to you by the three month vacation and Psychotactics.com. Bye, bye.

What's the secret to getting results? Amazingly it's not some online marketing trick or strategy. It's just plain old follow up. But how do you follow up? And how can you have a marketing strategy—especially for your small business? In this episode of the Three Month Vacation from Psychotactics, you learn exactly how to follow up to get results. To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps 00:00:00 Introduction-My Story With Compaq 00:03:07 Table of Contents 00:04:09 Topic 1: Education and Sales to Follow Up 00:09:04 Topic 2: How Often Should You Follow Up 00:13:16 Topic 3: How Do Amazon and Apple Follow Up? 00:16:21 Summary 00:17:48 Final Details ====  Transcript Sean D'Souza:I've not always lived in New Zealand. I lived in Mumbai, India for a long time and back then, I used to be a cartoonist. I wasn't so much into marketing or not into marketing at all. Even as I say that, somehow it seems odd and the reason for that is because even without realizing it, I was using the concepts of marketing, so let me tell you this story. Even though I grew up in Mumbai, I mostly drew for newspapers and magazines and places like that.    The pay is terrible there because all of the syndicates like Universal feature syndicate and all these syndicates that send out cartoons, they just mass dump the cartoons into other countries, including India.   It's so cheap that a newspaper or a magazine can just bring dozens of them. If you look at the cartoon pages, they are there every single day, a whole page of cartoons. There I was competing against this absolutely dirt cheap, probably 20 cents a cartoon scenario and of course I couldn't make a living doing that, so I started looking out for companies because companies do presentations and within presentations, you can use cartoons. At one point I picked on this computer company called Compaq.   They showed some initial interest in the cartoons, but then they went quiet. Now as I said, I wasn't doing any marketing back then, but I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and followed up. One day, their manager called up and he said, "Can you come over?" He took me to their boardroom and there I was in front of fifteen or twenty people sitting there and he said, "Tell them what you did." I'm completely confused now. It's like, "What did I do?"    He says, "Tell them when you started communicating with me," and so I did and he says, "Tell them how many times you communicated with me," and of course I followed his instruction. I did want the job after all. Then he turned to the entire group which happened to be in sales and marketing and he said, "This is the difference.    This is why he is standing here. This is why he's going to get the job. It not because of his skill, it's not because of pretty much anything I know about him, it's because he followed up and because he was persistent, that's why he's standing here and that is a lesson for you in sales and marketing."   Yes, it was a lesson for me in sales and marketing too because when you're a small business especially, you don't know whether you should follow up. If you're a big business, you can just buy ads and flood them in the marketplace and repeat them ten thousand times and maybe they'll do the job and maybe they won't, but you have those deep pockets, but if you're a small business, what do you do? You follow up, but how do you follow up without becoming a pest?   The first thing we're going to cover today is how do you follow up without becoming a pest. The second thing is how often do you follow up and then we'll look at some real life situations from Amazon and also from our site at Psychotactics and how it has made a difference to our business. When I say a difference, this has been the difference between a client buying nothing and ending up buying twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars worth of product and services over time.   Let's start with the first topic which is what are the tools that you use to follow up? What are the systems that you're going to use to follow up? There are actually two tools that probably encompass everything that you need to do with follow up and that is to educate and the second one is to sell.    Now both of them are incredibly important. You might think that the education is more important than the sales, but it's not. Both of them are very, very important, so when I first started out as a cartoonist and I just moved to New Zealand, I was not only a small business, but a small business with no clients and with no understanding of what people in New Zealand were buying and where to go. In short, it was like just being born in a business. It was brand new.   Of course, you do what most businesses do. You get in touch with clients and this is a consulting business, a business that's not online. You get in touch with them, you go to some meetings and then you get a name of someone and that's what I did. I got some names of some art directors and I started sending them a calendar. Not just a calendar once a year, but a calendar every month. Now it would have been cheaper to send it once a year, but they got a reminder from me every single month and it was a useful calendar. It had space to write down things and yes, it was just photocopied on color paper and it did the job.   That is a kind of educational followup. If you're online, your followup tends to be with articles, with PDFs, with reports, with some sort of giveaway and as we know, this is increasingly getting harder every minute because of the fragmentation of media. It used to be easy before or easier, but it's getting much harder, so you've got to consider that you are going to follow up both offline and online and we do this ourselves. We get clients and then we send them a bar of chocolate. We send them postcards.   Now consider that our business has been online since 2002, so we've got a reputation. We've got clients that love our work and yet, we're still using that age-old system of offline marketing. We're still following up bit by bit. We still keep in touch with clients through email, just sending them a note saying how are you doing, what's happening and yes, it's all taking time. We're all super busy, but the point is that once you have a client, once you have a contact, your job is to keep following up.   Now you can follow up with educational material like articles or reports or podcasts or webinars or anything, but as long as they are on a regular basis. Now what you might not realize is that following up and selling your product is just as important. Notice what you do when you buy a book. Say you buy a book by an author. Say it's James Patterson. What happens next? You want to buy another book by the same author and then a third book by the same author, so in effect, when you don't have a product and you don't follow up with selling a product, you are preventing the client from coming back.   At least a fifth or a fourth of your communication with clients needs to be one of sales. There's education or there's entertainment or whatever you're sending out for the three-fourth, but one-fourth needs to be some kind of offer, some kind of sales, some kind of incentive so that they can then decide I want to buy this product or service. This might not seem very intuitive at the start, but it's what holds the business together. It generates the income and it enables you to then follow up or to get resources who will then follow up for you. With that, we end the first part, which is follow up with both information as well as something that the customer is going to buy.   This of course takes us to the second part which is how often should you follow up? When we send out something and we expect a response, we usually get a blank and that's not because people don't want to buy, it's just that you're selling at the wrong time. What do I mean by wrong time? Well, when you want to sell something, that's not the exact time that people want to buy something, so you've got to prepare them for that moment. If you want the six secrets to following up, well, the first secret is follow up. The second one is follow up. The third one, follow up. Fourth one, follow up. The fifth one, follow up and you know the sixth one, which is to follow up again.   Even if you're not sending out a newsletter, even if you're not doing anything that most people do in terms of marketing, if you're going to spend the time initiating a meeting with someone, then you want to make sure that you follow up at least six times. Take for example this podcast.  Now, admittedly, we've been online for ages and you would think well, you just send out an email blast and everyone's going to go to the page and put in the reviews and subscribe and do what you expect and they don't and so I had an online Google Docs document and I put in the list of the people that I was contacting and I was contacting twenty-five people a day, every day, so guess what happens?   You're looking at the number of people that you have communicated with over the past five years or ten years. I looked at my sent box and there were twenty-two thousand emails that had gone out. Now even if two hundred of them responded and did what I was expecting, that would mean two hundred into six interactions which would be twelve hundred interactions.   Luckily for me, some people respond quickly. Some people don't, but you've got to have that system in place because you spent all that time creating the podcast, putting the music together, putting it up, getting all the software; there's an enormous amount of effort that goes into setting up something, creating something and then we get dejected when people don't respond the first time. You can't do that. You have to keep following up repeatedly over and over again.   The point is that if you follow up with some sort of incentive, some sort of information, some sort of curiosity, it becomes less of a painful experience. When it came to my cartoon career, I was sending out those little calendars. When it came to Psychotactics, we used to send out newsletters. We gave away free products. We sold some products. When it came to the podcast, I was just following up with the people I knew, just through email; no incentive, but a certain amount of curiosity of what we were covering in the podcast, but there was a strategy for follow up and that's the message I want to get across to you today.   What was the result of this follow up? After about ten days of following up, we got thirty-five reviews on iTunes. That was enough. That got us into the new and newsworthy section of iTunes, so we debuted at 55 on iTunes, which is good. I mean, you've spend all that time, you're getting a result. The next time when you're feeling nice and dejected that no one is responding to your stuff, remember, all of us have to do the groundwork. All of us have to follow up. If you don't have a follow up strategy in place, it's not going to work.    But what if you were a big company like Amazon.com? Would you then do this followup? If you're on Amazon or you bought anything off Amazon, you know immediately what I'm talking about and that is that they follow up incessantly. They follow up in different ways.    This morning, for instance, I wasn't interested in buying any books; however, I had bought a book in the past and they sent me an email saying which other books would you recommend to readers who've read this book? Well, that was a different question. I mean, it wasn't about leaving a testimonial. It wasn't about rating anything, it was about which other book would you like to recommend. They also put a link there about here are some other books that readers recommend and so I got curious. I went to see which books others recommended and of course, I ended up buying two books.   Now, the point isn't that you don't have the power of Amazon and you don't have the data base and you don't have this and you don't have that. You have to remember that you have obstacles and the obstacle becomes the way because there is no other way but to go through the obstacle, around the obstacle or over the obstacle.   Amazon, with all its resources, with all of its money, is still following up. We have a strategy at Psychotactics which involves attraction, conversion and consumption. Attraction is the followups that you have to do before someone buys a product and so you send them all of these newsletters or these reports or the podcasts or webinars or whatever content you're creating or sometimes even paid products that you just give away at that point in time.   Once they buy something; let's say they go and buy The Brain Audit, we then have a post followup, which is a consumption followup which is getting the customer to consume what they bought. While this also takes a lot of time, you have to put in a whole bunch of auto-responders together; the point is that we want customers to consume the products.    We don't want them to just buy it, we want them to use it.   It's when you follow up and when you use technology to follow up and when you just follow up using old grind method, that's when you get clients that stay with you and that is one of the secrets of why we can take so much time off every year. That's why we can take our three month vacation. We don't have to go out there and get new clients all the time. We can just follow up with existing clients and they help us in meeting our goals.   Let's summarize what we learned today. The first point we covered was how do you follow up without being a pest and you do this with education, which is good; not just your average stuff, but really good stuff. You do this with sales as well. You want to sell them a great product. You want to sell them a great service. You want to get that through because the moment they buy something from you, there is greater investment in your system, in your methodology, but how often do you follow up?    Well, you follow up before they buy, six, seven, eight times; at least six times and then after they buy, you follow up as well, helping them to consume the product. It's called consumption. Finally, remember that even the giants like Apple and Amazon with all their budgets, they're constantly following up and while it's easy for us to say we don't have that kind of money or infrastructure, we do have systems and all we have to do is work out a strategy to follow up.    It's not going to happen today or tomorrow, but over time, that strategy gets to be better. If you've received a chocolate from us or if you've received a postcard or you've received an email, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. What's the one thing that you can do today?   When I went to Compaq, I just didn't have any strategy. When I launched this podcast, despite being as busy as you know I am, I had to follow up, over and over again, but I had a strategy and I had an Excel spreadsheet. For those of you who know how much I love Excel, well, I had an Excel spreadsheet, so that's how keen I was on followup and that's how keen you should be on followup. Any followup strategy is going to be better than no followup strategy. It gives you a much clearer idea of what you're going to do in the weeks, months and years to follow, but even so, for the next few months, have some sort of strategy, any strategy will do. It's still better.   That brings us to the end of this episode. If you haven't already subscribed, you know what to do. Go to iTunes, subscribe, give us a rating, help us along. We need the help. This is the tenth episode and we're into double figures and that's me, Sean D'Souza saying bye for now. This has been brought to you by The Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Once you subscribe, make sure you go to Psychotactics and subscribe to the newsletter as well.    Bye bye.  

The bikini concept or bikini principle works on a simple idea. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor is just as strong, if not twice as strong. And yes, what the bikini didn't reveal, was the part the audience most want, and was the part they were willing to pay for. The same applies to your information products, webinars, workshops and yes, presentations.  To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ----------------------- Time Stamp 00:00:20 Introduction: Bikini Principle 00:05:33 How The Brain Audit Workshop Helped 00:07:57 What You Can Give Away And What You Can Sell 00:09:20 Summary 00:11:04 Action Plan   --------------- Transcript   It's hard to think of a bikini when you are in a classroom and you're giving a speech and then someone asks you a question, but that's exactly what happened and how we came upon what we call the bikini principle. This bikini principle became one of the most read, most ever. The reason why it became so popular is probably because of the bikini, but also because it underlines a concept that's so obvious, and we probably are too scared to admit that it works.   What is this bikini principle?    To understand the bikini principle I have to go back in time. I have to go back all the way the Pittsburgh. Now Pittsburgh is a city in the United States; it's on the east coast. I had been invited to speak at an event. As it happened, we had just started Psychotactics.com a couple of years before that and I had written this book called The Brain Audit. The way I'd go about my speeches is I would cover only three things. I still do that; I still cover only three elements even in this podcast.   The point was that in The Brain Audit the book consists of seven bags or seven elements. When I covered those three elements, of course everyone would be very interested in the elements and then they would ask the inevitable question. The question was: If you've told us about the three red bags, and there are seven red bags in The Brain Audit, what are the remaining red bags about?   I was always un-eager, as it were, to answer this question. I was very reluctant because somehow I felt I was giving away the plot. I was giving away everything and then there would be no reason for the customers to buy anything. I was giving away all the seven red bags now, but if I gave away just three then maybe, just maybe, they would buy the book because that way they would have to find out what the rest of the red bags were.   Now one of the people at this event was quite adamant. He was like "But surely you can tell us what the four red bags are about." Very reluctantly, I did. I put it up on the board and I explained what they were. I told them the seven red bags are the problem, the solution, the target profile, the objections, the risk reversal, the testimonials, and uniqueness. I laid it out for them and I thought that's it. I'm going back; I'm not going to sell anything; I've told them everything I know.   Incredibly, we had the best sales ever. Of course we've gone on to sell a lot more since then but back then we were just starting out. It stunned me how many products we sold on that day. When I got back to New Zealand I wrote about it. I called it the bikini principle. It's not very hard to understand where that idea comes from. The bikini hides just a few parts, but what it reveals is enormous, and yet it's just the few hidden parts that make it so sexy. In effect, revealing a lot more wasn't causing customers to buy less.   Instead, they were buying more. That totally took me by surprise. I just didn't expect it.   Over the years I've realized that the people who end up buying stuff from us are people who get more information about a product or a service - and this is not just on the sales page, but when you look at, say, Amazon.com and you read the first chapter, what that does is it reveals a lot of the stuff in that first chapter or second chapter and then you get locked in.   Earlier this year we sold the pre-sale course and then we took it off the shelves. In that short period we gave away one-fourth of the course. Now I know what you're thinking: One-fourth is not a bikini, but you get the idea. The idea is once you give away a substantial amount of your information, instead of the customer leaving and going elsewhere saying "Oh, I got all the information I need," they come back. This went to a completely different level when I did the first Brain Audit workshop.   Now imagine this. Supposing you have a book and you wrote the book and everyone's read the book. Would they come to a workshop? Well, you're going to say yes, right? That's what we do. We buy a book, then we go to the workshop. But as a creator, as the writer, as the person who's running the business, that's not how we think.   We think that if they've got everything, why would they bother to come to the workshop. There I am in Washington D.C. looking around the room, and guess what? Everyone in the room has already brought The Brain Audit, has not just bought The Brain Audit, but because we have it in version we've sold a version of it, version 1.1, 2, version 3, and then finally it was version 3.2. everyone in the room has not just read The Brain Audit but some of them have read various versions.   It then struck me how powerful this concept of revealing stuff is. It's like an epiphany. It's almost too hard to believe that people would continue to buy from you once they've already read your stuff. Now just for the the record this is not for you to go and give away all your stuff hoping that people will come back and read all of it. There is a limit to how much you can give. That's why it's called the bikini principle.    You can give away a lot of the stuff. Whether you choose to give away 90% or 80% or 70% or 30%, that's totally up to you. The point is that customers come back once they are completely hooked with your information. I would like to say that the more information you give the more hooked they are but that's not entirely true. The more information you give that allows them to make changes in their lives, that empowers them, that's the kind of information that they will come back for. That's the information where you can give away 90%, hold back just 10%, and they will keep coming back.   You don't have to give away everything, and even if you decide to be very generous, remember that customers will come back for other formats. What do I mean by other formats? If you happen to give away something absolutely free, and maybe you give away 90%, 95%, maybe even 100%, and then you change the format or the packaging, then customers will come back for that very same something.    Let's say this podcast, this podcast is absolutely free, and yet if I were to just put all of the pricing podcasts together, all of the storytelling podcasts together, and then sell it as a separate product, customers would buy. They would pay a price for something that was absolutely free simply because of the way it was packaged.   Or let's say I took it and I put it in a PDF or an epub, and you had an epub just of storytelling articles or an epub just of pricing articles. Then customers would be willing to pay for that as well. Just giving away stuff free is not going to ruin you completely. I'm not suggesting that you go around giving stuff free all the time. However, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you clob things together that seem to be all over the place, then customers are willing to pay for it.   That is what the bikini principle is all about. You can give away stuff, and a lot of stuff, and customers will still want more. The second thing is that the very customers who buy your product or consume all of your product will then come back for workshops and consulting and training and all kinds of things like that. Finally, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you club things together, then customers come back to consume those other formats.   That's why the bikini principle is so powerful and that's why so many people wanted to read it, because that's not our natural instinct. Our natural instinct is we should not give it away. We should not share. We should not be so open, so overexposed. Yet time and again the bikini principle just proves us wrong. It proves that we can indeed create attraction with that bikini principle.   That brings us to the end of this podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes. If you've already done that, well, thank you very much. Also, you want to go back and listen to the podcast on the three-prong system.    That's podcast number two and it helps you understand how you can structure your three-month vacation. Before we go, let's look at an action plan for today's show. What are we going to do? Even if you're just a little bit shy about giving away all your stuff, at least give away some bit of it. Maybe a chapter or a free one hour session, which is a live session, a workshop or a seminar.    You will find that it's very powerful. If you're not in a position to do that, take some of the free stuff that you've given away and convert it into audio or into some other format, and that will get you going because people will want that other format even if they've got free stuff from you in the past. That's your action plan for today, and it's time for me to go now. This podcast has been brought to you by Psychotactics, Psychotactics.com, and The Three Month Vacation.    Bye for now.  

How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough". ========== Some goodies To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ========= Time Stamp 00:00:20 Calvin and Hobbes Story 00:02:04 Keeping Up With The Joneses 00:03:37 Psychotactics: Our Definition of Enough 00:06:53 How Can You Overdo A Vacation? 0:09:25 Summary 00:10:40 Coming Up Next ======== Transcript: Power of Enough Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long.   Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?"   Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich?   One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit?   When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day.   So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept.   The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough.   If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people.   At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all based on a factor of enough, of a limit, a fuel tank and we're not going to overfill that tank. You might say that well, it's easy for you because you are already established. You've been in this business for over twelve years. What about me who's just starting out? The point is that our workshops, our courses, our membership site, they had these limits right at the start. It wasn't something we figured out along the way and while we did really well at work stuff, we didn't really figure out our vacation bit.   When we started, we figure nine months of work and three months of vacation seems like a fair deal, but we didn't understand what the concept of the three months vacation was all about. We overdid it. Now, you'd say how can you overdo a vacation? But you can. The first year we took a vacation was in 2004. We had just started out business towards the end of 2002, so within a year of starting up, we just decided that's it. We're going to take a three month vacation and we took three months off and it drove us crazy. We weren't enjoying that time that we were supposed to spend because it seemed endless. It seemed like we had to fill in those days.   Then of course when you come back from the vacation, there's this big void. You've not been working for so long, you don't feel like working anymore or for a very long time, so we had to juggle it a bit. We had to go okay, let's try six weeks and we tried six weeks and six weeks was too long. Then we tried four weeks and that was too long. Three weeks seemed just right, so three weeks plus a week of going back and forth to whichever place, so we never go directly to a place, we'd stop over for a couple of days. On the way back, we'd stop over a couple of days, so we're away one month at a time. We realize what is enough: Three weeks plus a week of travel and that is enough.   But it's really crazy to have a running tally that continues to increase. You're continuing to add holidays or money or whatever to where you're just putting in more and more fuel into that tank. For what reason? While I'm an information junkie - I just love information. I'm learning in design and Photoshop and my camera, which is the X100, that's a Fuji film. At the same point, I'll be tackling lettering and studying some stuff on learning, etc., but even that has that point of enough.   Often when I'm talking about how I go for a walk with my iPhone loaded with audio books and podcasts and stuff and people think well, you must be doing that all the time; you're completely crazy. Yes, of course, a person like that would be completely crazy, but today I was listening to Billy Joel and all of this summer, I will be listening to Andrea Bocelli, so you have to understand what is enough.   This brings us full circle to Calvin and Hobbes. Sometimes, we just slip into the Calvin mode. We overdo stuff. We are built to overdo stuff. We want to be part of the human race where we're always going to just push our comfort zone quite a bit actually, so we always have to get into the Calvin mode and then decide I want to be like Hobbes sometimes. In fact, I want to be like Hobbes a lot. I want a tuna sandwich.   So what's your action plan? It's simple, really. Think about it. How many customers do you want? How many people do you want at your workshop? How much money do you want to make from now to whenever, just a finite amount. Maybe even how much silence do you need? Everything with definition becomes a fuel tank and you fill it and you're happy and you have enough.   Coming up next week, we have the bikini principle. Interesting topic, isn't it? It's appropriate because it's summer here in New Zealand. I know it's freezing in other parts of the world, but it's appropriate here. We're going to find out exactly what is this bikini principle and how does it apply to stuff that's not related to the beach at all?   We learned a very good lesson when we were selling the brain audit about this bikini principle and it has stayed with me. It was one of the most read posts when we first had the consumption blog which no longer exists because there were too many blogs to manage, but it was one of the most read posts ever.   If you've been a subscriber, then you know that you automatically get the downloads on your phone or on your computer if you subscribe to iTunes. You can also get our podcast on Stitcher and hopefully soon on SoundCloud and finally, if you don't have any of the above, then you can get the RSS feed, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast and you can find the RSS feed there.   Oh and before I go, be sure to leave a review for us because it's really important. It really helps me look at the review, look at E-comments and I feel much happier and you want to keep me happy, don't you? If you have any feedback, you also want to write to me at [email protected]. Anything you'd like to see or listen to anything you don't like, just write to me at [email protected]. I actually implement the feedback. We've come to almost twelve minutes of this podcast, so that's enough so I'll say bye for now. Bye bye.   This episode has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation which is at Psychotactics.com.  

Should stories be dramatic? Incredibly, the answer is NO. Drama comes from the 90% principle. And this means that your audience needs to know 90% of your story in advance. And that's one of the elements that make storytelling incredibly powerful. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com   ==== Transcript: Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I'm his evil twin. Sean D'Souza:And you're 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. Some people are considered to be natural born storytellers and that's all of us by the way. When you were five years old, you came back from school and you told a whole bunch of stories and you did it perfectly well. You put in the drama, you put in the suspense, you changed your tone, you did everything powerfully and wonderfully. Then as you grow up, you get a little more judgmental about your stories and you think that other people are better storytellers than you and it's true. Storytelling is a craft. When you're five years old, everyone listens to you because it's true, but as you grow up, you have to craft it.  We'll take a little trip and find out what's involved in storytelling. Now this is just a little bit of the entire series that I've written on storytelling but it will give you a good gist of what to expect from that book, that series, and because these questions were put to me off-the-cuff, I am probably going to answer things that you probably won't find in those books or that series. It's a win-win situation and I think you should get the series from Psychotactics but for now listen in and let's get on this storytelling rollercoaster, shall we? In this series, we're going to cover a lot of topics, probably 10 in all but we'll start off with the main topic and that is what makes a good storyteller. There are clear attributes to be found in good storytelling. One of the attributes of a storyteller is they should know when to tell a story and when not to tell a story. You can't always tell a story just about anywhere.  One of the good places to tell story is when you are starting up something. If I started off this thing with a story, you'll say let me tell you about the time we were in London. Immediately that gets your attention. The other place when you need to tell stories is once you have given some information. Stories almost act like an example, like a case study and so they help the listener understand, comprehend what you just said. A storyteller needs to know this. They need to know that it's not just about telling story after story after story. Instead they need to know where to tell the story, when to tell the story, how long that story needs to be. That's what makes a good storyteller. This takes us to our second point. What can you do to improve your storytelling? Let's find out. There's an amazing series on Africa and the narrator of that series, which is a BBC series, is David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough talks about the resurrection plant and he talks about how the resurrection plant is out there in the desert and how it starts to roll and roll, and then it could be like that, rolling for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 100 years. Then at some point in time, it runs into a puddle of water and that's when the resurrection plant comes to life. Immediately, in a couple of hours, it starts to grow. It's almost like watching something on video in fast motion. Then the resurrection plant is not done. It has to wait for the second phenomenon which is the rain has to come, and the rain has to then hit the petals. The petals have to drop on the floor and new resurrection plants come up. Within a few days, all of them dry up. They shrivel up and then they become these little balls of resurrection plants that may go for another 50 or 100 years. What makes that story interesting? What makes that story interesting is simply that it has three elements. The first element being sequence; the second being suspense; and the third being a rollercoaster.  A good storyteller needs to know these three things. If you want to improve your storytelling, you need to understand that there needs to be a sequence. It needs to unfold one step at a time. This happens and that happens, then that happens.  The second thing is that there has to be a factor of suspense, so maybe the resurrection plant gets to the water but at that point in time, nothing is happening. It's growing but the petals don't fall off. How are the petals going to fall off? How is that momentous occasion going to come about? Then the rain comes along. Then you've created this ups-and-downs, this suspense, and that brings us to the third part which is rollercoaster. Now, what is a rollercoaster? A rollercoaster is just the ups-and-downs. The resurrection plant has no rain, then it has the puddle, that's good, but that's not good enough. It needs the rain to come and drop the petals to the floor and then just when everything's going good again, the sun comes up and dries it. We have that rollercoaster, that up-and-down. If you want to improve your storytelling, you have to focus on these three elements: the sequence, the suspense and the rollercoaster. Now that we know about sequence, suspense and rollercoaster, we have to also figure out how do stories help in business. When is storytelling important in business? Well, the problem with business, it's full of data, full of information, full of stuff that puts us to sleep. The moment you start off with something like let me tell you about the time or you give a case study, immediately your attention switches. Immediately the audience's attention switches to you.  If you were to stand up in a crowded room and talk about a case study, immediately it doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are looking at their phones, whatever they are doing, thinking about whatever they're thinking about, at that point in time the attention goes right to you. The power of the story is that capacity to hold or snap an audience out of whatever it's supposed to be doing. Today people are so captured or captivated by what they are doing that you need to snap them out very very quickly. That's what a story does really well. There's a second reason why it's important business. When we understand a concept when we have explained a concept to someone, it's not like they can figure out what's happening. They need a layer. The first time you hear something, you think, well, how does it apply to my business? When you have that story, when you have that case study, that's when people understand exactly how it applies to their business. The thing is that storytelling is very useful when you're trying to differentiate your product or your service from someone else. To give you an example, we have a product called the Brain Audit. Now the Brain Audit is a marketing book. It shows you why customers why and why they don't.  I bet if you go to Amazon, there are 1,000 or 10,000 books on marketing. When someone arrives there, how are they going to decide that this is the book that they want. They look at the story, and the story talks about the seven red bags, how you put seven red bags on a flight and then you get off at your destination and you're waiting at the conveyor belt, the carousel, you're waiting for the bags, and then there's one red bag, and then the second red bag, and the third red bag, and then an orange bag, and a green bag, and fourth red bag, and the fifth red bag, and the sixth red bag.  When does the customer leave the airport? When they have all the seven red bags, right? What's happening there is the story's explaining why this book is different. What are those seven red bags? Why are they needed? Stories snap people out of whatever they're doing. It gets their attention. It explains a point. It allows people to absorb stuff. Third, it allows you to differentiate yourself from other products and services, so they're very very useful. Let's take a little break, a little summary. What we've done so far is we've looked at the attributes of storytelling. We've looked at how you can improve your storytelling and then we looked at how stories help in business. This takes us to the fourth section which is about how less is more in information product. What is it that you're doing wrong and how can you fix it?  Imagine you've invited someone to dinner and you want to impress them, of course, but you go out there and you have 20 dishes and each dish has its own taste and its own style and its own look and its own variation and its own subtle flavor. The guest is completely flabbergasted, very impressed but completely lost because as human beings, we're unable to consume that amount of stuff. We've tried it before. We've gone to a buffet and tried to eat 20 dishes. We eat a little of this, a little of that, and we can't cope with it.  This is how information products are created. Information products are chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter, and suddenly you have 20 chapters and 200 pages and each of those chapters have their own concept and subconcept. Suddenly you're floating with information. With information products, less is more, but how much is less in the first place? Usually you can start off with three main topics. If you have three main topics, you can cover three main things. If you listen to some of these audios in this series, you'll find that, say I'm talking about storytelling. I'll say storytelling consists of sequence, it consists of suspense, and it consists of a rollercoaster. Now I can spend a lot of time talking about sequence. I can spend a lot of time talking about suspense and a lot of time talking about rollercoaster, and that's when you get the depth. You get that felling of that feel that you've consumed, that you've understood, that you can even recreate ... but 20 dishes? That becomes too much. This is why we're struggling so much in today's world. We have too much information and there is this rabbit hole of information going deeper and deeper and deeper. Instead, have just three main topics and then dig deep. One inch wide, one mile deep. Just a little bit of information, lots of depth in it. That's when you create expertise.  The next time you're thinking of putting together a document or an audio or a book or anything, think about how much you're inflecting on the customer or the reader. How much you're overfeeding them and then give them some expertise instead.  OK, let's not overdo it here because we have covered three or four points and now we go to the fifth point, which is the best way to start writing a story. Then we'll finish off this segment and then we'll do it in the second part so that you're fresh and you can tackle that second part. When you start to sell, you know that you have a weapon and that is the power of storytelling. When people know that storytelling really engages the audience, engages their customers, they are keen to use that weapon. How do you use that weapon? Well, you have to remember that storytelling is not just something that you rattle out. It's not a bedtime story. It is a specific story hinging on one phrase or one word. Let's take the example of the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit is a book and it talks about how you put on seven red bags on a flight and then when you get off at the other end, you have six red bags. The question is, when do you leave the airport? What we have there is a situation of hesitation. You have seven red bags. You had six red bags. Now there's hesitation. We can now take this concept of hesitation and apply it to selling so now we can say, in the same way when you're trying to sell something, you might remove all the bags off the customer's brain and leave just one red bag missing, and then they don't buy. They hesitate.  They want to ask their uncle, their brother, their sister ... they don't want to make a decision. What's really the key between the story and whatever it is you're selling? That is that key word hesitation. That's what we really have to drill into. We have to figure out what are we really saying because it's only when you know what you're saying that you can bring about this whole story line and create a story for that sales pitch. Now, you don't have to use hesitation in terms of just the bags at the airport. That's been taken by the Brain Audit. You can use different forms of hesitation and you'll know different situations where companies hesitated, so there will be case studies, or you can talk about personal stories where you hesitated. The point is once you get to that key word or key phrase, then you build a story, then you link the story to whatever it is you are selling. That's when a story becomes very powerful and not just a bedtime story. OK, it's time for some summary now. Let's see what we've covered so far. The first thing we did was the attributes of the storyteller and we found out that you can start a story with drama and that would get the attention. Also, once you're going in through a lot of information, you want to bring in the story of that [inaudible 00:16:04] because that enables the listener, the reader to absorb that information, to run that case study, that story in their head. That's the first thing that you need to know when to bring in the story and then how to bring in that story. The second thing we learned was how to improve storytelling and we found that it was about suspense, sequence and rollercoaster. You'll remember that story of that resurrection plant. That had suspense and sequence and rollercoaster. Go back and listen to that bit because it's really useful. Put these three elements and you make great stories. The third thing we covered was about storytelling in business. Information is full of data and information, and more information and more information is really boring. Storytelling helps you clarify what you're saying. It also helps you to stand out. We did that with the Brain Audit. With all those marketing books, the Brain Audit stands out because of that story, not because of anything else. Later on you get to the contents of the book and you find it's great and wonderful, etc. The point is that it starts of with the story. It really helps you stand out. If nothing else, it helps you stand out. Less is always more, and you can have a topic which is one inch wide and one mile deep. Now, on average, you want to cover three things. This series, this audio has five. They are short. They are manageable. You don't want it to be a rule but you definitely want it to be a guideline. When you have a ton of stuff, people can't consumer. Always remember go inch wide and one mile deep, and that's really what you want to do. Finally, if you want to write really good stories, you need to distill it down to one phrase or one word, just like the Brain Audit is about hesitation. Until you get that one word, and it's not as hard as you think. You just want to say too many things. Instead, just stick to one word, one phrase, and then you'll get many scenarios, many case studies, many stories that you can build from that one word.  This brings us to the end of the first part in this storytelling saga. Saga? Is it a saga? It's not a saga. It's just a little bit, just a little bit, and I do hope you enjoy it. If you have been, I would suggest you get the storytelling series. You can get it at psychotactics.com. It's in the Products Section and it's the products under $50, so have a look there. You'll find it quite easily or use the search bar.  That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now and you know what? If you want to share this with a friend, with several friends, or even send it out in your newsletter, feel free to do so. Yes, tune in for the second part in this series because we're going to have a blast there as well.  

Storytelling isn't an art. It's a science. Every kid knows how to tell stories. And it's cute to be a storyteller when you're a kid. But when you put structure to writing and storytelling you take it from science to art. Find out how this works with story. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com   Transcript: Sean D'Souza: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.  Most stories start up with once upon a time, well at least the stories that we learned when we were kids. Well, imagine if Goldilocks and the Three Bears started right in the middle.  That's what we're going to cover in this section.  We're going to start off with stories that start right in the middle.  How to keep stories fresh and engaging?   We're going to look at the 90% principle and we will repeat that several times in this series in different ways, but you'll learn the 90% principle.  Then, there's counterflow.  What is counterflow?  Flow and counterflow, but what does counterflow involve?  Finally, the pivotal moment, how to turn the story on a dime?   Let's get into story telling.  Let's start off with, how to keep your stories fresh and engaging?  If you ask a photographer to take a picture of say a glass.  Well most of us will just stand up, take our phones out and take a picture from wherever we are standing.  We don’t go close to the glass.  We don’t bother to see the angle of the glass, we don’t bother about anything.  We just rip out the phone, rip out the camera, take a picture and we are done.   That is not interesting.  From a photographers point of view it is well you want me to take a picture of this glass, what kind of lighting, which angle.  When you look at the glass there are about a million permutations, the type of light, the type of color, the type of angle.  All these things come into play when a photographer is taking a picture of a single glass just an ordinary glass, and this is how you have to approach your content. When you are talking just about anything you have to understand what I am really going at.     What angle am I going at?  Why kind of lighting am I portraying?  With story telling you have to know what is it that you are talking about?  If you are talking about something that is immutable, insurmountable, well you have things like the Himalayas, and you have these mountains that cannot be moved.   You also have other problems, other things that personal stories that talk about things that you could not move, that wouldn’t budge, so you have case study where maybe a recording company didn’t budge and the Beetles just had to find another way.  Once you have got that kind of understanding of well, what I am really saying here.  What is that word?  What is that phrase?   No you can keep your content fresh and engaging.  You can tell the same story, that same glass and look at it at different angles and different light and different ways and you can approach that same story a million different ways and customers never get fed up.  However, you also have to understand that we the storytellers get tired of our stories long before customers do.   You look at someone like say Frank Sinatra, and he is saying, say ‘New York, New York’ and every time he went out people were happy to listen to the new songs, but they wanted New York, New York.  They wanted him to sing that song or they wanted him to sing ‘My Way.’     They wanted those things that they could attach themselves to understand, and so yes there are million ways to represent a story or a million ways to represent a sales pitch but also remember that people love the way that you have always done it, so don’t just change for the sake of changing.   In summary, there are different ways to approach the story, just know what you’re talking about and secondly once you have that run it.  You don’t have to keep changing it.  This takes us to the second part which is how do we make the story more dramatic.  Where do we start?   When we are growing up we are accustomed to listen to stories that start off with once upon a time and the problem with stories that start off with once upon a time, it takes too much time to get to the main gist of the story.  Let’s think of a story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you know how that story runs.  It starts out with once upon time there was Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc.   You don’t really want to start there.  That is fine for a kid.  That is fine for someone that is just falling off to sleep.  Your audience is not falling off to sleep.  You want to wake them up remember.  Where does your story start?  It starts right in the middle.  The drama is right in the middle of the story.  Goldilocks is there on the bed.  She is looking up and suddenly there are three bears looking at her.   That part is far more dramatic than once upon a time there was Goldilocks and she went into this forest or she went to see these three bears.  You got to work out that the story is more powerful at the center and so you write your story or your figure out your story or you figure out your case study and go right to the center and go which is the dramatic part and pull that part out, and put it right at the start.   That is what the movies do.  Very rarely will you get a movie that starts to build up slowly.  A movie will start smack in the middle and then they will go to the start somewhere along the line and then build up the story right to the middle again.  That is what you have to do?  You have to go right into the core of the story, pull out the drama, put it right at the middle, and then bring out the beginning.  It is middle, beginning, back to middle and end of story.   That’s what makes a good story.  That is the mistake that a lot of people make.  They don’t start off in the middle.  Then in the end or right to the middle by which time the audience was fallen asleep.  You don’t want them to fall asleep.  This is not a kid story.  This is a wake them up story.  This is a story that they will remember.  We have looked at two ways, the first is start in the middle and the way to keep your stories fresh and engaging.  Let’s move to the third thing which is very important.  It is called the 90% principle.   Whenever you are telling stories, one of the things that people tend to do is put too much information in the story.  Let’s say you telling a story about Jack and then Mary comes in and then Charlotte and then Anita, and now you have got too many elements that the person has to deal with.  People often tend to make up stories by putting all of these elements and you don’t want to have that.   You want to have 90% of your story in place, so when a person is listening to your story, they don’t have to make up 90%.  It is only 10% of that story that they need to figure out.  When we look at a story in the brain audit which is the book, you are talking about putting bags on a flight and then standing at a conveyer belt or the carousel and getting those bags off the flight.   What has happened there is that 90% of the story is in place.  You have been on a flight.  You know that you have to put them on.  You have to take them off and the thing that has changed, the elements that have changed are just the factor of the seven red bags, and that one bag goes missing.  When you listen to that story on the brain audit, what we have here is 90% of the information is already in place.   Let’s take another example.  Let’s say you were trying to get into a car and you are fiddling with the key and it is not opening and you know it looks like your car and it is still not opening.  We have tried to do something like that.  We have tried to get into a wrong hotel room or try to get into a wrong car, 90% of that story is in place, 10% has changed and that 10% is what makes it personal, what makes it your own.   This is not the case when you are talking about case studies.  Case studies unfold in ways that are completely different from personal stories.  The personal stories are get the audience on your side.  Case studies are something that someone else did.  I would always recommend, ‘A’ that you have personal stories and ‘B’ that 90% of that story is already in the customer’s brain and you are just tweaking 10%.  Now that we know what the 90% is all about let’s move to counterflow.   When we write a story or when we recount a story what we tend to think is that the only way to get a story going is go forward.  You think of a sequence, but there is also anti-sequence, or what I would call counterflow.  There is flow and there is counterflow.  It is almost like someone is headed towards success and then there is a barrier and that slows down the story, takes it in a different flow as it were.   When you look at the seven red bag story or when you listen to the seven red bag story it seems like everything is going fine.  One red bag is coming off the carousel so you put all these bags in the flight and then one came off and the second came off and the third came off and now there is counterflow.  There is the green bag, orange bag and a polka dot bag and then of course there is flow again which is the fourth bag comes out and the fifth bag and then the six bag.   Now there is flow again but then the seventh bag is missing and that’s counterflow again.  That keeps the interest.  When you are looking at any kind of story, you have to look intricate and go is there is a flow and counterflow.  Is it going in favor and then slightly off, disfavor.  That is what makes great stories.  You don’t want to always have the sequence.  You also want to have this flow and counterflow.  This takes us to the last one which is the pivotal moment.  There is a moment where you can turn the story around.  Lets’ find out how.   A lot of writers are worried about writing something that is boring and you have to remember that there is no such thing as boring.  Let me explain.  Let me give you an example.  Let’s say I am giving you the story.  I remember the night we were driving home on June 21st.  It was dark, rainy.  Even slightly foggy and then I saw it.  In the middle of the freeway it looked like someone had stopped their car, and so I swerved violently to the right and the next moment to my horror a car zoomed right past me.  The car was hurtling down the wrong side of the freeway with no headlights.  Moments later we heard the sickening crush of metal behind us.   Did that paragraph get your attention?  It did, didn’t it, because it is dramatic.  The car was on the wrong side of the freeway.  Yes the driver the drunk, and yes he would have hit us head on at about 70-80 miles an hour if I hadn’t swerved.  Stories such as this one make for enormous heart pounding drama but what if your story is less dramatic.  For example, let’s say you went to the post office today and there is a parcel waiting for you.   Now there are five different scenarios that could pop up just from the post office.  You could be waiting for this parcel for a long time and it excites you now and you could be not expecting any parcel and then finding a parcel just brightens up your day.  You could be expecting a parcel and get someone else’s parcel which leads to disappointment or you could be expecting a parcel, get the parcel, but it is the start to a series of events that you could not have predicted, or you could be expecting a parcels but the contents are broken, and this leads to some other events.   This is just a parcel stuff and you probably got bored with all the variations but the point is just very simple.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring event.  What is boring is the way in which we put it forward, because if you are a Hollywood director you would see drama in everything because any incident leads to another incident which leads to the third, fourth, fifth incident.   Any incident can start off being perfectly good and then turn horribly bad, or any incident could be terrible to begin with and then turn out to be amazingly fabulous.  What we are really talking about is a pivotal moment and that pivotal movement is simply a moment which spins in some direction, either it gets better or worse.  Any moment can be a pivotal moment.   You have a story from your life and you say well that is really mundane.  I woke up today and then something happened.  What is that moment?  Let’s take a dramatic moment.  Let’s say a bully is beating you up at one moment but then what happens next?  Do you stumble?  Does the bully hit his head on the table and knock himself out [inaudible 00:14:34].  Does someone come to your rescue or do you get beaten up black and blue? The point is that you could be doing anything like eating a spaghetti, a bowl of spaghetti, and the next moment something changes.  One movement you are driving down the road and something changes.  One movement you are getting drenched in the downpour and then somethings changes.  Every situation can go from good to bad, bad to good and then keep bouncing back.   All you have to decide is what is the pivotal movement what is that movement that the story goes off in a tangent?  When you have that movement what you do is you keep the story going ahead.  There is no such thing as a boring story.  There is a boring way in which to put the story.  If you have a pivotal moment?  If you have things happening along the way then suddenly things happened.   Well, that sounds crazy doesn’t it, but that’s exactly what happens.  What is your pivotal moment?  That is what you have got to decide and once you decide that you don’t have the problem of being boring any more.   Speaker 2:Okay, we have had enough, now let’s get to the summary.  Can we now get to the summary?  Summary, summary, summary, summary.   Sean D'Souza:Okay, let’s get to the summary.  We have talked about how to make stories memorable and really we will talk about it again, but the point is that if you don’t have that idea, that one word in your mind, it is very difficulty.  That is what really makes it memorable from there you get your case studies, from there you get your personal stories, and from there you get your analogies.  That was the first thing.   The second thing was starting in the middle.  You want to start a story in the middle.  It is nice to start a story at once upon a time but starting in the middle that is where it rocks.  The third thing was the 90% principle and the 90% principle is very simple.  Your story is not ordinary.  It’s a great story.  You just have to tweak 10% of it.  Make it your own and 90% principle works.   The fourth thing we did was counterflow.  The story is going in one direction.  Hold it back.  Turn it around.  Make that whole story jiggle a bit, and that is what causes counterflow, and finally we looked at the pivotal movement.  Something is happening and this is similar to counterflow in a way.  Something is happening and then something else happens.  What is that something else.  Turn it around.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring story.  There is no such thing as I am only going into the post office and something is happening.  Be the story teller.  Tell that story.   If you enjoyed this podcast then pass it over to your friends and also let them know that they can get podcast just like this full of solid information at ‘The Three Month Vacation’ on Itunes and you can get yours too.  Go to Itunes and look for ‘The Three Month Vacation.’  While you are there please give me a review as well so that this podcast can be seen by other people.  Your reviews really matter.   Speaker 2:He wants a five star.  He wants a five star.  He wants a five star. Sean D'Souza:It is time to take Snippy for a coffee I guess.  Bye for now.  

Storytelling is a craft that small business owners need to improve their marketing. Without stories, a marketing strategy is like a boat without a rudder. Fact, figures and data can only go so far. Learn how stories help to create powerful marketing, in a completely non-threatening manner. Oh, and go to http://www.psychotactics.com—it's really cool.    

When you're in marketing, one of the big "marketing strategies" is to appear bigger than you are. Every one in the marketing field or in business is always talking about "six figure" incomes and "how to get thousands of customers". And so you and I get pulled along with this crazy tsunami. We stop being who we truly are, and start behaving like someone else. How can we be true to ourselves? How can we be our crazy selves and still succeed online? For more of the good, crazy stuff, go to http://www.psychotactics.com TimeStamps 00:00:20 Marsha's Confusion 00:04:10 How to Find Your True Personality 00:07:22 Why Personality is Important 00:09:08 Copying Someone Else 00:13:21 Summary 00:14:37 Getting Started-Action Plan

It's not easy to save time. We all know that. Yet, time management isn't just a factor of getting a fancy to-do list. Sometimes it involves some pretty odd things that you have to do. At Psychotactics, I didn't always have time. Now my workload has more than doubled, but I have a lot of time. How did that happen?  More at http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:02:54 | Tip 1: Keep Stuff Open At All Times 00:08:22 | Tip 2: Leave the Office?And Plan Obsessively?And Weekly! 00:13:22 | Tip 3: Spend Two Hours To Save 5 Minutes 00:17:07 | Summary 00:18:40 Transcript Sean:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I am his evil twin.  Sean:And you're 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.  I want to start today with just a little boast. I write several courses every year, like 200 pages and then we do the course where we have sometimes 20 or 30,000 posts on a single course. I'll write articles, I'll do workshops. Not lots them, maybe once a year, but it takes a lot of planning. Then I'll be in 5000bc.com which is our membership site. Yes, there's lots of other work-related activities but I also mentor my niece, which means that I stop work at about 12:00 every afternoon. I'll take a break, often take a nap, and I'll explain that in another show and why it's so important. Then I will work with my niece until 7:30 that evening.  The point is that I was boasting there. The other point is that it's all true. Now granted, I do wake up at 4 AM but I also take three months off every year. Where do I find the time to do all this stuff? There are certain things that I've learned over the years, and when I go back to who I was back in 1990 or in the year 2000 or 2005, I was not the same person. I was always battling for time and always struggling with stuff. I had to figure out what am I going to do. How is this going to change? Why is it that I'm always battling with this factor of time? I realized that some people do things slightly differently. On today's show I'm going to talk about three things that would seem radical in a way. I would ask you to try it, because it works really well.  The first thing that we're going to talk about is just the factor of keeping things ready. We'll find out what this is all about. The second thing we're going to cover in the show is just to leave the office, which sounds really odd. The third thing is to spend about an hour or two hours so that you can save five minutes. As you can see, this is pretty radical stuff, but it will save you enormous amounts of time during the year. Let's get on with the show, shall we? Back in 2010 I started watercolors. I went to a watercolor course nearby. In fact, it was my third or fourth watercolor course. I had never succeeded in painting and so I decided I'm going to get this done. But it was the guy who was conducting the watercolor course that made a difference to me. His name was Ted and he said "Sean, why don't you get a diary and why don't you just put your stuff in there everyday? Just draw what happened to you." I thought that's a good idea. I thought wow, that's a good idea. I could do that. I could just take something that happened to me that day and put it in the book, in the diary. Now the good thing was that I already had a whole bunch of Moleskine diaries that I'd put earlier a couple of years ago, never used them. Now I could use them. I started to use them, but soon enough chaos reigned. I would forget the diary somewhere and I would sometimes have to diary and not the pens. Then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting anything done was I didn't have all my stuff with me open at all times. Now this sounds really odd but if you don't have your stuff open and ready to go, you simply lose momentum. If I we're to go into my bag, even if I had my drawing, and then get it out of the bag and then open the book and get to the right page, and then open the pencil box, and then sharpen the pencils, it's five or seven minutes or eight minutes - if I get everything right. What I started doing was I started keeping everything open. I started keeping all my watercolors there ready to go. I started keeping all my paints ready to go. As a result I have now done a watercolor almost every single day for four years. That's, wow, 365, but I end up doing a little more so maybe about 1,200, 1,500 watercolors that I wouldn't have done, had never done before. Where do you get this kind of time? Just the fact that you have to open stuff takes up a lot of time. I have Scrivener on my computer and when I do my courses, what I do is I keep Scrivener open all the time. I know this sounds crazy for people who want to close everything and keep it neat, but having to open Scrivener, find the file, put in all that assignments that I've written for the course, all of that takes just five minutes. There's five minutes here and five minutes there and five minutes everywhere. Yes, it adds up to an hour but what's more debilitating is that it actually ends up with a couple of hours, because the energy required to do this mindless exercise is fascinating.  What I tend to do is I keep everything ready. When I go for my walk everyday, and I go for my walk everyday because if I don't go for my walk everyday I'm not just fit but I don't listen to the podcast. I don't listen. I don't educate myself. I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't do a lot of stuff. All the podcasts, all the audiobooks, all of the information that I need for my trip, I'm learning languages - all of that is there on my iPhone. When I'm on the walk it's there. I switch on the iPhone as I leave the house. I speak to my wife a little while and then we start listening at a specific point.  The first point I'm trying to say to you is if you're writing a sales letter or you're writing a article, or you're doing whatever you're doing, you have to keep the stuff ready. You have to keep it ready to go. If it's the previous night or the previous day or on your computer or on your desk, keep it ready to go. That saves an enormous amount of time. That sounds like a really simple tip but it's very powerful. The momentum - that's what you're really battling with. The fact that you have to go and you have to put on your shoes to go for a walk. If your shoes are already halfway out of the door, you might as well just put them on and then when you do that you go for a walk. When you go for a walk you listen to the podcast. When you listen to the podcast you get smarter. When you get smarter you're able to implement stuff.  Really that is what it's about. Preparation makes a huge difference. The people who succeed consistently are people who are prepared long before the opportunity arrives. The people who struggle all the time because they're opening their books while somethings going to happen. They're opening their program while something's happening. The prepared ones, they're already there. That's the first tip: just keep stuff open. Keep it ready to go. Keep it there the previous night or whenever. Keep it ready.  The second thing that has been of enormous use to me in saving time has been to leave the office. Now this sounds totally counterproductive. Why would you leave the office? Office is where your computer is. You get a lot of stuff done. Why would you leave the office? For one, because the office is your execution place. It is not your thought place. It is not your learning place. When you leave the office you will find that all of your great ideas, all of your fabulous money-making schemes, they all happen in the car or when you're going for a walk, or you're doing whatever you're doing. My wife and I, we sometimes go to the café. Not sometimes, we actually go to the café a lot. The trip there and back is the most productive part of our day. At the café we probably read something or draw or plan. I'm getting to that shortly.  The point is that the office is the least productive place.  Speaker 2:To be fair, he doesn't get very good coffee in the office anyway.  Sean:The office is where you execute, not where you think. In fact, if I'm doing presentations I will take a pencil and a paper and go out. I'm really good at doing everything on the computer but I will still go outside and do it all. It's the thinking, it's the planning that makes a big difference. That takes me to this whole concept of planning. We make elaborate plans. We plan monthly, weekly, yearly. Every Friday we have a couple of hours of just planning. We just go to the café and we plan. You think well, I keep planning as well but nothing comes of those plans. You'd be surprised that if you just keep at this exercise of planning on the same day every week you will find that you are moving ahead at a far brisker rate than if you didn't plan at all. You have to do this almost methodically. You have to do this on a regular basis. You have to say Wednesday 3:00 to 4:00, that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to plan. You go "I don't have enough time to do stuff," but planning is what clears your mind. When I did one of the planning sessions I realized that I was just going nuts.  Now Pscyhotactics has been around since 2002. We've got lots of articles. We've got courses. We've got products. We've got all that stuff. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I could do podcasts. Suddenly I wanted to write some books for Kindle. Then I wanted to do this and do that. When I sat down at that planning session I realized that I was stupid, that I could never get all of that stuff done. I had been spinning for a couple of weeks just trying to get stuff done, hoping I could get it, and in the process getting absolutely nothing done.  The plan revealed my weaknesses. That's what I say to people. I say this to clients, I say this to my friends, I say this to everyone. Keep on planning, because planning is priceless and plans are useless. But the person who has the planning, you have to fulfill this goal of yours. If you don't have that goal and that goal is not reviewed on a regular basis ... This is not a to-do list. It's a plan. It's where I'm going. Leave the office. Get all your ideas in the car. Go for a walk. Get fit. Yes, spend time planning. You'll say why is that such a time-saving device? Because it gets rid of all the million things that you plan to do and you couldn't fit in. Now you can do the things that you could do or you want to do.  The planning really clears your mind. It focuses your in the right direction. That is a huge time-saving device. When I leave the office I often try to find a café that doesn't have an internet connection. Sometimes it's a real pain because I really want to check stuff and I want to see stuff, but not having that internet connection is really cool. If you can find a café like that, that would be really good. Leave the office and plan obsessively. This takes us to the third idea of time management, really. That is that you often have to spend two hours to save five minutes. Now that might sound really crazy but let me give you an example. I have a program called Text Expander. Now Text Expander is a tool where if I just type in a couple of letters it can expand into a whole paragraph. For instance, if you asked me "What is your address?", then I would type addx and it would spill out the entire address, my postal address, my home address. Say you had a problem downloading something from our website. Now a lot of people have issues, especially with Internet Explorer. There's a browser issue. In this case it's not downloading. Often you just change the browser and it downloads the product. There's nothing wrong with the product or the server. It's just a browser issue. I have to then go to this browser, do this. It's a whole couple of paragraphs, maybe three paragraphs. These are just instructions. All I have to type is “browx", which is what I've set up obviously. The point is it spills out all of the information and now that person gets the information, they're able to download that product. But it took me three seconds. It took me half an hour or 45 minutes or one hour to learn how to use that program effectively. Because a lot of programs are very effective and we learn 1/10 or 1/100 of that program and it can do a lot of stuff. That's what we don't realize. I type a lot in forums when we have our courses, like the article writing course or copywriting course. There is formatting to be done. The top subhead has to be in bold and red and italics. Then you go around formatting all of that and you've gone and done five clicks. I can do it in one second.  The reason is had to spend a couple of hours going through a tutorial learning all the stuff so I could save three or four minutes in a day. But what happens is then those three and four minutes expand everyday. Suddenly you wasted hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours every year. But it's not just a concept of hundreds of hours. It's also wasting a hundred or more hours just getting tired. All of that typing and retyping - and you can say "Okay, I can cut and paste," but you're learning Photoshop, you're learning programs. You need to spend a couple of hours that you don't have right now to save those five minutes. You will realize how much faster you are.  This is true especially for the technology that you have on your computer, that you use three, four times a day. I would really suggest this. In design I use Photoshop, I use a whole bunch of programs. Every time I educate myself on it it has saved me enormous amounts of hours in the day. I hit myself on the wall. Speaker 2:He doesn't really do that. That would be an amusing sight, wouldn't it? Sean:I think why didn't I do this earlier? Why didn't I actually spend some more time learning how these programs work? Every time I do it saves me time. That's my recommend to you. Spend two hours and save five minutes.  Let's summarize. The first thing that we did was just to keep stuff ready, keep stuff open, keep it open all the time. It's really cool. Don't keep too many things open. You don't have to have 25 tabs open, but the stuff that you really need, the programs, keep it open. Keep your books open and it saves you an enormous amount of time. I know it's a crazy suggestion. Try it.  The second things is leave the office. The office is just a place where you execute. You waste a lot of time at the office. Go out there, get your plans together. Planning saves enormous amounts of time. It tells you what not to do. Your stop-doing list, it comes out in planning.  Third and very important is to make sure that you learn the technology that you use everyday, whatever programs that you use everyday. Take a tutorial on it. Spend time on it. Don't do all your programs. Just do the ones that are most critical, things like Text Expander or Scrivener or programs like that which you're going to use on a regular basis. You will save enormous amounts of time.  This brings us to the end of the third podcast. We have reached podcast number three. If you haven't got the first two podcasts go to iTunes and download them. Be sure to leave us a review as well. It helps me stay focused and get this job done well. Thanks again for listening, and this is brought to you by Psychotactics.com and the Three Month Vacation. You can't have a vacation if you don't have time, so might as well start saving time now. Bye bye.  You're still listening. Well, if you have any suggestions or any feedback, send it to me at [email protected]. I will be paying attention to it for sure.