The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage? We’re all told to create landing pages. So why do they fail? The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don’t land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That’s a mistake. And this episode tells you why it’s a mistake and how to fix it. Click here to read: How To Write A Sales Pagehttps://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We've been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop. How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner? Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Click here to read: Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain https://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves a loner. If you’re working alone, you’re just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here’s how to go about the task of winning the game. Click here to read: How To Beat The Resistance Gamehttps://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/

There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work “great”? How do you even know or benchmark “greatness?”. And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart? Click here to read: Good to Greathttps://www.psychotactics.com/good-to-great/

Whenever you run into tips on productivity it’s always this earth shaking advice You’re advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks. Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You’ll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here’s a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well! Click here to read: How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results https://www.psychotactics.com/gentle-productivity/

If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be “risk”. When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there’s a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute? Click here to read: How To Overcome The Hesitation Factor https://www.psychotactics.com/elements-of-risk/

Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we’re not good learners? Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you’re a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there’s no true learning, no true application. A teacher, gets the student to apply the skills. When you’re creating info-products, writing books or articles, this is what needs to be kept in mind. Click to read: Why Learning a New Skill is So Difficult https://www.psychotactics.com/why-clients-struggle/

Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare What if you’re wrong? What if the name isn’t well received? However, there’s a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It’s not the title that matters. It’s the sub-title. Find out why we’ve been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done. -------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. Part 2: The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out. Part 3: How to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles. -------- My friend, Karen, was about to have her first child. As you’d expect, she was a bit apprehensive but also quite joyful. One of the reasons why she was so excited was the whole process of giving a name to her soon-to-be child. She had half a dozen books on “naming the child”. While we were visiting, we had a little conversation about the naming process and she went into a lengthy explanation about how she intended to name the child. Of course, I expected her son to have an interesting name. Several months later when I ran into Karen online, I asked her the name of her son. “Jack”, she said. “Jack?” I responded almost incredulously. “You went through all of those books, and all you could find was, Jack?” “Yes,” she said. “I was going to find a fancy name when I ran into an article that asked me to go to the doorway and call of the name of the kid 20 times in a day. It seemed easy to shout out “Jack”, then something like “Bertrand, so “Jack” it was. And that is how my friend, Karen named her first born. Your “firstborn” might need a slightly different process. Especially if your firstborn is a book – and you are called upon to name the book. This is where we go slightly mad. We’re not really sure how to name our products. Which is why this article is all about learning a structural method that will help you name your products. We will look at books or information products that already exist, and see how they have gone about the process. We will also take a look at what we’re doing at Psychotactics and how even when we understand the concept, we tend to get it wrong. Well, sometimes you can just get lazy. What are we going to cover? 1  Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product 2  The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out? 3 how to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles. All of these three steps are part of the journey that we need to take the name our information product. As always we need to start at the top, and that takes us to the first topic. 1) Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. The list you see below are the successive names given to a single book. The author tried repeatedly to come up with a great name, but these were the names he came up with—despite putting in a great effort. See if you like any of the names. – The Parts Nobody Knows – To Love and Write Well – How Different It Was – With Due Respect – The Eye And the Ear. Have you heard of any of these books? Possibly not, because they never made it to the bookshelf. And the author, a “certain guy” called Ernest Hemingway, died before the book’s title was finalised. So what was the name of the book that made it to the shelves? It’s called “A Moveable Feast”. “A Moveable Feast” caught the attention of the editors and then the readers and became a bestseller (and has stayed high on the ‘books to read’ list). But it could have easily been dead in the water, with a title like “With Due Respect” or “The Eye and the Ear”. As it appears, it’s not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. So how do you name your books? The simple answer is to make it curious. And how do you make it curious? You use both the title and the sub-title to dramatic effect, that’s how. But let’s not start with the title and take on the sub-title instead. In fact, let’s take a few good (and bad examples from the Psychotactics stable itself). As it appears, it’s not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. Title: The Brain Audit Sub-title: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t) So is the title interesting? Yes, it’s interesting at once. We’re terribly interested in anything to do with the brain, and so in a sea of books, a name like The Brain Audit stands out immediately. But that’s where the sub-title comes in. Would you know if The Brain Audit was a medical text or a book on calisthenics? It would be hard to tell, right? If you look up Amazon.com for books that have the term “Brain” in it, you get a range of books including one called “The Brain That Changes Itself”, “Brain Rules”, “Brain on Fire” and you can’t really tell which one is a business book and which one isn’t. And that’s where the sub-title comes into play. So yeah, that sub-title worked. Time to choose another, eh? The second product we take a look at is a course on Uniqueness. At Psychotactics, we have a homestudy version on “how to make your company stand out in a crowded market place”. So what’s the name of the information product? It’s called: Title: Pick One Sub-Title: Getting to Uniqueness Did that sub-title excite you? If the answer “NO” comes to mind, you’re on the right track. So now that we’re decimating the crappy sub-titles, let’s go digging further and find out some more that could do with improvement. Let’s look at a set of three books that were written on the topic of presentations. Title: ‘Black Belt Presentations’ Sub-title: No sub-title. Ugh. In fact, while we’re here, let’s list at least a few of the products and see why some products are easier to sell than others. And why the sub-titles make such a difference. Title: Be Kind, Be Helpful or Begone Sub-title: How To Build A Powerful, Community-Driven Membership Website Title: Attversumption Sub-title: The strategy behind attraction, conversion and consumption Title: Website Components Sub-title: No sub-title. Title: The Secret Life of Testimonials: Sub-title: Simple, Powerful Techniques to Get Better Clients-And Sales Title: The Power of Stories Sub-title: How to Turn Average Stories into Cliff-Hangers Title: Chaos Planning Sub-title: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Title: Client Attractors: Sub-title: How To Write Benefits, Features and Bullets That Speed Up Sales Title: Design Clarity in Minutes Sub-Title: How to put some sanity into your design with some really simple tweaks Title: How Visuals Help Increase Sales Conversion On Your Website Sub-title: No Sub-title. Now as you scan those names, you can quickly tell which of the sub-titles work and which don’t You can also tell that those without sub-titles aren’t well thought through, or definitely hampered by the lack of the sub-title. So let’s just stop for a second and see what we’ve covered: •            That the title matters •            But first we must pay closer attention to the sub-title •            That it’s easy to get lazy or rushed and forget to put in the sub-title •            That some sub-titles don’t work as well as they should Which brings up the question: Is there a simple way to write a sub-title? And the answer is yes. You can indeed create great sub-titles every single time. Let’s find out how. Part 2: What makes a sub-title stand out? So we’re clear. We all put our hearts and souls into creating a title for our books and products—but yes, the sub-title is often the one that draws us in. So how do we go about creating this sub-title? The easiest way is to jump right in and create. So what’s the simplest formula possible? There is no ONE formula. And rightly so, because that would make every sub-title boring. Instead let’s look at just two. Method 1: Headline-type of sub-title Method 2: Problem, solution, target Then let’s head over and pluck out a few bestsellers, shall we? Method 1:  Headline-type of sub-title Let’s first look at what they’re all about and then put in a sub-title that reads just like a headline. a) LEAN IN, by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell: The chief operating officer of Facebook urges women to pursue their careers without ambivalence. Title: Lean In Sub-title given: Women, Work and the Will to Lead Sub-title: How Women Can Forge Ahead In Their Careers Faster Than Ever Before Sub-title: The Untold Story of One Woman’s Career Surge (And How You Can Do It Too) Sub-title  Why Women Need To Pursue Their Careers Without Ambivalence b) THE ONE THING, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan: Narrowing your concentration and becoming more productive. The second book has already done the work for us. Title: The ONE. Sub-title given: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results Sub-title: How to narrow your concentration and become more productive Sub-title: The keys to narrowing concentration and increasing productivity. c) GIVE AND TAKE, by Adam M. Grant: A Wharton professor’s research discloses that success depends on how we interact with others. The third book has a vague sub-title but let’s work on it. Title: Give and take Sub-title given: A revolutionary approach to success Sub-title: How People Interaction Creates a Quicker Road to Success d) THE POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg: A Times reporter’s account of the science behind how we form, and break, habits. And the next two books follow as well. Title: The Power of Habit Sub-title given: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business Sub-title: The Quiet Secret to Making Habits Stick Forever Sub-title: How Habits Rule Us (And How To Break Bad Ones Forever). Sub-title: How to Make Good Habits Out Of Bad Ones Just adding a headline to your sub-title makes the book stand out. It almost doesn’t matter what the title happens to be. Well, not quite true. The title matters, but it’s the sub-title that can be made to do the grunt work.  But writing headlines for your sub-title is not the only way. You can have sub-titles with the familiar formula found in The Brain Audit.  And that is the problem and solution combo. String them together and you can pretty some pretty outstanding sub-titles for your book. If we were to take the subtitles of the book that we have just looked at, and put in the problem-solution formula, you would get some pretty interesting subtitles. Let’s give it a crack, shall we? The total for The Brain Audit is “The Brain Audit” but what is the subtitle? The subtitle has a problem and the solution. It goes like this: “why customers buy (and why they don’t). And that’s a problem and solution strung together. Method 2: Problem, solution, target Let’s look at the subtitles of the books we just brought up and let’s see how they too could work with subtitles that incorporate the problem and solution. a)LEAN IN, by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell: The chief operating officer of Facebook urges women to pursue their careers without ambivalence. Problem: Doubt/Ambivalance Solution: Move ahead Target audience: Women My Journey Through Career-Doubt—And Beyond b) THE ONE THING, by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan: Narrowing your concentration and becoming more productive. Problem: Concentration issues Solution: Beat the issues Target audience: People who have trouble concentrating The art of beating concentration issues (and becoming more productive) c) GIVE AND TAKE, by Adam M. Grant: A Wharton professor’s research discloses that success depends on how we interact with others. Problem: Lack of success Solution: Success through interaction Target audience: People who want to succeed The Hidden Secrets of Interaction (And How Successful People Use Them Well) d) POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg: A Times reporter’s account of the science behind how we form, and break, habits. Problem: Form/break habits Solution: Form/break habits Target audience: People who want to form/break habits How To Turn Bad Habits Into Good—And Make Them Stick As you have just heard, you can quite easily use the problem and the solution to create subtitles. So w hat have we covered so far? We looked at the power of subtitles vs titles. And subtitles pack so much punch. You can create your subtitle by writing a headline or you can use the problem and solution to create a subtitle that is just as effective. However, just to prove it is the subtitle and not exactly the title that does all the grunt work, let’s change the subtitles of some very well known books. Example: Good to Great Good to Great: How to turn your potatoes into twice the size, overnight. Good to Great: The Secret to Non-Boring Garden Landscaping Good to Great: How Indonesia turns out an endless array of badminton champions Good to Great: The Story of Singapore Airlines’ Profitability Good to Great: Why Turkey Is The Second Fastest Growing Economy In The World Good to Great: Why Bacteria Is Winning The War Against AntiBiotics. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to turn your potatoes into twice the size, overnight. Blue Ocean Strategy: The Secret to Non-Boring Garden Landscaping Blue Ocean Strategy: How Indonesia turns out an endless array of badminton champions Blue Ocean Strategy: The Story of Singapore Airlines’ Profitability Blue Ocean Strategy: Why Turkey Is The Second Fastest Growing Economy In The World Blue Ocean Strategy: Why Bacteria Is Winning The War Against AntiBiotics. Of course it won’t work for every single title. For example, if you took the name like The Brain Audit and put any sub-title, it wouldn’t work. But these examples are to show you that the title, for the most part, is not the crazy holy grail that you’re looking for. It’s nice to have a great title. But it’s a better strategy to have an even better sub-title. Which brings us to a moment of utter clarity. The sub-title matters. That’s what really gets the attention of the customer both in the book store, on Amazon or on your website. Without the sub-title, we’re handicapping the book or info product. And yet so many of us (me included) have quite easily placed our emphasis on the title, and ignored the sub-titles. Well, now you know… So is the title of any use after all? Yes it is. But should you go nuts trying to get a great title? No you shouldn’t. The cartooning course we have is called the DaVinci course. Is that a great title? No it’s not. But the greatness comes from its “invisible” sub-title. So what should the sub-title have been? It should have read like this: How to go from non-artist to amazing cartoonist in 6 months (or less). The same applies to our headlines or Article Writing Course that don’t even have titles and yet are booked out months in advance. The promise they bring is what draws the audience to the product/services. And yet, would I ever swap a title like The Brain Audit for something else? Of course not. Not having a great title is not critical for an infoproduct, but once you get one, it’s an invaluable asset. So how do you create your titles? In the past, the titles were today’s sub-titles. – How to stop worrying and start living: Dale Carnegie – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Stephen Covey Then times changed to focus on the subtitle while the title shrunk – Freakonomics – The Tipping Point – Posititioning Some titles come from every day language e.g. the tipping point, positioning, etc. And some are made up e.g. Freakonomics, Strengths Finder. So is there a way to find a title? Yes, if you pay close attention. When you’re in a conversation, pay close attention to what’s being said. Every sentence has the potential for some unusual term or word that could become a book title. e.g. the last sentence has “close attention”, “potential”, “in a conversation”, “conversation”, “what’s being said”. And while you may not have great use for any of those, they are all book titles that can be used. To get book titles from your own field, open up magazines and books related to your field Immediately you’ll see a whole bunch of terms within a book. A management book will yield titles such as “Myth of the Change”, “Cascade”, “burning platform”, “marines take care of marines” etc. In fact I just opened up a management site and the words/titles popped out with amazing regularity. So yes, it’s all around you, these titles. And finding a title isn’t so scary as it once was, because we know that while titles are great, it’s the sub-title that really gets the customer’s attention. So go out there and create your sub-title. Then your title. Summary 1  Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product 2  The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out? 3 how to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles. Next Step: We all want to create profitable products but aren’t sure where to start We hope for some amazing formula, when all you really need are three core questions. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today?  Click here to continue your information products journey: How To Create A Profitable Product (Three Core Questions). https://www.psychotactics.com/create-profitable-product/

How do we get talented? Part 2 of “How To Get Talented” is a bit of a shocker. You realise that talent is only the stuff you can’t do. If everyone can do what you can, then it’s not really a talent. Ok, so that’s the spoiler, but listen or read anyway. ------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Pattern recognition and energy Part 2: How can you achieve a ton of talents Part 3: Is all talent inborn? Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/ ------------ Definition No.2: Talent is merely high speed pattern recognition. What is 11 x 13? 143. What is 11 x 27? Yes, it’s 297. And just for good measure, what’s 11 x 45? If you said 495 in a flash, you’d have the right answer. However, the chances are you were slightly flummoxed by the questions You could clearly see that we were dealing with the 11 times table, but it made no sense whatsoever when you had to multiply these random two digit numbers with 11. And yet a 10-year-old could do it quite quickly. I know this to be true because I teach willing 10-year-olds this simple maths trick. Let’s start at the top, okay? First, let’s look at the numbers. What’s 2 + 7? OK, so take that 9 and stick in the centre, of the 2 and 7. What number do you get? Sure it’s 2-9-7. Now, what’s 11 x 27? It’s 2-9-7. Confused? My brain took a little time to work out the system as well So let’s take a simpler example where you already know the answer. What’s 11 x 12? It’s 132, right? So what we did was take the 1 + 2, and we got 3. We stuck that number 3 in between the 1 and the 2. And we got 1-3-2. Okay, so what’s 11 x 44? 4 + 4 = 8. So that’s 484. What’s 11 x 33? 3 + 3 = 6. So it’s 363. Once you have the pattern, you can pretty much multiply any two digit number by 11 and get an answer in seconds And what you’ve done is acquire a talent. An witty-bitty talent, but a talent nonetheless. And the way we’ve gone about it is to isolate the pattern and then roll it out slowly. At this point, your brain can figure out the pattern no matter what two digit number you multiply with 11. A similar concept applies to just about any skill Take drawing for example. Many, if not most of us, say we draw like a six-year-old. And you know what? You’re right. You draw like a six-year-old because you stopped drawing when you were six. You can walk into any school on the planet, and you’ll find that kids love drawing. Give them a set of crayons, chalk, even a piece of coal, and they’ll be drawing endlessly. But ask them to do maths or grammar, and they look at you like you’re a banana. However, that kid gets a packed lunch and is sent off to school. The years whizz by and those kids are 10. Ask them about grammar, or multiplication tables, and they can give you pretty solid answers. But ask them to draw and notice what happens. They draw like six-year-olds. Talent is about pattern recognition Those kids were given patterns that involved algebra and grammar, and so they picked up on those patterns. Music? Arts? Clay modeling? All the stuff they did right at the start? Well, that’s for babies, isn’t it? And this is how we go about life. We learn or are given patterns, and we dump the others. Or at least put them in cold storage. Some patterns are crucial, so we keep refining them. Take eating with a spoon, for instance. When you were a year old, trying to get a spoon full of mashed potato from the plate to your mouth was a major issue. Given a chance to “do your own thing” the potato mash would be partly on your face, on the ground and the dining room floor would look like a potato war zone. Now you’re able to use a fork, knife and conduct a conversation while trying to look up Facebook on your phone—and all at the same time. Somewhere along the way, pattern recognition kicked in. What seems like a mundane task of eating a potato was once horribly complicated. But given enough time and pattern recognition, you’re now a pro at potato eating. And that’s because all of this pattern recognition is costly in terms of energy Think of it as a mansion with lights. When you’re first learning something new, you have to turn on every light in the house. It takes enormous energy just to do the simplest task. Over time the brain figures out the pattern. Instead of every light, it turns on half, then quarter of the lights. Finally, it probably needs almost negligible energy to do a task you’re familiar with. Take for example the task of walking. You were utterly hopeless at walking when you first started, right? You don’t think much of it now, do this small task for me. Stand up and walk across the room, and say “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, balance, balance, balance.” You’ll make it across the room, but your brain is using up so much energy that it instantly rebels. And it does so because it’s already worked out the pattern. It needs almost no power to get you to walk across that room. All the skills you struggle with are a matter of pattern recognition and pattern execution When you see someone giving an excellent presentation, you wonder how they become such great speakers. And yet, you’re not looking at their feet, are you? If you look at the feet of excellent speakers, they’re not randomly moving around the stage. They’re purposely moving in a triangular shape from one end to the other. When they get to one edge of the triangle, they stop. They scan the audience from one end to the other, thus making eye contact. So without saying a word, a speaker would have to learn how to walk, how to stop, how to make the sweeping eye contact—all elements of pattern recognition. When you look at the speech, it’s a series of items that include the graphics and content on the slides, the structure of the presentation, great stories and examples, and yes, crowd control. If you thought, “hey, I’ll never be as good a speaker as that guy up on stage”, you’re right. You’re right because there are dozens of elements that the brain has to recognise and then implement. Just the walking across the stage might take you a few weeks to master, let alone everything else. But what about those who can pick up patterns instantly? All of us, without exception, pick up patterns very quickly. We do have biases of picking up patterns. Some of us may find reading to be more fruitful than audio, while others may love audio. Some may prefer video and others detest video. Picking up of a pattern relies strongly on the bias, but also on the way the pattern is laid out. A good teacher can get a student to pick up patterns a lot faster than a mediocre teacher that simply doles out information. Even so, some of us recognise patterns faster than others Stephen Wiltshire is a pretty good example of instant pattern recognition. Wiltshire is an autistic British architectural artist. He’s gained fame as he’s able to draw an entire city after just seeing in once. In video after video on YouTube, Stephen draws New York, Rome, London and Singapore after just a single helicopter ride. His work is so precise that he matches every window, pillar, and doorway. And this is the kind of pattern recognition that most of us refer to when we talk about talent. We can’t just waltz into a room, pick up a violin and play complex music. We feel that only talented people can do this. Yet, there’s a downside to being able to do very complex activities almost instantly. Wiltshire, for instance, struggles with everyday activities: like boarding a train or having a long conversation with people. The reality is that we “average” people can achieve a ton of talent in various fields We consider ourselves to be pretty average, but with the right teacher, the right methods and the right group, we can achieve extraordinary levels of talent in diverse fields. There’s no instant hit for us, of course, but we can achieve all of the talents we need and still do everyday activities with ease. The moment the talent or skill is broken down into isolated pockets of learning, we can quickly pick up the talent and become exceedingly good at a skill. Talent is just pattern recognition and pattern execution at high speed And you know it’s a pattern because you can see the works of art. You know a Picasso is a Picasso because Picasso had a style. And what is style? Yup, it’s just science sped up. Picasso may not have been able to explain how his brush work ended up as a piece of art, but the very fact that we recognise it means he used a system, a style that was his own. For a forger to replicate a Picasso, all he needs is the blueprint of the pattern and we’d be duped into buying a very expensive piece of junk. It’s easy to believe that all talent is inborn Yet, almost everything we do today is a learned behaviour. Our languages, the ability to write, speak, walk, dance, cook—they’re all a style; a pattern. And while no doubt there’s something, some hardware we’re born with, the vast majority of what we do is all learned through pattern recognition and execution. Which brings us back to 11 x 22 Yes, the answer is 242. But what about 11 x 29? You carry over the digit because it adds up to 11. So it’s 3-1-9. And one more. What is 11 x 99? Hah, you’ll have to remember that by heart: It’s 1089. See, it’s a pattern. Find a great teacher, who has a good system and a group, and you’ll magically become talented. No doubt practice will be involved, but it’s far less practice than you’d imagine. And the results will be far superior to just plodding around on your own. So we’ve finished two definitions of talent. – Talent is a reduction of errors – Talent is a pattern recognition system. Let’s go to the third part, which will stop you in your tracks a bit. Let’s explore talent from quite another angle: something you can’t do. Definition No.3: It’s only stuff you can’t do. Imagine I told you I was really talented at washing dishes. Okay, how about sharpening pencils, would you consider that a talent? And yet when I say: I’m magnificent at cooking or superb at drawing cartoons, you’re instantly interested, aren’t you? In effect, talent is only something you and I can’t do. If you can wash dishes and I can wash dishes, it’s not a talent. The moment you can do complex maths equations and I can’t, hey, now you’re talented. Look around you and see what you consider to be talented people They’re just people who are doing things you can’t do. They know how to write programs, or can sing well, or dance well. And you can’t do it, so it’s suddenly a talent. I grew up in Mumbai, and when we were out on the street, we’d have kids speaking different languages. I learned about six languages without trying too hard. While I’m not fluent in all those six, I can understand and be understood. If you showed up from a country where the only language of instruction is English, you’d think I was excellent at learning languages. However, on the streets of Mumbai, almost any kid would know more than two-three languages. It’s the same in Europe as well. You’ll find most Europeans on the mainland are fluent in two or three languages. And they don’t think it’s something wonderful. They don’t see it as a unique talent. Now put yourself on the starting blocks of any Olympic sport And almost immediately you see how the competitors consider themselves. They don’t see this vast gulf of talent. Sure, one athlete may hog most of the medals, but it’s not like that athlete is way ahead of the others. They’re just marginally faster, often by a few hundredth of a second. And so are you, by the way. You write slightly better than the next person. Or slightly worse, as the case may be. But there’s one more pretty insidious point we have to cover Let’s say one person can write, draw, cook, dance, sing, take pictures, garden, and ski very well. And let’s say you can’t do any of the above. It seems like you chose the short straw in life, right? That when you were born, somehow you got deprived of all but the most mundane of skills. That somehow the other person can excel in half a dozen competencies, and still continues to “discover” more talents along the way. Surely not one of us is so deprived while another person has such a vast number of abilities. There’s no doubt that we all have different brains, but to have such a high inequality of talents seems utterly bizarre. ”Even so, we’ve come to believe this untruth. Which is where I need to take you down a slight detour of why I feel so passionate about this talent discussion. Back in 2008, I started up a blog on this topic of talent I had to write things down because the more I discussed this issue of talent, the more people brought up objections. And it’s not like they’d stick to a single point either. I’d find the topic would bounce wildly from Michael Phelps, to genetics and everything in between. But it wasn’t enough to write a blog. And so I decided to do something that would prove without a doubt that talent can be acquired in an incredibly short period. The challenge was simple enough If you walk into a cafe and ask: Who’s a writer? Who’s a singer? Who’s a dancer? You’ll get some response. If you were to ask “Who’s a cartoonist?” the place goes quiet. So we decided to start up the cartooning course. It wasn’t about picking people who could draw. Instead, it was quite the opposite. The challenge was to turn everyone into a cartoonist. Notice I didn’t say, “anyone.” I said, “everyone.” There would be no failure Every single person in that cafe would become cartoonists if they joined the course. But of course, I had my “cafe” at 5000bc. And so I offered the course free of charge. Today that course costs over $1000, but back then I wanted to prove that this crazy goal was possible. And if you look at the work that comes out of the cartooning course, you will frankly, be stunned. The same concept needed to be applied to article writing or headlines or copywriting. It wasn’t just about getting one person or two people to be very talented. I wanted to make the training like I got on the streets of Mumbai. Everyone was able to speak “languages.” Everyone had the talent. It’s incredibly hard to believe that talent isn’t inborn We somehow like to believe we’re special, but for the most part, talent is just a reduction of errors. If you find the errors, you can fix them. The fewer errors you make, the better you are at completing a task. Fewer errors result in greater efficiency. Instead of the job just being another mundane task, you’re now able to push your limits. So when I took two days to write an article, I had no energy to do much else. Now I can write over 4000 words in a morning, and I still have the energy to find some great stories and make the article come alive in a way I could never do before. All those errors I used to make back in the year 2000, well, I don’t make many of them anymore. And so hey, I’m a writer. That’s the first point: talent is a reduction of errors. The second point is simply one of understanding how your brain works It’s all about pattern recognition. You probably couldn’t multiply 11 x 24 before today, but now you can. And maybe you can’t write a sales page without banging your head against a wall, but given the pattern, you will. Any skill can be broken down into smaller bits, and you can recreate the pattern. Will that make you Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt? No, it won’t. There are a lot of other reasons that we’re not covering right now. Instead of bringing up objections about why you can’t do something, go out there and find the teacher, find the system, find the group. And understand it’s a matter of recognising the pattern and then executing it. Yes, you can cook food as well as any other accomplished chef. You can draw just as well as anyone. And you can make an outstanding presentation. All the limits lie in not understanding the pattern. Finally, the last definition of talent is a closer look at ourselves in the mirror. How come we got passed up when the next guy got not one but a dozen talents? And how come we consider those gifts to be talents only because we can’t do it. It’s time to ask yourself these hard questions. The concept of inborn talent is a prison. If you believe in innate talent, that’s it; you’re done. You can’t learn any more. You’re stuck forever. Or you can start searching for a teacher, system, and group. And explore a world like never before. Oh, and yes, I am really talented at washing dishes! If you missed Part 1, here is the link:  Rapid Talent (How To Get There and What Holds Us Back) To read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/rapid-talent/ To join 5000bc: https://www.5000bc.com/

Why do others seem more talented than we are?  Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else. Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light. In Part 1 of this episode on talent, you’ll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before). Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/) ----------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Our battle with talented people. Part 2: Is talent a reduction of errors? Part 3: What has “Austin’s Butterfly” got to do with talent. ----------------- 7 miles per second That’s what it takes for a spacecraft to break out of Earth’s orbit. Breaking free of the gravity of Earth and heading into space is called “Escape Velocity” and is easily one of the biggest challenges of space travel. The spacecraft needs an enormous amount of fuel to break free of Earth’s gravity. And yet, that very fuel adds to the weight of the rocket. The more fuel you have, the more thrust you achieve, but the fuel also adds to the weight of the rocket. It’s almost a maddening Catch 22 situation that scientists have been trying to solve for ages. And it also drives us crazy when we look around us and see people who are clearly more talented than us We had this problem in school. Some kids were brilliant at writing and others that excelled in maths. As we grew up, we noticed people who sang better, danced better, are better artists, speakers, pick up languages faster than we could ever imagine. And then we brush it off We believe we were born with certain skills and it’s best to use them to our fullest capacity. The gravity of our situation holds us back. That’s not the way scientists look at gravity. For them, gravity is a challenge. Achieving “escape velocity” is simply a matter of breaking through what holds us back. It’s always about how to go at 7 miles per second in the most efficient manner possible. What you’re about to read is my battle with talent. You may already know of some of my skills. Writing, drawing, teaching, painting, cooking—that’s what you might have seen. You may not know that I’m also an excellent babysitter, dance exceedingly well, learn programs at very high speed and know more than six languages. And the reason I’m stating all of this isn’t to impress you. In fact, it’s the reason why I started studying the science of acquiring talent back around the year 2008. I’d be sitting at the cafe, and someone would come up to me and tell me how I was “talented” at drawing. I’d be on the dance floor, and I’d get a compliment about how well I danced. Compliments are amazing. They were my Jamba Juice. They spurred me on to get a lot better. But they also drove me crazy. It almost seemed like people were suggesting I was born with the skill. And so I started on an uphill climb. To prove that innate talent may not exist. In reality, I don’t care whether it exists at all. But it wasn’t easy to say it out aloud because the very concept of acquiring talent seems improbable. “Not everyone can be Michael Phelps,” they tell me. Not everyone can be Albert Einstein. The funny thing is I love pushback I love it that people kept putting objections in my way because somehow I had to prove beyond any doubt that talent could be acquired. What made the challenge even more interesting was the concept of 10,000 hours. I was determined to prove that you have didn’t need anything remotely close to 10,000 hours to acquire a very high level of skill. But you don’t have to believe me—well, not right away. All I’m asking you to do is listen to three definitions of talent. And then I’ll have made that little dent in your universe. Or at least that’s the theory. So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of talent and see why mere definitions can make you see the world the way I see it. It might even make you a better dancer. Are you ready? Let’s go, then. Definition No.1: A reduction of errors. No matter where you look, you find people who have talents in one area or another—except one. Not one person has innate talent when it comes to riding a bicycle. Definition No.1: A reduction of errors.When you see parents trying to teach kids to ride, they run wildly behind the kid, shouting out instructions that fall on deaf ears. After all the kid is trying desperately to pedal, steer and not go kaboom into the tree. So no one teaches you to ride a bike, and no one (at least no one I know) was born with the ability to ride a bicycle. Assuming you can ride a bicycle, that leaves us with only one conclusion Bike riding has x. no of errors you can make. Errors that involve steering, pedalling, balancing, etc. And slowly but surely, you started eliminating those errors one by one. The more errors you reduced, the less crashed into trees. Eventually, as you ironed out most of the mistakes, you were able to sail away down the road, chattering with your friends. Talent is a reduction of errors When you begin to learn a new skill, you make an enormous number of errors. Like a student driver who’s learning to drive a stick-shift, you lurch back and forth, trying to master the skill. Since your brain has no reference point of the errors, it’s unable to cope, and you continue to find the learning extremely tedious. If you were to ask someone how to learn to drive a car or a bicycle for that matter, they tend to answer in a single word: practice. Yet, practice is not the answer Even deliberate practice is not the answer. Instead, what’s needed is an understanding of errors. When the brain consciously or sub-consciously knows what errors it’s making, it prompts us to take corrective action. Take for example the act of dealing with a hot pan. There’s only one kind of error that’s possible with a hot pan. And yet a two-year-old child may not realise that glaring error and head right for the pan. But once we’re aware of the mistake, we take scrupulous care to avoid hot pans. We also avoid stepping in dog poo, potholes, and closed doors. The trick to learning, or talent, isn’t just in practice or deliberate practice. Instead, it’s about understanding the errors. Once you understand the errors, you are closer to fixing them. Once you’ve reduced or eliminated the errors, you effectively are talented. An excellent example of error fixing is the website building software called Dreamweaver If you were to open up Dreamweaver today, you’d find the option of viewing a website in two different modes. You could see the website in HTML on the left-hand pane, while simultaneously seeing the graphical view of your site on the right. Even if you were completely oblivious about HTML code, all you’d need to do is open up a perfectly good looking website in Dreamweaver. Then head into the HTML pane, and make a single change. You’d immediately see the change reflected on the right-hand side. Immediately your brain would go into “hot pan” mode, recognising the error. You may run into hot pans in the future, but at least you know better because you’ve learned from your mistake. Many of us believe that talent is either inborn or acquired by practice Instead, it’s acquired by a reduction of errors. Everything you do today had a huge error rate at one point in your life. Addition, subtraction, spelling and grammar were all riddled with errors. Some people you may know make mistakes such as spelling. They spell “you’re” as “your” or “pique” as “peak.” When you see these mistakes, you experiencing a situation where the person has not learned to spot and correct the error. You can’t fix a mistake unless you know you’re making one in the first place. Take for instance my niece, Marsha When Marsha was just three years old she came to visit us in New Zealand for the first time. At the time, her speech was a bit garbled, like most three-year-olds. Even so, one of the letters that foxed her was the letter “r.” Wherever “r” was prominent, she’d substitute it with a “y.” So “road” became “yoad,” and “room” became “yoom.” And of course, we only ever “yolled in the gyass” (that’s “rolled in the grass”). If you tried to point out that she was pronouncing “r” as “y,” she would look at you with puzzlement. In her brain “r” sounded like “y.” Then one day I decided to speak exactly like her. I didn’t say “road,” I said “yoad.” I didn’t say “grass,” I said “gyass.” Marsha didn’t say anything, or if she did, she probably said it in her garbled method. But within two days, she was pronouncing the “r” perfectly. Her brain, it seems, was able to detect the error when the word was said incorrectly. And within days, and without any training, she was able to fix the problem. This isn’t to say that all learning is made through trial and error The brain is a pattern-recognition system and will learn efficiently enough by just copying patterns. It’s why we learn to speak a language, then adopt the accent of a parent and then change our accents depending on where we go to school. A good chunk of learning is purely pattern recognition. What holds us back from learning a skill like dancing, cooking or drawing, isn’t pattern recognition, but knowing what we’re doing wrong. There’s a video online called “Austin’s Butterfly.” It shows a group of very young children appraising the work of one of their classmates. Austin, who’s probably in first grade, and has just drawn a butterfly. There’s only one problem. The Tiger Swallowtail butterfly looks amateurish, and the kids know it. At that tender age, they’re not about to let Austin get away with such a terrible piece of art. Then something quite unusual happens. The teacher takes over and asks the kids to give feedback One by one they pipe up with their critiques, so that Austin can take a crack at the second draft. They point to the angles, the wings, making the wings of the butterfly more pointy. They go on, and on, and the illustration improves with every draft. Six drafts later, the butterfly looks like something you’d find in a science book. The finished butterfly is so stunning that anyone—you, me, anyone—would be proud to call the illustration our own. What’s at work is simply a reduction of errors This article isn’t about becoming Michael Phelps or Muhammad Ali. We’re all tempted to diverge into why we’re not winning gold medals by the dozen at the Olympics. And yet, even at that level of super-heroes, there’s only one gold medal winner. Why is this so? In the Olympic pool, Phelps is often only one-hundredth of a second faster than his rival. That’s hardly an advantage. The only difference is that Phelps is committing fewer errors. And just for the record, Phelps too was beaten by a much shorter, stockier swimmer from Singapore. On that particular day, in that particular race in the Rio Olympic Games, Joseph Schooling made fewer errors. Talent is merely a reduction of errors. When you reduce the errors, you get talented. But that’s only the first definition. But what of those who seem innately talented? They do things that we could never hope to do. In the next section, we look at the second definition of talent. Where talent is just pattern-recognition at high speed. (Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/)) Continue reading or listening here: Part 2:  Three Definitions of Talent—And Why They’ll Help You Understand Yourself Better Part 2 The listen: http://traffic.libsyn.com/psychotactics/118b_-_Rapid_Talent_How_To_Get_There_and_What_Holds_Us_Back.mp3 To read the article: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/