Capturing Your Awesome Life Story

In this episode of LMScast, Chris Badgett talks with Nick Usborne about his initiative, Your Awesome Life Story, a website that helps people, especially those over 50, record and save their life experiences for those who come after them.

Nick’s project provides a number of platforms for producing and disseminating life stories, such as scrapbooks, audio or video recordings, written memoirs, and even dynamic websites. Importantly, he reassures that one doesn’t need to be a professional writer to tell their story authenticity matters more than style.

Your Awesome Life Story encourages people to record their life, which helps close the generational divide, strengthen family ties, and leave a rich legacy for future generations.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest and good friend. His name is Nick Usborne. I’ve known Nick for about six years and he is a prolific course creator. And writer, teacher he’s been in this industry for a long time. He’s got a new project called Your Awesome Life Story.

We’re going to dig into that today. But first, welcome to the show, Nick. 

Nick Usborne: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Always fun to talk with you. 

Chris Badgett: Tell us What your awesome life story is it’s basically and by the way, I just want to say head over to your awesome life story dot com. So you can look at what we’re talking about.

And Nick, if it’s possible, maybe turn down your speaker volume a little bit. I can hear it coming through your mic just a little bit. 

Nick Usborne: Oh, all right. Let me have a look. So say something to me, make sure I can still hear you. 

Chris Badgett: Yourawesomelifestory. com. 

Nick Usborne: And does it sound any better now? 

Chris Badgett: Sounds perfect. 

Nick Usborne: Okay, cool. All right. All right. So what is it? It’s basically a service, for people who, boomers or say you’re over 50 and you want to create a record of yourself, of your life.

So it’s about writing your life story. It’s part of kind of the family history, scrapbooking, journaling, that whole thing where people don’t want to lose everything. Like I’ve spoken to so many people who say, Oh man, I wish I’d done that. With my dad or with my mom or with my grandma before she passed, because now I know she had so many kind of stories and lessons to share and she did such great thing, interesting things in her life and there’s no record of it.

So it’s lost to us. So the idea of writing and creating and then publishing a life story is you, it’s a legacy. It’s something you can share with your kids, with your family, it can be passed down so your grandkids can find out about your life and there’s so many. I started off when I started creating this was just, Hey, wouldn’t it be fun for people to create their life story?

And then the more I got into it, the kind of deeper I found the topic became I was talking to someone who does activities in a retirement home. And she was saying, Hey, that’s great. There’s so many people here who would like to report their stories, but so many other fringe benefits, like getting a group of people together to share their stories, to get to know each other better, there’s the, I don’t know it’s just such an adventure.

The more I dig into it, the more I see this as a kind of life adventure of, yeah why do I want. Everything that I’ve done, everything I’ve learned to be lost. It’d be, Hey, I got some particular stories that my kids just love. They just say, Hey, tell me the story about when you, and this is usually about when I was in my teens or early twenties, when I was crazy.

And they want to hear those crazy stories. If I didn’t share them, they wouldn’t know. And I’m sure my, from my parents, particularly my mom, my dad left some of his stories behind, but my mom didn’t. There’s probably so much there that I never, she was just like mom, but I didn’t know her before, she was married.

I didn’t know what her aspirations and what she did when she was younger. So I think there’s a lot of, there’s a huge loss within a family and it connects family. It connects generations. A grand, a grandson can say, Hey, you know what? Grandpa’s not so different. He had these same struggles when he was young.

When I think about Nick, I think about the story of you living in a cave in Turkey, I believe. It’s just, that’s such a cool story. Let’s make sure it’s not forgotten one day, 

I should have used that as an example in the course. And I haven’t, that’s not lost. I’ve written that one up with texts and the store and the photographs and everything.

Chris Badgett: You’re a writer, very talented writer but your awesome life story is for anybody. And how do you, what’s your approach to getting people that aren’t necessarily writers or YouTubers or content creators to capture that, which is particularly common, especially in the older generations today.

Not being creators, if you will, for the modern web. 

Nick Usborne: I think all of us have some capacity to write. Yeah, because even if we’re not writing for the web, we’ve written letters. If you’re old enough, you’ve written letters, you’ve written postcards. You, you know how to communicate. And one of the things I say in the course is, Hey you don’t have to have had a celebrity life to make your life story worth sharing, your kids don’t care about the celebrity stuff.

They just want to learn about you. And also you don’t have to write like you’re, John  Grisham or Stephen King. You can just write in your own voice. And sometimes you’ll get a younger person helping a grandparent. With their life story and they’re likely to just record them on video or audio and say, Hey grandma, tell us about, and then that can be transcribed.

If you don’t feel like, so there’s all kinds of different ways to do this. 

Chris Badgett: And what are some of the formats, if it’s not a book, it could be what? 

Nick Usborne: My dad wrote up just a part of his life because I was raised on a farm and my dad had that farm for 30 years. So his life story, he didn’t talk about his, when he was younger, he didn’t talk about when he was retired.

He just talked about those 30 years. And he actually did it just simply as a binder, like a scrapbook. And he typed up the story. He added photographs. There was like newspaper clippings, things like that. So yeah he just, he was retired when he did it and he just sat down and he’s typewriter and then wrote it up.

So that was a binder. There’s another member of my family, like a second or third cousin, he’s actually built a kind of family story as a website, which is also interesting because the thing about it, if you did on a website, it’s a living history. Is you can add to it, somebody has a grandchild or you suddenly remember something, or you find some photographs in the attic.

When my, both my parents have passed and particularly when my mother passed, she was the second to go. There were so many boxes of albums and photos and things like that. And it was fun to look at but the trouble was a lot of those pictures had no context. We’d love to, I’d love to say, Hey, mom, where was this taken?

And why did you keep this? What was this? We never really had, so we had bits and pieces and old letters and postcards. Old ferry tickets from vacations going, from England to France, just all kinds of stuff. So yeah, you can add all kinds of, I’ve lost track of the question now.

I’m rambling. It’s 

Chris Badgett: just a content. The different formats it could take. So it could be a 

Nick Usborne: website, it could be a binder. Another friend I have who he was actually, he originally set out just to write like a letter to his children. So that’s a format. You sometimes see that, letter to my younger self or yet letter to my children.

So he was going to do a letter to his children because his kids were leaving school, they were graduating, but that had no education in finance and money. At school. And you thought that’s not good. This friend is his, he’s, he went through all kinds of struggles and he tried different businesses and they didn’t work.

Then suddenly they did. And now he’s very wealthy and very comfortable. He wanted to share that with his kids. So he started off just as a letter to my kids. And then he thought hang on, there must be other parents out there who feel the same, that their kids get no education in money matters and entrepreneurship and stuff like that.

So he turned that into an actual book and it’s like a three, I got a copy here somewhere. It’s like a 300 page book he had published, by a big name publisher. So you can go that route or you can just do it yourself. You can publish it as a, just as a, an ebook, as a PDF, or you can take that PDF and publish it on the Kindle, Amazon Kindle.

So there’s lots of different ways of doing it. And, or you could do it just as audio or video. It’s. I guess through the mechanism or the, how you approach helping somebody achieve this, because I know it could seem like a big project, but how do you ease into it in your course of like process?

Chris Badgett: How does somebody get started and on the path and what are some of the milestones and methods in your course? 

Nick Usborne: So I take them through kind of steps, because like you say, it can feel overwhelming. Like I have no idea how to do this. So I said, okay, step by step. So step one is why are you doing this?

What’s your why? I want to hand this down to my kids or the why could be, it could be a journal of rediscovery for yourself. It could almost be therapy for yourself is Hey, there’s all kinds of stuff I went through and I just want to review that and get back through that. And so it can be therapeutic too.

And also the why is. Yeah. Like, why do you want to do it? Then there’s the who, but who are you doing this for? Is this just for immediate family? Is it really an intimate thing just for immediate family? Or is it for like extended family and friends? Or is it for everyone? Like my friend who published it, as a big name publisher.

Is it this for everyone? That matters too. And then I say, okay, let’s now gather together all your stuff, boxes of stuff. These are the building blocks, the kind of bricks of your story. And then we get into, okay, how do we structure this? Like, how do we find the beginning of the middle of the end?

And where do we begin? So I have a big beard on. So basically what I’m doing is I’m, I don’t throw anyone at the deep into the deep end with the course. I say, okay. Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for? Where’s your stuff? Let’s put that into a structure. And then in the next session, we look at, okay, we’ve got a structure, but let’s do a bit of storytelling here.

Let’s apply some of the kind of theory of story to this and make it maybe a little bit more exciting to read, interesting to read. Rather than just dull pros, as it were and then there’s all kinds of tools that I talk about. And one of the things I do right at the end is a section that’s almost, I don’t think I titled it this, but it’s close to saying, Hey, I’m not dead yet.

It’s my story so far, but maybe my story so far can inspire me to do other stuff in my life. So I might, as I’m writing my story, I think. You know what? That was such a period of my life. You mentioned like I lived in Turkey for a while. I can say, you know what? I should go back there. I’m going to put that in the bucket list.

I’m going to go back to Turkey and revisit that place and see if any of the people I knew back then are still there. So that goes in my bucket list, or it could be something I haven’t done. I’ve never, Hey, I’ve never been further east. I’ve never been to the far east. I quite like to go to the far east.

So I’ll put that on my bucket list. So when you do your life story it’s a voyage of rediscovery for yourself and for your family. But. Can also be an inspiration for, Hey, here’s some of the things I want to do with the rest of my life. I’m not done yet. It could be volume two, somewhere down the road, or if it’s a website, then you just keep adding to the website.

Okay. Here’s the journal of our finally my trip out to the far East. Here’s the journal. And I put it on the website. Funny question 

Chris Badgett: for you. What if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed? Oh my gosh, there’s so many stories, so many different parts of life. How do you choose what to not focus on  part of it?

Nick Usborne: Again, I did, I go through this in the course is there are some things that you don’t want to, my brother was writing a book like a memoir and he was chatting to me and he was asking me about stuff. And there was a particular episode that he said, oh, I want to put this in. And he mentioned that and I was like, no way, because that particular episode was very personal, very painful for me.

Back in, in our early childhood, and I said, no, please do not, I do not want that shit. So there’s some things that you may not want to share. And definitely in terms of privacy, if it involves someone else, you should ask them before you decide to share that, or it could be, Hey, maybe I’ve had struggles.

Maybe I’ve had addiction. Maybe I had problems with her in any relationship. Is it good for me to go back through that? It might be. Do I want to share that with everyone? Maybe I do. If this is a story and part of redemption, maybe I don’t. So you’re going to go through stuff and it’s like any kind of editing of any kind of story or anything like that is, is the stuff you want to put in and the stuff you don’t want to put in.

And part of it, I talk about a push pin structure. Think of highlights, again, you talk about the trip to Turkey. Okay. That’s the kind of push pin thing. I’ll put that up on the wall. That’s interesting. It was interesting when I moved from England to Canada. That was a big deal. I’m going to put that in it, where, so there, there’s, you can do almost like a highlights reel. You don’t have to cover everything. No one wants to know everything, but it’s, think about what’s interesting to you, but also think about what would be interesting to your kids, to your grandkids, what would they like to know about you?

And also like one of the things that I’ve done and I talk about in the course is because the world changes so quickly I’ve got a. Even in the closer picture of a slide rule. So slide rule is what we used to use at school before there were calculators. But my kids and their kids, they wouldn’t, if I showed them a picture, a slide rule, they’d have no idea what it is.

So I put that in there because it’s interesting. Wow, think of all the changes that have taken place just over a relatively short period. So it’s fun and it’s. I hope at no point did I say, Oh, this is hard work. I really don’t want this to be hard work. This is fun.

This is exploration. And this is going back through. This is like ringing up old friends, someone you haven’t spoken to for 20 years and say, Hey, I’m doing this thing. And I suddenly thought, do you remember that trip we took? Do you remember that concert we went to? Do you remember that time we misbehaved, whatever it is.

And it’s you can reconnect with people. I’ve done that. I went back to England and I reconnected with one of my very first bosses after I left school like I worked in a quarry and they, he was a master Mason and he was a fantastic guy who had a huge influence on my life, I, when I went back to see him, I hadn’t seen him for over 20 years.

So that was again, part of rediscovering, rediscovering important times in my life, important people in my life. And I think we get, we’re always rushing forward. We’re so obsessed with the present and the future. And the past is gone and I think that’s a shame. I think it can be my process of creating the course.

I’ve necessarily gone through the process myself of creating this life story for myself. And. It’s really interesting and it is healing in a way. And it’s so interesting to look at those big forks in the road. Like when I came to Canada from England, what if I hadn’t? What if what stimulated me to come to Canada?

I wouldn’t be talking, I probably wouldn’t be having this conversation with you now. We wouldn’t have met the way we did all those years ago. So there’s these forks in the road, which are fascinating when you look at them. Wow. And I’ve spoken to that, about that with my kids of Hey, just imagine if, because I, my, my kids, I bumped into their mother.

Oh, I guess it’s always the case. It’s like almost by, I wasn’t looking for her. Yeah. I just bumped into her and all of a sudden we, we’re married and having children and stuff. What if I hadn’t, she was in fact the person who sold me my first. Flat, my first apartment in London.

What if I’d gone to another realtor? What if I hadn’t seen that ad, whatever it was, everything changes. So it’s fun. It’s really interesting. And I’ve involved my kids a bit in it. Because again, part of my story is my life with my children, raising my children. So I said, Hey, do you remember that time?

And sometimes we have very different memories. Of what, they’ll say, do you remember? And I’m like, no, what was that? And then they remind me and I think, oh, true. That was great. Anyway, 

Chris Badgett: let’s talk more about that therapeutic aspect. What are particularly, I think when you’re getting older.

There’s some pain of loneliness, boredom maybe looking for meaning and significance and you’re talking about how good it can be. But what’s some of the kind of the negative side of like where people are at later in life? That this could really help with I 

Nick Usborne: think 

Chris Badgett: it’s 

Nick Usborne: part of it and I talk about this in the course is, and this is when I was talking about retirement homes, the lady there who’s in charge of activities that say one of the biggest.

Issues there is that people become less social, that fewer social connections as you get older, you tend to have fewer people around. So she was saying that what she loved about the idea is that it gathers all the people together in a group and all of a sudden they’re talking with each other. And somebody says something and someone else just burst into laughter and said, Oh, that was me too.

I did that. Or I, I saw that band. Oh my goodness, we were at the same event and we never even knew. And it just brings people to life a bit, I think. And it’s and even if it’s not old people, it could be, I don’t, maybe I’m old, I don’t feel that way. But just like I said, get reconnecting with that boss of mine, having conversations with I, I got back in touch with the headmaster of my high school.

We had a conversation, so again it’s reconnecting with people. Again, for sure I’ve thought about and revisited moments in my life that were not wonderful. And again, that can be really helpful to revisit those moments where things were not great. So I just think it’s ever since as I’ve created lots of courses and they’re generally for the, in the marketing space, this is a new departure for me to do something outside of the digital marketing space.

This is just for anyone and everyone. It just started off as just this little tiny spark of an idea. And what generally happens with me is a spark of an idea either kind of flickers and goes out or it just starts this yeah. And it’s been like that for me with this is I find it so interesting.

I find it so fascinating. And I love like stories man, people, everyone loves stories, right? And stories are great connectors between generations, between cultures from across the world. I can sit down and laugh about something silly that has a thanks, it’s a story about Thanksgiving dinner.

Hey, you could go to Japan, go to China. They may not have Thanksgiving, but they’ll have those holidays and they’ll have the same experience and have the same funny stories, different language, different culture, different place. But stories bind us as humans and their stories endure. But Bible stories, pre Bible stories, ancient Greek stories, ancient Rome story, these stories are still alive.

They connect us with the past, they connect us with the present. Stories like, Hey, I remember reading my little kid, my kids stories of bedtime, they’re such a central part of who we are. And how we connect with others, whether it’s different cultures, different age groups, different, anything, everything like that kind of glue that hold us together.

So when I talk about your awesome life story, it, when I say awesome, whatever you may think, oh yeah, my life wasn’t that interesting. I bet it was, I bet you have some good stories to share. You don’t have to be a celebrity. You don’t have to be a superstar to have it. The story worth sharing.

So yeah, for me, this has just turned into this big roaring project. I, and like I say, everywhere, every time I turn everything I look at this, I just think, Oh man, that’s interesting. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So it’s growing like nuts now. Like for instance, that thing of the retirement homes never occurred to me when I started the project that, that people in homes might be interested in me helping a group of seniors sit around and tell their life stories.

And it was only when I started talking to the kind of administrators and activities people there that I said, Oh, my goodness, this would be wonderful because it addresses so many issues of community of socializing. Of memory, it stimulates memory in older people. It’s really good for older people and their kind of brain health, as it were to, to remember stuff.

It’s really helpful for them. So it never occurred to me that when I started the course but like I say, the deeper I go, the more the applications I find and the more interested I become. And that’s important because as like starting and publishing and selling a course is not always easy.

There are bumps along the road. It never, I always think it’s going to take off, go viral. A gazillion people will buy it on day one. It didn’t happen. So you, there’s a grind. You have to keep on grinding, working at it. And if you don’t love it, it’s really hard that grind.

But if you do love it, then it becomes easier. 

Chris Badgett: So I watched the movie last night the new remake of Moby Dick. And the author had to work hard to get one of the survivors, as an old man who was a kid during the incident, to tell his story. So if you’re a kid, or a partner, spouse, or friend, and you’re trying to encourage The person you care about to that you think this might be really good for them, or you’re just genuinely curious and you want to get those stories captured.

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Chris Badgett: How, what would you say to somebody like that? Or it could be like the retirement home activity coordinator. To encourage somebody to buy into the idea of doing this. 

Nick Usborne: You can’t force it. There’ll be people who are very private and don’t want to. But I would say generally more often than not, we like it when people express interest in us, in our lives.

It’s Oh, you’re interested in me. You’re interested in my life. That’s cool. Let me tell you stuff. And I think particularly if there’s a strong bond there, like if, Hey, I’m just thinking if one of my grandkids asked me something like that, I’d just melt because my grandkids.

So I’d say, sure, of course, go sit here. I’ll tell you some, I’ll tell you some stories. And your dad can tell me to shut up when I tell stories that aren’t appropriate. But it’s I think most of us we like the idea of being asked cause it makes us feel not important, but it makes us it’s like our life matters.

It’s like an endorsement of likes it is. It’s like the subtext is grandpa, your life matters to me. And that, like I said, that makes me melt inside. Yeah, but like I say you can’t force it. Some people are very private and they won’t want to. They won’t want to talk about stuff like that or they’ll have had, a lot of almost insurmountable difficulties in their life.

And they just don’t want to revisit that. You got to respect that say, okay, that’s okay. And if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group setting, like in a retirement home, maybe out of a group of six or seven people, maybe there’ll be one or two who just like to sit there and listen. And that’s okay.

Chris Badgett: What what’s like a realistic timeline for somebody to go through this process, just in general, I know different strokes for different folks, but it’s somebody pulled us off in a couple months, three months. 

Nick Usborne: Yeah, I think you can, I think that’s about right. You can do this in two or three months.

One of the things I say in, I interrupt one of the sessions in my course. I say, okay, hang on. And that’s where I’m talking about the discovery process of finding all this stuff and maybe interviewing some old friends or school teachers or old bosses, or maybe finding, maybe your local paper’s still there and they have archives and you can go back to when you were a teenager or you played on a sports team and you think it might’ve been in the newspaper.

All this kind of discovery stuff. I say don’t rush this. The process of putting together the raw materials for your story, the journey is half the value. Yes, it’ll be great when you’re done and you can share this, but like the real value here is this journey of putting it together. Yeah, so don’t rush it.

Like you want to, and it’s tricky cause I also say don’t slow to a crawl and lose momentum, but don’t feel this like a deadline and enjoy and be present for those times when you’re discovering stuff or you’re interviewing someone, or you’re going out for a beer with someone that you haven’t talked to for 15 years or 20 years.

Don’t rush that stuff. Because even if at the end. You never put this down on paper, which I hope everyone does or on, whatever medium, even if, just the process, just going through the process up to that point has huge value, I think, of exploring, re exploring your life through the stories of your life.

Chris Badgett: It’s almost like a working vacation. It’s fun. But there’s some work aspect to it, but yeah it’s enjoyable. 

Nick Usborne: Yeah. And there’s no deadline. There’s no failing. There’s no, it’s just a, it’s just a journey. And I think like I say, it was, keep trying to think of what was the original spark?

And I can’t remember. I think it was, I think there was just like a page in a book that I read. Months of my life in the middle of last year that I just think it just, that was just the spark and I can’t remember the book and I but I’m pretty sure I was reading a book and I don’t think I finished the book.

I think when I had that spark, I stopped on that page and I thought that, and it wasn’t about life stories. It was about life, but I can’t remember why it sparked the idea. But yeah, sometimes you just never know where it’s going to come from, the idea. 

Chris Badgett: What’s your approach to teaching in the course?

Is it like videos, text assignments? How do you do 

Nick Usborne: it? Yeah, I do kind of video. First of all, I build PowerPoint because I want to show things. I want to illustrate things. And then I go through them. It’s as if I’m doing it. I record it. The course as it stands at the moment is pre recorded. So there’s nine different videos, nine, nine sessions.

And basically it’s me, my voiceover on PowerPoint slides, but at the end of each session, there is a worksheet. So this is part of the kind of teaching process that I go through. And I said, look, listen to his session one. Here’s the worksheet and this stuff for you to do. There’s an assignment that there’s lines where you write stuff down.

So I encourage people to go through, listen to the session, complete the workbook, the worksheet, before they go to the next session. So they’re internalizing and they’re participating because the, this, like with courses, sometimes we get into courses and we just we’re half present, half not, and we’re listening to it.

And then maybe we see something out the window and then maybe we’re halfway through and we don’t even go back for the rest of the course. And that happens a lot. So I don’t want that to happen. That’s why I have these worksheets in between sessions. to get people to actually participate and to internalize what they’ve learned and to build up, in the end, they’re going to have these nine different worksheets as a pile, as a little binder, as it were.

I also have some kind of bonus materials. There’s one of them is a prompting guide, where if you are sitting with your grandmother, How do you prompt her to remember? Hey grandma, like if, when you walked out your door, when you were 10 years old, what did you see when you went to the shops, what shops did you go into?

And what did they have? When you left school, grandpa what was your dream? What did you want to do? And then what happened? And so it’s one of the, one of the downloads, one of the kind of bonus downloads is 52 different prompts to, to actually, and that is those 52 prompts are really interesting.

Cause you can do it to yourself. You can go through them and get and do it yourself. And it’s really interesting to unearth stuff that you haven’t thought about forever. I did it. I said a while back, my wife said, Oh, do you remember that time we went to Pittsburgh? And I said, I’ve never been to Pittsburgh in my life.

She said, sure you do. We went together. I said, we did not. And she had to really prompt me and remind me of the specifics of that trip. And I said, Oh, wow, you’re of course you’re right. She could remember I didn’t. But then I did and it’s like we forget so much and it’s not like part of the prompting and part of this whole process is we, our memories, this back shelf, there’s the back room storage of our memories and there’s front, the front window of our memories.

And we often get lived through life just looking in the front, the store window, the front, the big memories that we hold in the front. But man, we got so many memories stored back there in the shed behind during the, on shelves back there. And that is where some of the amazing stuff is in those memories and stories that we haven’t thought about for a decade or decades.

And that’s what the prompts are for. Is it helps you unearth those and you go, ah, and you go back into the storage room and you pull out the, and it’s Oh man, I haven’t thought about that for so long. I should give that guy a call. So again, it’s enriching. It’s reminding you of the kind of tapestry of your life and the weave of your life.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the free guide on your site. So if somebody wants to check things out, you have sign up with an email address and they get your life story discovery guide. Yeah. What’s in there? 

Nick Usborne: It’s basically, it covers a fair bit of what we talked about today. It’s basically a lot of it is the why.

So the course is the practical hands on step by step that, that free it’s, Hey, it’s 47 pages. It’s not nothing. It’s not like one of those three page freebies the substance there, but what it takes you through a lot of the, why the emotional journey of why this is important, how it can be good for you, how it can strengthen your family.

How it can. Bridge gaps in the family it can bring people together. So a lot of the reasons why in the discovery guide is to discover why you want to do this. And then at the end, if you think, you know what? Yeah, I do want to do this. I’ve discovered the one, then you go into the course and that’s the practical step by step.

Okay. Here’s how we’re going to do it. 

Chris Badgett: So if somebody out there is listening to this and what their curiosity is peaked, or they know someone like, let’s say they have an older parent and they see this opportunity, what would you say to them to encourage them to follow this thread? Get the, get, 

Nick Usborne: Get the guide.

The, anything you’ll pay for the, any payment for that is I’ll send you a series of three or four emails in the days to come. But even the emails are informative rather than pitching. Yeah, take the guide and talk about it. Talk about it with people in the family. Talk about it with, say it could be an elder relative.

Sometimes, I guess I mainly. Speaking to if I’m buying Facebook advertising for this, which I do to get people to see this, I’m targeting the 50 plus 55 plus. But like you say you could be 25 and you’re thinking of your grandma or your parents or that old friend who’s lived next door forever and used to babysit you when you were a kid.

And that seems to be, I’ve mentioned before, I think it seems to be a real motivator for some people. This is almost I’m not ready yet, but I’d love to help. I wish I’d spoken to, I’ve got a friend whose mother. And she had Alzheimer’s it’s not a lot of fun. And she was saying, ah, I wish I’d thought about this for my mom before that, that took hold that I’d captured her story in time.

Because again, like when someone’s diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or dementia or whatever, it is that fear, the horror of everything is lost. Everything in my mind, every memory, everything is gone. So it can be very powerful for them to invite them to let’s capture that. Let’s capture your life story.

So yeah, I’d get the discovery guide. That’s the starting point that, that explores the reasons why. And then you can get the course for yourself if you want to do it for yourself, or you can get it to help, to go through it with an older relative or friend. 

Chris Badgett: And I’ll just say, we don’t have to mention the price because Nick may change it at some point, but it’s very affordable and approachable.

So if you’re intrigued, I’d encourage you to check out yourawesomelifestory. com. Any final words for the people, Nick?

Nick Usborne: If you’re course creators, or you want to create courses do what I did, which is follow the spark, follow the flame. There’s lots of, there’s lots of people who will say, Hey, here are the hot topics. Here’s where you need to be. Here’s where you want to be. That’s okay.

But I, but but I think your greatest work will come and your most successful courses will come out of where it lights a fire inside you. It’s like I say, this is I’m ridiculous. I published a number of courses and I always think on day one, Oh my goodness, this is awesome. A hundred people are going to buy it in the first five minutes and they don’t, but it’s what kind of drives me.

Like I say, if you’re not in love with your topic, it’s really hard to keep going because it is a grind. You have to keep working it. It’s a business. You have to keep working it. So find something you love. You want to share that is important to you that has meaning for you and that you think has deep meaning for other people.

And yeah, now when you invest the time it’s important. It’s rewarding. So yeah, Jeff is something you love with a spark. 

Chris Badgett: I just thought of it as you were talking were to use a course as like the finished product, you could, for example, like I’m thinking about this, if if I went through a prompt hey, what lessons do I wish my kids knew When they’re my age or before they get here.

So they have an easier time or better time or whatever. Why would I teach them? And then is there a story that goes with that? And you can literally like use a core structure, which are literally called life lessons or lessons. They could be life lessons and do that. And then even one, there could be a whole course about finances and money as an example and then another course about love and another course about travel, another course.

Nick Usborne: To the point about the story thing, it’s say, if I say to one of my kids or grandkids, listen to me, I have years of experience. Let me give you some advice. Generally doesn’t work like, Hey, old person, just shush. But if I say, let me tell you a story and the lesson is embedded in the story.

Then that’s something that people want to hear about and that stories are teaching tools, the fair, don’t go into the woods. Cause the big bad wolf, we tell stories to keep our kids safe, don’t, don’t go out after dark into the woods. It’s a scary place.

The wolves will get you. So yeah, stories are fun. Sorry. Rambling. 

Chris Badgett: No, it’s good. It’s good. Yeah. Story is part of teaching. That’s Nick Usborne, yourawesomelifestory. com. Check it out. Get the guide. Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. It’s always a pleasure to have you. I can’t wait to see where this goes as time goes on.

And it’s really providing a valuable service to the world and humanity and people’s. Hearts, minds, and memories. It’s very cool. Like you said, it’s a spark. And the more I look at this project, the bigger that flame keeps getting. It’s a good idea. 

Nick Usborne: Okay. Hey, and we should mention this is built.

I’d love my, the whole thing is built on Lifter LMS. Come on, man. You gotta, we gotta do a bit of promotion. 

Chris Badgett: And Nick is a serial creator. He has many core sites built on lifter help mess. So it’s always fun to see what you do. And I love seeing it when it’s something like this that can really put out a ripple of positive impact in the world.

One of the other things is there’s a lot of kind of negative ripples in the world right now, or all around the world. I love the idea of putting something positive out there as a bit of a counterbalance modest, but just a little thing. Going back, like you said, we’re really focused on the present and the future, and we have our recent window of memory, but there’s a lot of gems back there to go find.

Nick Usborne: Absolutely. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks for coming back on the show, Nick. We really appreciate it. You’re 

Nick Usborne: welcome. Thank you for inviting me.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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