The Three Month Vacation Podcast

What's wrong with this statement? Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you’ll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Imagine you’re a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you’re the most popular band in the whole world. You’ve sold over 200 million records. You’re in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can’t get a job. Speaker 2: He’s the only surviving member of one of the 20th century’s greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he’s about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they’ve earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It’s not like he needs the money or the fame, because they’re the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, “We weren’t on the charts. We were the charts.” In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that’s not the point. “I have to keep this music alive,” says Gibb. To me, that’s what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren’t really looking for this magic pill. We’re not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we’re trying to do is keep our music alive. We’re trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff’s really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles’ fame, John Lennon said, “Work is life, you know, and without it there’s only uncertainty and unhappiness.” When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I’ve ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn’t open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he’s preparing the next day’s meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It’s different every single day. It’s a big surprise, and it’s always amazing. Today I’m going to talk to you about three myths about business. We’ve run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I’m going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they’re important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that’s really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That’s what we’ll cover in today’s episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That’s myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you don’t need a vacation from. Let’s start off with the first myth, which is you have to grow. Once a year, we have a really important meeting at Psychotactics. My wife Renuka and I meet with our accountant Steve, and we go over our accounts. We look at how much money we made in the year. How much are our profits? What are the expenses? All the stuff that you do with an accountant before you sign off everything. We’re in 2015, but when I look at the accounts, it looks exactly as it did in 2007. 2007 was a really good year. We earned twice, maybe thrice as much as we needed. Of course a third goes to the government. That’s just what you do; you pay tax. Even so, you had twice as much as you needed, and our needs are not much. We take our breaks. We go on vacation. We buy little goodies here and there, but we’re not flash people. We don’t have the flashiest car. We don’t fly business; we always friendly economy. We keep our expenses under control. But even so, having twice as much as you need, that’s quite a lot. The way that a lot of businesses go about this situation is to say let’s double it, let’s triple it. Here’s what I’m telling you. You don’t have to double it. You don’t have to triple it. You don’t have to enter that rat race. All you have to do is stay comfortable. That was your goal in the first place. Your goal as a business owner was to start up a business, to have control over your life, and be comfortable. It was not to struggle anymore. It was never to double and triple your income. In fact, when you read the stories of business owners that have doubled and tripled, and I don’t know, quadrupled, quintupled their income, you find that there is a huge sacrifice. That sacrifice is their family, their life, their health, everything else. When people talk about all of the extra stuff, the extra money that comes in, the extra fame, they don’t talk about that part until a lot later when they’re doing their memoir. The reality is you have to double or triple nothing. When we look at our list, for instance, our list grew from 200-300 people. Now there are 37,000 people. It might seem quite small when you think about it, because we’ve been around since 2002, to have only 37,000 people. I know it sounds like a lot if you don’t have 37,000 people, but if you’ve been around since 2002, you should have 350,000 people. Here’s the reality. Those 37,000 people don’t open the newsletter. Maybe 4 or 5,000 people open the newsletter at any given point in time. This is a reality. Out of those 4 or 5,000 people, probably 400 people generate more than 90% of our income. Most of them are our members at 5000bc. At this point, this whole message seems very conflicting, even hypocritical, because what we’re saying is we’re very comfortable. We are earning thrice as much as we need. We’ve got this huge list. I’m saying to you, don’t do that. Don’t go crazy over stuff. We could have had a list of 350,000 people. We could have ten times the income. What would we do with it? How many sacrifices would we have to make to just do that kind of stuff. Instead, the sacrifice comes from other places. This is where the growth really matters. When you look at many of the products at Psychotactics, you will find that they have been polished over time. When you look at The Brain Audit, it started with version 1, and then version 2, and then version 3, and then 3.2. that’s where we grow exponentially. When you look at the courses, they improve by 10% or 15% every year. How do we know this? Because we get feedback. Every course has one full day of feedback where clients tell us what we did wrong and how to fix it. We have to fix it, and that takes a lot of time. There there is the growth. We still take exactly the same number of clients for every course as we’ve always done. We never exceed 25. If you’re in a workshop, it’s never 30. There is never this need to continuously grow and grow bigger, and grow fatter, and grow … I don’t know. There is no need. The need is in making magic, in getting your work better. Why is this need so important? Because you as a person, you feel satisfied. You feel wow, my work has got better over the years. You’re fixing it and it’s improving and it’s evolving. Then you look at your clients and see that they are achieving these skills. Their business is growing. They’re more satisfied. They’re taking more vacations. You think, my mission is on its way. It’s not finished. It’s on its way. The benchmark needn’t be the fame and the benchmark needn’t be the money, and the benchmark needn’t be the growth. That’s one of the first myths that I want to take apart. Because almost every book out there is talking about something quite the opposite. In fact, yesterday I was on Facebook and there it was again: double your income, lessen your work. No, your work is interesting. Your vacations are interesting. I get the point. You can’t sell a book that says stay stagnant with your income. Stay stagnant with your revenue. Stay stagnant with your clients. It’s not going to sell. Maybe it will, I don’t know, but the point is it’s a myth. You have to be satisfied first. Your work has to bring great satisfaction and you have to be comfortable. That’s all that really is required from you as a small business. Let the Apple and the Google and all those big companies do whatever it is that they want to do. Let them double and triple and do whatever they want to do. That’s probably not for you. If you’re the person that enjoys your family time, and enjoys your life, and enjoys the little things, then this is how you go about it. Because, as we saw with the Bee Gees and Barry Gibb, the fame didn’t make that much of a difference. It made a difference, but at the end of the day, it’s about keeping the music alive. It’s about keeping the magic alive. That brings us to the end of the first part. Now we go to the second myth, which is things get easier. Back in the year 2000, if you went to a site called millionbucks.co.nz, you would find our site. Yes, I’m embarrassed by the name, but that was what I wanted to do right at the start. I wanted to grow the business, make a million bucks, do all the stuff that we’re told we are supposed to do. Unfortunately, no one, or very few people were making money online at that point in time. The online space was not seen as some place where you could go and by stuff. It was always about information and sharing that information. It’s not until 2002 that we launched Psychotactics. That’s when we sold our first copy of The Brain Audit. That was a big surprise. We were forced to setup our credit card system by someone else who kicked us into doing it. Then someone showed up and bought the first copy, took us completely by surprise. Then my wife Renuka would do a happy dance. She would get up from her chair and do a dance in the room. Then of course, as the months passed, we would get some more sales, and every time a sale came she would do a happy dance. It does get to the point where you can’t dance anymore and you have to sit down and do your work. You also buy into this idea that things will get easier. Because when we started out, we were working five, six, seven days a week. I realise there are only seven days in a week. But we were working all the time. We thought things will get easier, and they have got easier. But wait a second, we still put in five full days. We take the weekend off now but we still put in five full days, so how much easier has it got? The point is that if you want to do superb work, things don’t get easier. Because you’re always making it somehow better. You’re always learning. You’re always getting feedback, and feedback kills you. Because feedback tells you that your work isn’t as superb as you think. That dish that you just cooked, that you’ve been raving about, that you think everyone should praise you for, it’s too oily. There’s too much salt in it. Or maybe there’s just over the top salt and it tastes good but that’s too much salt for human consumption. You cannot take that feedback because that feedback means that you have to fix something. Clients will come back right after we’ve written a book and they’ll say, “You should fix this part or you should move that part.” They’ll get onto our courses and they’ll start to move things around. They’ll suggest different types of technology. We have to listen. All of that listening means all of that doing, and doing means that things never get easier. It’s like the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. They say they start painting at one end and by the time they get to the other end, they have to paint it again. I don’t know if the story is true, but that’s approximately what your business is going to be like. It’s going to have lots of ups and downs, but more importantly, it’s not going to get easier. If you want to improve your work, if you want to make it magic, you’re going to get that feedback. You’re going to ask for that feedback and you’re going to get that feedback, and you’re going to have to fix things. When you fix things, it’s work. When you create new stuff, it’s work. All of this work brings an enormous amount of satisfaction. I can look back at a lot of the things that we’ve done, and if it weren’t for the clients, I wouldn’t have done it. If it weren’t for the deadlines, I wouldn’t have done it. But all of it is work. You look at the storytelling workshop that we’re doing now in Nashville and Amsterdam. I would never have written the notes. I’ve written a series on storytelling. It’s available as a book. But this is more comprehensive. This is more in-depth. I’ve had to spend weeks working it out. I sit at the café looking pensive, drinking my coffee. Then it’s work. To me, it never gets easier, because you’re always trying to explore that depth, as it were. You’re trying to get that magic. You’re trying to keep that music going. We all start out with this dream of sitting on the beach and doing nothing. That’s not how the brain works and that’s not how the body works. In fact, if we sat at the beach and did nothing, we’d soon be a vegetable in no time at all. If we don’t do our daily walks, and we don’t exercise, and we don’t meditate, and we don’t do all the stuff that we’re supposed to do, we don’t do all this “work,” there’s no satisfaction in life. Today I can write an article in 45 minutes. I can do the podcast. I can do webinars. I can do a lot of stuff. What happens is you get much faster and better at doing stuff, and you want to get faster and better all the time because it improvements your work. You put more cartoons in the books. You tweak the workshops. You do stuff that only brings more work. Of course that’s why you need the vacations as well. Because you need to wind down. You need the weekends to wind down. That’s really how life continues. It’s not about the beach. The beach, that’s vacation time. There’s a separate time for it. The third myth is that vacation is the enemy and work is everything. Because we’ve been talking about work, haven’t we? Let’s look at this third myth, which is that vacation is the enemy. But is vacation really the enemy? It seems like it, doesn’t it? Because wherever you go on Facebook or on the internet, you run into this little saying by Seth Godin, and it says, “Instead of wondering where your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense to have a great life and you don’t need a vacation. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Because when you look at that saying, what it’s saying is that your job, whatever you’re doing right now, or your business, whatever you’re doing right now, is so tedious that you’re not enjoying yourself. It’s saying that the enemy is that bad job, that unsatisfying job, that unsatisfying business that you’re running right now. And that you need to find something that is satisfying. That’s the enemy. Look what happened here. Vacation came in. Vacation came in as the enemy when vacation is not the enemy at all. That bad job, that’s the enemy. The good job, that’s your friend. Vacation is the time where you get better at what you do. You take time off just like a flight takes off, and it lands, and it has to refuel, and it has to be maintained. That’s what vacation is all about. It’s about going to new lands, learning about stuff, learning the different types of food, enjoying yourself, reading, sleeping, drinking, doing stuff that we did as kids. When we grew up, we weren’t working all the time. We’d go to school and then we had vacations. Vacations weren’t the enemy back then. How did they become the enemy all of a sudden? It’s because we’ve got this crappy job or we’re doing this business that is deeply unsatisfying. Then you have a statement like this, which is probably just off the cuff, but it has made vacations the enemy, and vacations are not the enemy at all. They are the friend. That’s myth number three, that you don’t need vacations. You need the break. Think of yourself back when you were a kid and you just enjoyed the time of absolute nothingness. You would like to get that again, wouldn’t you? What’s the point of sitting at work the whole time? There is really no point. You can fool yourself, but the reason why we sit at work the whole time is because we get what is called work momentum. We work and we work and we work and we work, and then that momentum takes us into more work. The moment we go on vacation, we’re thinking of what? Work of course, because that’s what we’ve been doing for so long. Then when you go on a vacation, if you have enough time on your vacation, you get into vacation momentum, and then you get more and more relaxed. Then when you get back to work, it’s very hard to get back to work. This management is important, this management of work and life. It’s important not to just take anything you see on Facebook, this nice little phrase, just because it came from Seth Godin or some other guru, and then take it at face value. You want to deconstruct it and understand why you did things the way you did. You want to see it from your perspective as a human being. You want to see it how you were when you were a child. Because vacations are like a drug. Once you take vacations, work becomes so much more satisfying. Okay, I’ll stop ranting and raving. This brings us to the end of the episode. What have we covered in this episode? We covered three things. The first thing we covered was this factor of doubling and tripling your income, and your customers. At Psychotactics we’ve grown organically. We’ve just done things and the list has grown to quite a sizeable number, but it’s very slow. It does matter. If you do what you love and you do it really well, and you will over time, then you will find that there are clients and there’s enough revenue, and you live a very comfortable life. You’re spending time with your family. You’re doing things that you really want. That’s what’s important. That takes us to the second myth, and that is that life doesn’t get easier. It gets easier if you do nothing with your work, if you don’t take feedback, if you’re not big enough to take that feedback. Because most of us are insecure and we feel like someone is attacking us when they give feedback, so we don’t ask for feedback. We ask for praise all the time. But praise doesn’t improve your work so much; feedback does. When you get that feedback, you have to do some more work. Of course that takes more time, and so things don’t always get easier. You just get better at it and your work gets better, but never easier. The final thing is that vacation is not the enemy. It has never been the enemy. We’ve made it the enemy because of crazy sayings that float around the internet. When you look into your childhood and your early years, vacation has always been your friend. You’ve just forgotten the friend and decided to adopt another friend, who’s a workaholic. Well, get rid of the workaholic and go back to your childhood. Go back to your young years and you’ll see that it’s a lot more fun. That brings us to the end of this episode. What’s the one thing that we can do today? Well this episode was not quite the things to do episode, but even so, one of the things that you can do today is make more work for yourself. Whether it’s in your personal life, the hobbies that you have, or whether it’s in work, you want to ask for feedback. You want to ask people to tell you what you can fix. Stop asking for so much praise. The praise is important, but the feedback is just as important. Create a little more work for yourself and then take a vacation. Because, as Barry Gibb said, you want to keep the music alive. When you listen to this podcast, we’re likely to be on vacation. We’re going to Morocco. Our trip is across the United States, then to Europe, then to Africa, then to Asia, and then back to New Zealand. Amsterdam is one of our favorite cities on the planet, and after our trip Nashville we’re going to be in Amsterdam for quite a while before heading to Morocco. It’s going to be fun in Morocco. No tourists because it’s not as hot this time of year. We’re going to be at a seaside place, really nice place, do nothing, just relax, just paint, eat, drink and sleep. The reason we’re headed back to Auckland in a bit of a hurry is because Auckland is amazing at this time of the year. It’s summer; there’s no one in the city. We go for long walks. When we get back after our vacation, we’re going to take another month off until February. That’s when we get back to work. If what I’m describing to you sounds so unreal, then remember that it was unreal for us as well. We decided that this is what we want to do. We want to take time off. We want to take weekends off. We put these things into place, and that’s what you should do as well. That’s exactly what the next episode is about. It’s about goal setting, but goal setting our way, and you would expect it to be different, so listen to it and tell your friends about it. If you haven’t given us a rating on iTunes, then please do so. If you would like to give us a one-star rating or a two-star rating, that’s fine. But give us a rating. If you haven’t done that already, go to iTunes, give us a rating, and total your friends about the Three Month Vacation. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Still reading? Find out—The Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/

What is the meaning of life? This utterly vast and philosophical question pops into our lives with amazing frequency. But is it the right question to ask? What if we move the words around a bit and asked another question. Like: What gives your life meaning? Hmm, that changes things a bit doesn't it? And even when we change the words, we may still move towards the specific. So why does the abstract help more? Find out in this episode. http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/ ---------------------------   ------- The Transcript What gives your life meaning? It was 6:20 AM. I was close to the beach, halfway through my walk, listening to this podcast on Transom.org. There was this reporter who was asking older people how they went through their lives. They were 100 years old. She started out with this question, which was: What is the meaning of life? I’ve grappled with this question before, and it sounds very philosophical, but then somewhere in the middle, the question changed. Those words just interchanged somehow and it became: What gives your life meaning? I had to stop. I had to stop on the road just to absorb what that meant. Just by that little interplay in the words, suddenly the whole sentence, the whole construct changed. It was amazing to me. As you tend to do, you tend to try to answer the questions. I tried to think of the people in my life and I tried to think of the things that I do. Then I realized I was going about it the wrong way. In today’s podcast we’re going to cover three elements as always, but the way I’m going to cover it is, I’m going to talk about me me me. I’m going to talk about the three things that give my life meaning and why I approached it the wrong way. But I think it is the way that we need to approach it. Of course you might choose to borrow these, or you might choose to bring up your own three elements, but this is the way I think that you’ve got to approach the question: What gives your life meaning? Part 1: Space I think the right way to approach it is to go through an abstract sort of thinking. The three things that give my life meaning are space, deadline, and elegance. Let’s start out with the first one, which is the factor of space. About a month ago, it was August in New Zealand. Well, it was August everywhere, but it’s wintertime here in New Zealand. I had this little piece of paper in my pocket. I’d been carrying it in my wallet for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. This piece of paper had been given to me by my doctor. I’d done my annual checkup the year before and I was supposed to get the blood test done. I had been procrastinating for quite a while, as you can tell. That day I decided I’m going to park the car and I’m going to walk to the lab and get the blood test done. I wasn’t expecting anything. I’d been walking every day. I’d been eating sensibly, I think, drinking sensibly. Yet, the very next night I got some news from my doctor. He said, “Your cholesterol is high.” I went and looked it up, and I found that there was no real linkage to what you eat and cholesterol, but there is a very distinct relationship between stress and everything, not just stress and cholesterol but stress and everything. That is when I started taking the weekends off. Now we fool ourselves. We say we’re taking the weekend off but we check email and we work for a couple of hours, or do this and do that. Suddenly, the weekend is not really off. I found this to be true for me. I used to get to work, even on the weekend, at 4 AM because I wake up at that time. Before I knew it, it was 9:00, 10:00. I put in five or six hours on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Of course I had my excuses. The podcast takes so much time, and we’re doing this course, and I have to write this book. When I got this report, I suddenly realised the importance of space. I realised that there is no point in me doing this stuff on a consistent basis and driving myself crazy, and that the weekend was invented to give us space. Now we take three months off, and you know that, but these minor breaks become very major breaks on the weekend. I had to find a practical use for this, because at the same time we have courses going on, like we have the headline course going on. Now our courses are not about just information. They’re about practical usage. Clients will come in five days a week and they’ll do their assignment every single day. This is a problem for me, because in the US it’s Friday, but here in New Zealand it’s Saturday. That means I have to look at the assignment on a Saturday. That’s what I was doing. I convinced myself it was only going to be a couple hours here or there. I had to then go to all the participants and say, “I’m going to take the weekend off, but my weekend, is it okay if I take it off?” I had to take their permission. No one had a problem. I don’t know I was expecting that they would have a problem, but no one had a problem. This is the concept of space. I’ve had to use this concept of space over and over and over again. Every time, it drives me crazy when I don’t. For instance, now I’m preparing for the storytelling workshop and I have to write the notes and do the slides. I have to create this space. I have to go away from the office and sit in a space that is quieter and less disturbing, and then work through that. This factor of space had an effect that I didn’t expect. Whenever you’re in any business, you’re always going to be slightly envious of someone else. If you’re a writer you’re going to be envious of other writers. If you’re a dancer you’re going to be envious of other dancers. It’s just natural human behaviour. Now a lot of people interview on their podcasts. Once we finish what we’re covering, they will talk to me just casually. Occasionally someone will say, “Oh, I’m so excited. We’ve just finished 1.8 downloads,” or, “Oh, we’ve got 5,000 more subscribers.” This used to drive me not crazy, but you think about it. You think, how come? We’re putting in as much effort into this podcast. How come? The question changed the moment I realized that space was important to me, the moment I realised that weekends were important to me. I started asking myself, are you getting the weekend off? I’d listen to that person saying that they made so much more money or they got so many subscribers. I couldn’t get myself to be envious. This was a change for me. This was a big change for me, because I thought that somehow that would never go away. The space became the benchmark. It was no no no, this is more important to me than the money. It’s more important to me than your subscribers or your downloads. Having that space allows me to think and relax. I have not felt this way, like I’m feeling right now, in a very, very long time. It’s taken me about a month to slow down completely, as in to feel really relaxed. It’s just because of space. This takes us to the second element, which is in direct contrast to space and quiet. That is deadline. Part 2: Deadline In 2014, we had one of the most harrowing years of our lives. It wasn’t harrowing personally, but professionally it was a real pain. That was because we had hacker attacks. It first surfaced on psychotactics.com. Now that is a very popular site, and for over a decade it has been in the top 100,000 Alexa ratings. It’s natural that hackers like that site. We put a little Band-Aid on the system and we fixed it, but they came back, and they came back, and they came back. They wouldn’t stop until the entire website had to be completely reorganised and rebuilt from the ground up. Then after that, they went after 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. They did the same thing. Then they went after the training site, which is training.brainaudit.com. You can just tell how frustrating this is. You’re going about your business as passively as possible, trying to keep your head above water, and these hacker attacks continue to come and disrupt your life and drive you crazy. When I think about it, the hacker attacks were the best thing that happened to us because they gave us a sense of deadline. When we think of deadline, we only think of writing books or an article or finishing this project, but the hacker attacks were so cool. They forced us to do what we hadn’t been doing for several years. We’d been putting off tidying up the website and making it just resistant to these fun-filled creeps. They came there and they went through the system, and then we had to pull up our socks. We just had to do whatever we had to do. This is the beauty of deadlines. A lot of people consider me to be a pretty crazy person, as in I’m doing a lot of projects. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as a very lazy person. I see myself as someone who loves to lie on the sofa and get a lot of that space and not a lot of deadline. Yet, without the deadline nothing happens. All the books that you read on Psychotactics, starting withThe Brain Audit, they were written because someone forced me to do it. The cartooning course, I didn’t want to do it. Someone said, “Oh no no, you have to do this. I’ve tried all the cartooning courses. They don’t work for me.” I’ve written a book on storytelling, but to do the course was something completely different. I’m discovering elements of storytelling that I didn’t know existed, or I’m discovering depths that I didn’t know existed. Of course it’s frustrating to have to build a whole course from nothing, to write notes, to create slides, to get all the event venue, to get everyone to sign up. We could do without it, but putting that deadline in place gives my life a lot of meaning because it enhances what I do and it forces me to do it by a specific point in time. Take this podcast for example. In October we’re going to Australia to Uluru. For those of you that don’t know, this is Ayer’s Rock, that big red rock in the middle of Australia. This brings up its own set of deadlines, which is I have to write extra newsletters. I have to put in extra vanishing reports for 5000bc, and of course podcasts. I have to do more of these podcasts so that it covers all of October. Then in December we’re going to Morocco. I know, I know, it’s a hard life. The is that the deadline brings meaning to my life. Without the deadline I wouldn’t achieve as much as I do. Those creeps, those hackers, I wish I could send them chocolate, like howwe send our clients chocolate. Because they made such a difference to my life. They brought in this deadline, this “you have to do this right now.” It’s made our life different and I would say a lot better. The first thing that we talked about was space, and having the space creates so much of quiet in your life, and of course a lot less stress. The second thing is this factor of deadline, which forces you to rush, rush and create that stress. They both coexist together just like music. There is quiet in music and there is this huge flurry of notes. They both have to be that way because that’s what makes music. This takes us to the third element, which is one of elegance. Part 3: Elegance Now I thought about it a lot. Why elegance? Why not simplicity? Simplicity is so difficult. Why elegance? In 1990 I was still living in India. A pen panel from the United States came across. She was there for a couple of weeks. She created a deadline of sorts for me. I hadn’t seen a lot of India at that point in time and she wanted to see India, so we booked a trip. We got to the Taj Mahal. Now by this point in time I wasn’t doing very well with this pen panel. When I was in university we were sending each other letters, ten pages, 12 pages, really long letters. It seemed like we would get along fine with each other. Yet, the moment she landed that wasn’t the case at all. Something about her drove me crazy. Something about me drove her crazy. By the time we had reached Agra, which is where the Taj Mahal is located, we were pretty much going our own ways. She’d set out later, but me, I wake up early in the morning. I decided one day to go to the Taj Mahal as early as possible. There was this huge fog that was in front of the Taj Mahal. I couldn’t see it until I was very close, and it was amazing. It was stunning beyond my understanding. I’ve seen thousands of pictures of it over the years, but nothing came close to standing there right in front of it in that fog. As I got close to it, what struck me was the elegance. It was just so beautiful. It was simple. There wasn’t anything fancy about it. Sure, it was big, it was really big, bigger than I ever imagined, but elegant. It was so elegant. As we’ve traveled the world, we’ve run into places like Japan. When you buy something in Japan, it’s amazing. It’s like you never want to open it. You can buy the smallest thing in Japan and they put it in this little box and this little wrapping. Then they put this ribbon on it. Everything in Japan is so beautifully packaged that you never feel like opening it. There is this elegance to it. It’s not just thrown at you. As I started to be more aware of the world around me, it struck me that there are three ways to do pretty much anything. When you look around you, you see stuff that’s really crappy. We don’t want to go there because that’s just crappy and sloppy. That’s just how it is. Then you go to the next stage, which is where it’s simple. When I look at a book on Kindle, it’s simple. There’s just text. It’s been thrown in Microsoft Word. It’s out there, nothing to it. Then you look at something’s that’s elegant and you know that someone has spent some time and effort and simplified it so it looks beautiful and it reads beautiful. The words work together and the pictures work together. Suddenly you have this feeling of the Taj Mahal. It’s beautiful. It’s a monument. There are thousands of monuments in the world, but some stand out for their sheer elegance. To me, that’s my third principle, that when I create this podcast I somehow have to be dissatisfied with it. I’m happy, but I still want to improve it. That quest for improvement becomes quest for elegance. The best example of elegance is a software program, because when you look at a software program it comes out as slightly crappy. You have version one and it’s not so great. Then version two and it’s a little better. Then it gets bigger and more bloated and it stops being elegant. Now you have to improve things without making it bloated and terrible. You have to bring in elegance. That is the thing that gives my life meaning: to create information, or to create product, or to create a cartoon, or to do anything that is more elegant. The beauty of elegance is that sometimes it doesn’t get noticed, like when you’re watching a movie and there’s this music that enhances the movie and you don’t notice the music. That is elegance: that feeling of creating something that’s so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that no one notices it, as long as you know. Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. I know it was about me, but I think it resonates with you as well. To me, the most important things, the things that give my life meaning, we could summarise them with three words, and that is space, and deadline, and elegance. Your three words might be similar, they might be different, but I think we have to stop asking ourselves what is the meaning of life, because that question is too big. Instead, it’s what gives our life meaning. Then bring it down to this whole abstract feeling. I think that’s the one thing you can do today. I think you can just sit down and write down these three terms on paper and start to think about it. What are three things that give your life meaning? Because even hackers can give your life meaning. So how can be solve the eternal problem—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning? Especially when Chaos hits us everyday. Click here to find out—Why and how to make chaos your friend. http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos-planning

When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/100 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Concept of Consumption Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources 5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly Goodies: How to design a visual “yes-yes” pricing grid for all your products The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don’t -------------------- The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?” Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.” That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product. What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Part 1: The Concept of Consumption The first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption. In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix. Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference. In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical. When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time. What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline. In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something. When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?” That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect. Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower. That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section. Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Let’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista. Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee. The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it. Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness. When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried. That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content. Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on. That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product. Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain As you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away. You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain. I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore. Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff. Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample. Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future? Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product. Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right? What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you’re giving away and see is it built for consumption. Can they go from A to B to C and then have that superpower? If no, then you’re just giving information. We don’t need more information. We’re done with information. Just give me some skill that I can sort out in the next ten minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, whatever, but quickly. We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be. Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)    

When you start writing articles, you get advice from all sides. But there's advice you don't want to hear. It's advice that goes against the grain. And yet, it's this advice that forms the hallmark of great writing. So how do you get from average to great? You take the road less-taken. It's harder and yet far more satisfying. Here's advice you probably don't want to hear. --------------- A friend wrote to me today and asked me what seemed like a pretty normal question. She expected 5 lines, maybe 6. Instead I ended up with 1800 words. So what was her question? What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content? The answer is something that most writers may not want to hear. It’s an answer that demands sacrifice, going against the grain and being persistent when things are going horribly wrong. Still interested? Well, here’s the question again: What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content? The answer 1- contrast 2- lack of pandering 3- the gap between style and ability. ———— 1) Let’s start with contrast It’s the year 1986. John Heritage and David Greatbatch have an itch to scratch. They’re studying applause and what causes it. So they embark on what could be considered one of the most boring tasks in the world: they analyse politician’s speeches. 476 of them. And what were these two poor souls looking for? Applause, that’s what they were keen to find. Why was it that one speech received total silence, while other speeches got applause? But not just applause, but applause twice per minute! Nineteen thousand sentences later they had a clue It was contrast. The moment the audience encountered applause, the brain was no longer dormant. Contrast brought a smile to their faces, and cheering followed. Contrast requires you and me to work so much harder But contrast also puts you in a strange and precarious position. If everyone says: You should go this way and there’s a writer that says, “Nope, you’re headed into sheep land. This is the way to go”. Now that is going out on a limb. Contrast is scary. It’s much easier to say what everyone else is saying. If you want to start with the hallmark of quality, contrast is where you start. Let’s take an example of contrast Let’s say you’re writing about a subject such as productivity, for example. Now productivity doesn’t bring to mind any sort of rest or sleep does it? Instead the enduring message of productivity has almost always been one of focus and concentration. It’s always been one of working out astounding efficiencies to do more work than ever before. At this point in time, let’s say your article talks about sleep. It talks about taking the weekends off. It even goes on to suggest that you take several months off in a year. You’ve shaken up the force a bit, haven’t you? You’ve created a counter force that may at first seem impossible to defend. Yet, that’s what great writing is about. Conceptually, it stands out and picks a topic that’s contrarian. But not all topics need to be contrarian to have that hallmark, do they? You could write articles on topics that have none of this rebellious nature and still bring out the big guns. This calls for a bit of a roller coaster in your writing An article needs to have a flow so the reader can move forward, but just as important is a counterflow. So let’s say you’re writing about how to “grow a curry leaf tree”, you also need to bring in the counterflow as you’re writing. That counterflow would be a possible glitch in the planting process. It could be a couple of mistakes you’re about to make. To be able to speed ahead, brake and go in a counterflow direction isn’t easy. Some writers do it while creating the material. Others create it later during an edit process. Flow by itself is super boring Try this paragraph for example: We went to the airport, there was no traffic on the highway. We got through check in and immigration in next to no time. And then we sat down to have a beer. So what are you thinking at this point in time? I’ll tell you what. You’re wondering if the story has any purpose. And yet, the moment counterflow comes into play, you’re alert again. Let’s go back to the story. You’ve had your beer, when a policeman walks up with a grim face. That’s drama, that’s contrast. And the hallmark of a great article is the ability to insert contrast into various sections of your article. Case studies can have an up and down. The concept can start out being all in favour of something and then diverge without warning. Now you’ve created contrast and lifts the tempo of your words. Counterflow needs to head back to flow, however Too much counterflow and your reader is turned off. The grim policeman, the spilling of beer on your white shirt, the missing of the flight—and the article seems to be falling right out of the skies. Which is why contrast matters so much. Contrast is about a constantly evolving set of words that get you to slip slide through like—yes—a roller coaster. Up, down, up and down. But contrast is only one hallmark of good writing. The second is a lack of pandering. 2) The second hallmark of great writing is a lack of pandering. Clients often ask me if I write articles with keywords in mind. The answer is no. I never have. I’ve been told I can get ten times the traffic if I pandered to keywords, but frankly I don’t care. The moment you pander, you’re not really writing for yourself Most of the greatest writing is not done for another. Most outstanding writing is done to clear the cobwebs in your own mind. You know this feeling well if you’ve tried to do a bit of a project like writing a report, presentation, or a book. There are a million thoughts floating through your mind and none of them seem to sit well until you put them down on paper. The reason why I wrote a book on the Secret Life of Testimonials wasn’t because a client asked me to do so. I wrote because I had these floating ideas in my head. And when I started writing the book, I expected to complete between 20-30 pages. There was good reason for me to have this pagination estimate. I’d already written a book on testimonials earlier and the first edition stopped quite firmly at 30 pages. Imagine my surprise when I went past 30, onto 50, then over 75 and sailed past 100, before settling at 125 pages. When you pander you lose your soul You stuff keywords into your headlines, write less than interesting opening paragraphs and do things that just don’t resonate with being a writer. And we know this to be true with one simple test. Would you use those same words if you were writing the article back in 1995? Pandering means a compromise that’s not necessarily walking step by step with producing the best possible work. No one is saying you have to be this crazy, independent soul forever All of us end up pandering in some shape of form. The great artist and sculptor, Leonardo da Vinci was known to be a lover of nature and hated war. Yet he created some of the most destructive weapons. And his patron, Cesare Borgia was one of the most hated men in all of Italy. Pandering at some level is almost inevitable, yet Leonardo didn’t stay in pander-land forever. He moved on creating work that was enduring and mostly for him. He didn’t want or expect you to see La Gioconda, better known as the Mona Lisa. He did that for himself, to make himself happy. Galileo stopped pandering. The father of geology, a Scot named James Hutton, refused to pander. Charles Darwin wrote 400 pages of stuff that rocked our world forever. The biggest exposés, the most interesting movies, they all refuse to buckle down and pander even when they know that pandering is profitable. So where’s the happy medium between doing what you love vs. pandering? It’s impossible to tell, but when you create a benchmark for yourself, you can decide whether you have time and the resources to create better work, or just work that’s good enough for the masses. At first you may have no option. You’ve got a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed and life is about meeting those obligations. To go down in flames before starting is not a good strategy. But then as you get a little more comfortable, it’s time to go out on a limb. At Psychotactics, we set a benchmark for ourselves: we wanted to work nine months a year and take three months off. Our income has been almost identical since 2007. We don’t need to double our income, double our clients or do any of that stuff that others find so endearing. This allows us not to pander. We know we can reach our goals easily and still do only the projects that are exciting and rewarding. Pandering is an obstacle we all have to learn to overcome. It applies to life, just as it applies to your writing. You can be enslaved by headlines like “7 Ways to attract clients”. You can stuff keywords into all your content to attract the search engines. But every time you do you’re running your soul on the pander-grater. That’s the second hallmark of great work: the move away from pander-land. Which takes us to our third hallmark of great work “achieving style through cross pollination”. 3) Which takes us to the third element: The gap between style and ability When you first start writing, getting an 800-word article on paper is enough to drive you to devour a tub of ice-cream. In time, however, your brain works out what needs to be done. A combination of writing, learning, resting and confidence bubble up to the point where writing is never exactly a joy, but no longer a frustration. Yet, when you’re done with the writing it seems to have no soul It reads pathetically like the work you see all over the Internet. Yet as Ira Glass, host of “This American Life” says: “The reason we get involved in something is because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. For the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It has ambition to be good, but it’s not that great. But your taste—your taste is still “killer”. And your taste tells you that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people give up. A lot of people quit. And it’s only by going through a volume of work that you can close that gap.” Ira Glass is referring to the gap in your brain But what he doesn’t say in that video is what he and every other great writer or creator knows to be true. That style is about getting worse before you get better. Your work is bad but then turns crappy. The reason why you give up is because you’ve pushed your boundaries and ended in crappy land. And you figure out: well, if I’m going to go from bad to worse, I must have no talent whatsoever. And you’re right Talent isn’t inborn. Talent has to be acquired. You have no talent whatsoever. And that seemingly stupid thing you just did when you pushed your boundaries—well, that just made the gap between your ability and taste so much greater. There’s a reason, of course, why your work goes downhill The brain is stepping outside its comfort zone. When the brain steps out into this frosty land it has to read a lot more. But not just a lot more in your own field. No, who told you that nonsense? Read about how continents were created, how birds took flight, why diamonds should logically never exist. When you read, read many authors, copy many authors. But also push your reading and copying way beyond your immediate field of knowledge. If you’re a designer, put your design books in a safe If you’re an architect, go look for books on gravity. If you’re going to really learn style you have to push up and wide at the same time. You’re going to have to learn your craft, yes, but you’re also going to have to get into other worlds. And there’s a good reason why. Style is an amalgamation of thoughts. You may consider your style to be unique, but every style is simply a melting pot, bubbling slowly and deliberately. A lot of style seeps in when you’re reading, but there’s also a factor of copying The greatest works of our times have involved copying (not plagiarism, but copying) to the point that you become a sort of style-clone. Then when you’ve had your fill of one, you copy someone else—and then a third, fourth and fifth. One day you wake up and you have a style You know this to be true because everyone around you says so. They comment on your unique style. They say it’s so different. And what they’re commenting on isn’t just a look. It’s a culmination of your taste and your skill. A combination of the ideas of the masters that have gone before you. An amalgamation so deep that you feel the style is all your own but know deep down, that it’s come from that cavern of knowledge that’s too deep to go back into. And then just as you’ve reached your pinnacle of taste, you realise you’re not the guru you aspired to be. You’ve climbed one mountain and there before you lie the Himalayas of taste. You have so many mountains more to climb. The gap continues to exist. Let’s summarise, shall we? Contrast is crucial. There must be flow, then counterflow and back to flow again. This is what makes for great content. The lack of pandering is scary but that’s where originality springs forth. Pander if you must, but move away from the evil as quickly as you can. The gap between style and ability is incredibly frustrating, but sooner or later you close that gap enough to be amazing, but never quite at the level you want to achieve. And that eternal gap is what keeps you interested in the game forever. Useful Resources: 1) Why Inspiration Can Be The Key To Winning The Resistance Game 2) The Secret of How To Get Clients To Keep Coming Back Repeatedly 3) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling

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. When you are clear about the answers to the three questions, you can take an amazingly pedestrian, everyday concept and make it hugely profitable. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today? ----------------------- How to Create a Profitable Idea for Business Around July 2000, I was made redundant from my job at a web design firm. Life wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. I’d just moved to Auckland, New Zealand from Mumbai, India a few months prior. And here I was, barely a few months later, without a job and with a mortgage that hovered around $200,000 (yes, we’d just bought a house). What do you do when you’re hurled into such a situation? I turned to Photoshop, but not quite. There’s a story behind the Photoshop story and it began back in India, in July. Back in Mumbai, I freelanced as a cartoonist and work was pretty steady through the year, except around July. For some inexplicable reason, the phones would stop ringing at that point in the year. At first, it drove me crazy and I’d do everything I could to drum up business. I’d rant and rave and complain about the fickle nature of July when my mother pointed out that things were always quiet for me in July. From that point on, we’d use July to learn how to use Photoshop One of the big games at the office (yes, I had staff) was to learn to use Photoshop in Tab, F mode. If you were to turn on Photoshop and hit the Tab key and press F (full screen) you’d find that all your toolbars disappear. The game at the office was to keep working in Photoshop without any toolbars. A bystander would look in awe as you were able to use the brush tool, increase opacity, decrease brush sizes etc. You could do almost anything in Photoshop without needing the tool bar. It looked like pure magic. It’s this magic that I had to use when I was made redundant The moment I was made redundant, I went back to trying to get work as a cartoonist. Since most cartoonists at the time were still using pen, ink and paint, my work in Photoshop stood out when I went to meet art directors at the advertising agencies. One particular art director got a bit chatty and as we talked she realised that she too could use the magic of Photoshop in her work. And so, while I started out trying to sell cartoons, I ended up charging $60 an hour, teaching art directors how to use the core tools of Photoshop without the tool bar. Notice something very interesting in the last sentence? I wasn’t teaching them Photoshop. I wasn’t going into the 2,459 rabbit holes that Photoshop presents to a beginner. Instead I was just teaching them a subset—the core tools of Photoshop without the need for a tool bar. And this is precisely the kind of advice I’d give to a client if they called me up and asked how they should start a profitable business. I’d say you need to ask yourself three questions: who, what and when. So why do these three questions matter? Why Who Matters I’ve been pretty good at drawing since a very young age. Like every other kid around me, I did the usual doodles and scribbling, and when the rest of the kids decided to give up drawing at the age of four or five, I kept at it. So you can say I’d be pretty good at drawing after all these years, wouldn’t you? And you’d be right because I’ve never really stopped drawing for a day. But drawing is a bit like cooking. Just because you’re good at cooking Italian food doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good at Japanese food Over the years I became exceptionally good at drawing cartoons, loved the structure of buildings and architecture, even dabbled in a bit of caricatures. But there’s one thing I avoided: drawing animals. I’d decided very early in my life that I wasn’t too good at drawing animals. Then, recently, I was saddled with about 400 amazing envelopes. There’s a story behind those envelopes, but for now let’s just say it was much too hard to throw away those envelopes. So I started drawing animals on them, tentatively at first, but then with a sense of a mission. The moment I started posting the photos of these envelopes online, there was a flurry of interest People from different parts of the globe started giving me advice on what I should do with them. You should print them, said one. You could create a collector’s item box set said another. And the advice kept pouring in, and did exactly what advice usually does: it confuses you beyond belief. The reason you’re hearing this story is to give you a framework of how a profitable idea doesn’t arise from an ability to do something well. A profitable idea arises from the first question you need to ask: Who. The envelope art I just started working on in early June 2016. So why is who so important? Without the “who” in mind, struggle is almost inevitable. Think about the boxed set of envelopes, for example. There’s no doubt that they make a great product, but well intended as the suggestions were, there’s no clue who would buy it. Or why they would buy it? Yet if we took the Photoshop example, we notice there’s an enormous amount of clarity. Sure, the clarity came about by a fluke discussion, but as we’ll find out a lot of profitable ideas are pure fluke. To get back to the art director, I now had a clear person (what we call in The Brain Audit as the target profile). That one job of teaching the art director not only went on for several months, but led to another job—with the daughter of another art director. I didn’t go down the path of teaching Photoshop to other art directors, but you could clearly see how the “who” helped. The “who” matters whether you’re writing an article or creating a product or service Let’s say you’re creating an online product on storytelling. Before you start writing a word, you are peripherally aware of the volumes of story-related material in books, videos and audio. To write another series on storytelling would be nice, but how would it stand out. Now let’s be fair: there’s a lot of terribly average material online and offline that is very profitable regardless of uniqueness. All the same, when uniqueness is relatively easy, why would you want a me-too product when you can have one that’s clearly outstanding? When you create a product or service for someone in particular, they give you their own specific bent on the problem they’re facing. Take for example a service on presentations There are hundreds of books on presentations and services that promise to show you how to be amazing on stage. Yet, when I spoke to this presenter, she felt competent, but not quite. She felt she needed that last 10% that would take her from good to great. And there you have it. That subset is what gives you the clue. Instead of writing a book, creating a course, inventing a service on “presentations”, you work on the subset of how the “last 10% can take you from a good to great speaker.” Fluke plays an incredibly important part in this game of finding the “who” We’re so hell-bent on finding the right person, the right target profile that we don’t dare venture far from our computer screens. When I ran into that chatty art director, I had no clue that she’d talk about Photoshop. When I spoke to that presenter, I had no idea that a cup of coffee would lead to an idea about “the last 10%”. It may appear that a lot of products or services are built around strategy, but they’re often built around a person. The mistake we make is we hope we run into the ideal “who” right away And more often than not, the “who” is a complete fluke. At first, almost every product or service is like Version 1.0. And the feedback you get from that person is going to be relatively limited. Even if you were to create a product or service for “last 10% presenter”, the product would need refinement to get to Version 1.1 and from there to 1.2 and so on. With every product or service that’s been profitable, we’ve had a Version 1.0 and then moved along refining as we go along. Every time you fix things, your product becomes better and more profitable and there’s always a “who” who’ll give you feedback and help you take the product to another level. But even if there’s a “who” in place, how do you deal with the “what?” The what depends on a simple concept: the idea of a superpower.   Why When Matters 1838 1840 1845 1849 1853 1859 For over 20 years Charles Darwin postponed the publishing of his theory Then, on 24 November, 1859, Darwin published his theory on, “Origin of Species”. Priced at fifteen shillings, 1250 copies were sold. Yet, Darwin wasn’t keen on the book being published until his death. In a letter to his religious wife, Darwin asked that 400 pound be set aside and enough promotion of his book be done after his death. Yet, Alfred Russel Wallace got in the way of these plans Alfred Wallace, a naturalist, spent eight years in Singapore and South East Asia between the years of 1854 and 1862 and is known to have discovered evolution by natural selection as well. He wrote an essay while in Indonesia (while living on the island of Ternate) and sent it to Darwin in 1858. When Darwin saw the contents of the letter, he knew the “Origin of Species” couldn’t wait any longer. It needed to be published right away or all of Darwin’s work would be attributed to another man. We are similar to Darwin in many ways Our work may seem insignificant when compared with the work of Darwin, but if your work changes a single person’s day, it’s significant. You know from your own experience how a single line in a book may have caused you to stop and reexamine what you were doing. Or a random comment that may have changed the way you went about your life or business. Our work seems insignificant only because we know it so well. For others it can be a major moment in their lives. Which is why you need to start now As you’ve probably heard or read elsewhere on the Psychotactics site, most of our work started out unpolished. At this very moment, as I’m writing this article, Renuka is laughing at one of my articles that I wrote several years ago. However the best example of the unpolished nature of our work must be attributed to The Brain Audit itself. As you’v probably heard before, the “book” started out as just 16 pages of notes. We made over $50,000 selling that book simply because we got pushed into selling it. And when we sold it offline we weren’t ready to sell it online. Again, someone pushed us and our online business got underway. If you think your work is crappy, there’s a good reason why Your work is crappy. The Brain Audit was crappy at the start. All our courses and workshops were crappy at the start. Not by choice, of course. We did the best we could but now I can’t even bear to go back and look at the early versions. You too will need to bolster up your confidence and get your work going whether it’s through text, audio, video or presentations. Because if you don’t do it, someone else will. Darwin had all the material he needed but was still reluctant to publish his work And here I am giving you this advice but I’m reluctant as well. I’ve been working on the concept of talent since 2008 or earlier. So many years have passed and while I’ve written the odd article here and there, there’s no program, no book, no webinar, no podcast. Let me ask you this question: Would you like to read about how to become talented in just about any field? Would you like to read about what holds us back?(and no it’s not genes). It’s not like I’m comparing my work to Darwin’s or any one else for that matter. But as a reader or listener, would the information be important to you? Your work is more important than ever It may appear raw to you, but you need to start and fix it later. You’re hoping for that one great idea but you need to start with a little idea. Will the little idea fail? It might, but from those failures you keep moving ahead and fixing things.  Even Darwin’s work was just the start of his journey. During Darwin’s lifetime the book went through six editions, with cumulative changes and revisions to deal with counter-arguments raised. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books. His final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (published 1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil. When he died he was honoured by a burial in Westminster Abbey where only royals, generals, admirals, politicians, doctors and important scientists are buried. And to think Darwin almost never started on his journey. Do you still want to wait? Or are you going to start today?   Summary So how do you create a profitable idea for business? When you started reading this information, you may have thought there’d be a formula. And that’s the formula you’ve been missing. The formula is so simple that somehow you feel like there’s something wrong. Like as if you have to pay $2000 to some Internet guru to get the formula. But think about it for a second. Let’s say you’ve got a really good way to grow tomatoes. You can grow thousands of tomatoes in an extremely small space. Is that a superpower? Sure it is. So let’s start with the who: Who is going to be interested in your tomato idea? Then let’s get to what: The “what” is about growing thousands of tomatoes in a very small space. Then let’s get to the when: And this is where it all falls apart, isn’t it? You should start now, but there are reasons why you can’t start now. If Darwin could have reasons, so can you and I. We can all have our reasons. The biggest problem isn’t necessarily that you need a great idea for business You just need to start but there’s something holding you back. And we’ll explore what holds you back—yes we will. But understand that there isn’t going to be a moment when you’ll get a great idea. The Brain Audit was not a great idea, it was just a presentation. Every product or service you’ve experienced at Psychotactics wasn’t a great idea and even today is just work in progress. Most ideas are half-baked when they start and it’s in your interest to get started. Start now! Identify whom you think will buy the idea, then work on the what you’re going to sell. Make it a superpower, as far as possible. And start now. If you keep at it, the road will change along the way. You’ll make mistakes and you’ll get smarter too. And that’s when the profit will roll in. Teaching Photoshop wasn’t a new idea. It wasn’t even a great idea. Heck, you could even borrow the idea by learning Photoshop and finding art directors. And the best way to get started is to get started. You’re a member of 5000bc aren’t you? Well, get to the Taking Action forum where others just like you have decided to take their ideas and run with it. They’re on their way and so should you. Useful Resources: 1) How A 3-Step Pre-Sell Creates Product Irresistibilityhttp://www.psychotactics.com/presell-creates-irresistibility/ 2) Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling http://www.psychotactics.com/three-elements-storytelling/ 3) The Brain Audit http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/

It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie? Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from. ------------------------------------------ Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you’re on a radio show. That’s exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today’s standards it wasn’t a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running. That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air. I was excited beyond belief I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic. You know what happened next, right? Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I’ll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a “miracle moment”. And I learned that events don’t always roll out the way you’ve planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we’ve experienced at Psychotactics. They’re a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn’t just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn’t just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven’t quite told before. These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics. Story No.1: The One Person “Australian” Workshop In 2004, we did something quite bold. We’d been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles. That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out. Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home. When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn’t asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up. Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn’t got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren’t terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we’d still have a sizeable number of attendees. Even so a uneasy calm set in The e-mails from the client weren’t encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn’t react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10. It was too late for us to change our minds We’d already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here’s the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne. Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn’t cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue. Which is when we got our next shock The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you’d expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, “That table hasn’t moved in a hundred years, and it’s not going to move now”. The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind. But the surprises didn’t stop at the venue and the table On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one person turned up, the workshop would go ahead. As we always do, we started on time at 8:32 am. Then, at 8:45 the doors burst open and another participant showed up. Yup, it was our first paid participant and one who’d seen the announcement of the workshop on our e-mail newsletter and decided to come to the workshop. We were going to recover some of our costs after all. However, this paying participant was no ordinary participant She happened to be the General Manager of a $500 million company that was located in Melbourne. In the break she spoke to me and expressed her surprise at the lack of attendees, but also expressed her admiration. “I was amazed that with just two people in the room, you started right on time”. Over the next two days we went through the elements of The Brain Audit workshop and by the end of the workshop we had a bit of a reward. The GM wanted us to come and present to her company while we were still in Victoria and she was willing to pay us for the trouble. And so, we broke even We could have given up at the stage when the client was sending his depressing e-mail reports. Instead we decided to persevere and yes we had a happy ending, but what are the lessons? Three lessons here: Lesson 1: Duds are part of the game The reason I’m relating this story to you is because I see so many people today who want to start a business, but they want to be successful in a very short time—and preferably with no downsides. If you’re starting up a business today, how many duds are you willing to embrace? The biggest reason why I see businesses failing is because they don’t want to fail. They play safe. They want clients to come to them via a blog or website. They don’t want to go out on a limb and fail a bit. Failing isn’t a nice feeling but it teaches you a great lesson. And sometimes, like we did, you get lucky. Lesson 2: Cover your costs We bought our plane tickets and paid for the venue before we had enough information. We trusted that things would work out in the end and it didn’t. Since then if we’ve had a workshop that involves costs (and they all do), we make a temporary booking of the venue. Until we sign up at least a few clients, we don’t book or buy anything. We’ve never made a loss on an event, but we came terribly close with this Hepburn workshop. It taught us to pre-sell and then commit to an event. We use the same concept for our product launches. We pre-sell and only once we have sign-ups do we create the product. Lesson 3: Work your own contacts When we started out, we didn’t have much of a list. We built that list though writing really good articles. Not just your run of the mill articles, but insightful, funny articles. Despite the presence of a list, we didn’t have many names from Australia. And we decided to work with the client who’d promised to get 60 participants. That was obviously a mistake. When you give away that much amount of control, you don’t know for sure how things are going to work out. In the end we had no control of the venue, the participants and were stuck with a billiards table in the middle of the room. But that trip to Australia was only one of our early adventures. The second scary one was definitely the insurance company speech.   Story 2: The Insurance Company Speech I don’t remember how I got some of the early speaking assignments—or maybe I’m just trying to forget. This early assignment was in Wellington where I was supposed to speak to a large group of insurance agents. The presentation was about The Brain Audit, but I tried valiantly to get case studies about the insurance business. I met with the client many times at their local office, I did my research and found many examples about the insurance industry. And that’s where I made my first mistake. Well, anyway, I flew to Wellington and started my presentation As I got through the first 15 minutes or so, I realised the audience was not reacting the way I expected them to do so. Instead of being interested in the case studies, they seemed to be bringing up objections and interrupting my presentation. And rightly so. I was the outsider in the room. I didn’t know squat about insurance and the insurance industry and there I was giving them case studies that left me open to attack. That’s when my second mistake became apparent I was still very much a rookie at presenting so I took whatever advice I could get in that field. And one presenter told me never to use slides. He suggested that slides were like the kiss of death. As it turned out, slides would have saved me from going to pieces on that particular day. As the audience grew restless, I got extremely nervous on stage. And then someone walked out Who knows why they walked out. Maybe it was just to go to the toilet or to get a drink. But as my eye moved towards the exit, I could see the entire audience walking out in droves. And though no one else was walking out at that point, I couldn’t focus and forgot what I had to say next. If I had slides, I could have used them as a guide and moved along. Maybe the presentation would have still been a disaster, but it would have been a lot better than a professional presenter standing on stage with his mouth open and his mind blank. I still had twenty minutes to go and nothing came to mind, so I fled. I left the stage, went down the corridor and locked myself in the room until the taxi came to pick me up to the airport, later. But that’s not the end of the story Three years later I was asked to speak at quite a different event, but at the very same venue, on the very same stage. To say I was mortified was putting it lightly. I could see myself forgetting what I had to say, and fleeing for the second time in a row. You know how it is when you’re all wound up, don’t you? You don’t sleep very much at night and I counted every ambulance and police siren that roared by on the street as I lay high up in my hotel room. Except I’d learned from my mistakes The first mistake was trying to appeal to the audience. That wasn’t a mistake I was going to make ever again. When you try to appeal to an audience of people in your industry, you have at least some authority to do so. But when you’re facing an audience from another industry, it’s like walking into the jaws of a steel trap and I’d had one experience and it was enough. I presented my information as is, and the audience drew their own conclusion. The second mistake I’d made was to speak without slides It may sound like a good idea, but if you’ve spent the previous night counting sirens, you’re likely to be tired and prone to mistakes. That one event made sure I never left home without my slides. I’d even take a backup on an external drive and print out a sheet of the main points—just in case technology failed at the last minute. But easily the biggest experience to draw upon was walking back on that stage. It was scary but I realised if I backed out I’d always fear that venue and stage. The venue wasn’t the problem, it was the way I handled my presentation that caused all the trouble. Going back into that seeming danger zone made me more resilient than ever before. Which takes us to the third story: the boat cruise.   Story 3: The Bouncy Boat Cruise I’m not a big fan of “believing in the universe”. I believe you need to put in the effort and you get the result. And yet I couldn’t explain how I ended up on this cruise from New Zealand to Australia. At the start of the year I’d written my goals and one of the goals was to get on a cruise ship. But as I ploughed through the year no cruise ship had my name on it. Then in May I had a meeting with a CEO of a bed franchise “I’d like you to make a presentation at our annual event”, he said when I met him at his office. You know what’s coming next, right? Yes, the annual event was on a cruise ship. As excited as I was about the “universe pitching in”, I still had a job to do. And the presentation wasn’t bothering me too much because I’d just made many similar presentations in the months running up to the cruise. The first night, as we sailed away, there were incredibly calm seas But calm seas and the Tasman don’t go together, especially in June. June is the start of winter in this part of the world and winter brings stormy seas. Added to that, the Tasman Sea is considered to be one of the roughest stretches of water. But we were in a good mood and we had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oily bacon and buttery-eggs. And then all hell broke loose. The ship started bouncing about like crazy The bacon and eggs—well, let’s just say you shouldn’t eat oily stuff under normal conditions—but on this rough sea it was pure hara kiri. Renuka and I were not only sea sick, we were throwing up for a solid hour. And later that morning, I had to make my presentation. Somehow, Renuka staggered to the medical centre to buy some overpriced pills to quell the seasickness. And then it was show time Luckily the presentation was in the lower part of the liner which happened to be the most stable. But I was feeling terrible and had a hard time standing up, so I didn’t get on stage. Instead I made the presentation from the bottom of the stage (at seat level) and held the stage for support. 45 minutes later I was done, and the CEO came up to continue the proceedings. “You didn’t look too well,” he said to me as we passed. “Did you drink a little too much last night?” “No I didn’t”, I informed him. I never drink the night before I have to make a presentation. What he didn’t know of course, was that Renuka was responsible for that advice. She warned me to stay away from any alcohol the previous night, no matter how many free drinks were being offered. And so I stayed sober, which was a very good lesson in itself. Often you’re judged not by what you can do, but other people’s perception of you. If I had been drinking the pervious night, it wouldn’t have mattered that I was sea-sick. My pale demeanour would have been attributed to the fact that I wasn’t a professional. I’ve found this to be true with not just speaking engagements but in every area of my life. When there’s a course on, I don’t tell clients what’s happening in the background. If I have a workshop, I focus on the slides and not about any other issues. When you let your audience know that you have other issues, they automatically attribute some slip up to that issue, even though that issue may not be connected. Oh, and that universe thing. I still don’t believe too much in it, but I write things down anyway. I put in the effort and then it comes true. Funny that!   Epilogue Often in life we’re waiting for that miracle moment. We are sure that if we simply put up the website, or start writing that blog, things will happen. What I’ve found is a bit different. With the Australia one person workshop we found that persistence paid off, but it was less a story of persistence and more about learning how groundwork and preparation avoids failure. We still need to get out from our office. We still need to push ourselves into the unknown, but we can do so without taking nutty risks. The Wellington presentation story was also one of willing to go beyond the computer screen. But it was also one of facing your demons and conquering them. Once I found that I could win that battle against fear, I feel comfortable taking on a scary situation time and time again. Finally the boat cruise could have gone horribly wrong if Renuka wasn’t around to give me advice. Her advice kept me in the good standing of the CEO. Perception is far greater than reality. And I’ve learned over the years to manage perception, because what people believe is what they feel to be true. No one is saying you need to be fake or feed your audience what you think they should hear. I openly share what we do, where we’ve succeeded and where we’ve failed. But in the middle of an assignment, you need to focus on the assignment and keep any additional stories for later, much later. That’s it. Stories from the Psychotactics vault. Don’t forget to listen to or read: #50: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand

17 questions? Why have 17 questions in a testimonial? And what if the client won’t answer the questions? The reason for the 17 question testimonial is simple. It’s not a testimonial any more, it’s a experience on paper. When other clients read it, they can sense the ups and downs. They can see the final result. It makes your testimonial stand out. In order to get this 17 question testimonial going, you have to have a strategy in place. This podcast shows you exactly what you need to do so that you can get the answers your business deserves. --------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation: Bento Box Style Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. ------------------ A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time. If you were to go back into Earth’s history, you’d choke and die quickly And that’s because the Earth’s atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor. A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun’s energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it was oxygen. Life-harnessing bacteria began to spread to any surface in the sea and  creating huge amounts of oxygen. But this oxygen didn’t go very far. The oceans were packed with dissolved iron, and you know what happens when iron mixes with oxygen? Sure you do. You get rust. The oceans literally rusted and for hundreds of millions the iron in the ocean sucked up the available oxygen. For about 700 million years of rusting, the oceans ran out of iron. There was just one minor issue: the cyanobacteria were still producing immense amounts of oxygen. Where would all this oxygen go? Into the atmosphere, that’s where it all went The oxygen had to escape and it made its way into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the billion years that were to follow the Earth began to change from a place where you could hardly breathe, to one that had a bounty of oxygen. Something similar applies you’re dealing with testimonials for your business At first the testimonials you get are weak, almost impossible to use. Then as time passes, and if you use the six-questions from The Brain Audit, you’ll get testimonials that are more oxygenated. But for you to create a great oxidation event, you need the power of the 17-Question testimonial. And the reason why you need this 17-Question testimonial is because it catapults your testimonials into an experience. Instead of just reading yet another testimonial, the prospect feels the ups, down, twists, turns and final result. Let’s go into the land of the 17-Question testimonial and explore three elements: 1) Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions 2)  Creating compartmentalisation: Bento box style 3) Why it’s a mistake not to send examples First, what are the seventeen questions? We’d want to get that out of the way, so here goes: 1) What was your primary reason for taking this course? 2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began 3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course 4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course 5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made? 6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped? 7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology) 8- Describe Sean as a teacher 9) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc). 10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course? 11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help? 12) Why would you recommend it? 13) The course is called the toughest in the world. Can you describe how tough it was, and what sacrifices you had to make to keep going? 14) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it? 14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why? 15) What advice would you give to future participants? 16) How did the course personally help you? 17) Anything else you’d like to add? Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Yesterday my wife Renuka was filling in a form for an online visa. She’d fill in a page of details only to be confronted with yet another. Then she’d fill a second page and the third would show up. Mother’s name, father’s name, previous visa number—details after details popped up to the point of frustration. When you’re asking clients for testimonials it hard enough when you ask a few questions, but a seventeen question form can be quite tiresome. Which is why you need to prepare the client in advance. This preparation calls for instructions. When we ask clients for testimonials, we forget one important fact We forget that for many, if not most of clients, giving testimonials is not a common activity. Even if they’ve agreed to give you a testimonial, the sight of seventeen questions may appear a little over the top. Yet, without that voluminous amount of detail you’re unlikely to draw out the entire experience. To make sure the testimonial plan goes well you have to prepare the client. It’s important to send them information in advance Whether the testimonial is done via the phone, in person or via the Internet, you need to make sure the client knows they’re going to go through a 17-question testimonial. And if you suspect the client is going to be reluctant to write, you should immediately reach for the phone or in person. There’s a big advantage to getting a testimonial over the phone When we write, we tend to edit. And if a client is sitting down to write answers to a bunch of questions, you’re asking him to invest a lot of not just writing time, but editing time as well. On the phone or in person, you have no such problem. The client is merely answering a bunch of questions and is likely to be happy to speak for between 10-12 minutes. In comparison, a written testimonial may take well over 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why you need to let the client know you’d like to speak to them, and that you’ll be recording the session. This is the first level of preparation involved. The second level seems minor but it’s just as important When clients agree to giving a testimonial, I also send them this information: This isn’t just a client testimonial. It’s more of a case study describing your ups and downs and final result. The experience is what counts and so I would really like you to answer these questions in as much detail as possible. Short, one-line answers become pretty useless as they lack detail. They also can’t really be used, so I’d prefer you put in as much detail as possible in your answers. This detail helps me understand your journey better and is also a really ego booster. So I would appreciate the maximum amount of detail in the answers. There’s really no reason to have a twiggy, anaemic testimonial You want one that’s well rounded, full of juicy experiences and stories. And when you put the client in a situation where they can quickly give you the information (via phone or in person) you’ve made the first and most important move. When you clearly bring up the issue of detail, you’re priming them to be effusive—and yes, it does make for some pretty cool testimonials. If the testimonial isn’t via the phone or in person, things get a little dicier Well, not quite. It really depends on what you’ve delivered in terms of product or services. If a client buys a product like “Chaos Planning” which is a short, yet intense book, there’s really no point in sending the client a seventeen question questionnaire. However, if there’s a lot of involvement and a slightly long drawn process, you’re more than likely to get a far better response. Let’s say you’re a web designer. You’ve just spent two months of back and forth movement building a client’s website. Now there’s been a bit of a relationship and it’s far more likely that an e-mail based set of questions will work. We tend to use the 17-Questions only for courses We conduct courses such as the cartooning course, the Article Writing Course, copywriting, First Fifty Words etc. These aren’t courses where you sign up and then the teacher disappears. They’re pretty hands on courses and with just a few clients a ton of back and forth is involved. To give you an example, in the 2016 Article Writing Course we have our normal limit of 25 participants. And we’re now in Week 8 of the course and so far 9,374 posts have been generated. Yes, it’s impressive at over 1000 posts per week, but what’s important to note here is the involvement. If the client is fully involved, then it’s more than likely that either a phone call or an online questionnaire will get an equally powerful response. Of course if you have 25 clients, it’s better to have them answer via an online medium because the exercise gets very complicated. You have to figure out available timings and time zones and anyway the exercise may take several days. But if you have just a few clients, it’s a better idea to use the phone or record via Skype. We started this journey to get our 17-Question testimonial but realised there’s a lot more to consider. We realised that planning the strategy and choosing whether to use the phone or an online questionnaire is important. And that while the online questionnaire is definitely less time consuming, it depends a lot on the involvement of the clients. The more involved, the more likely you are to get great testimonials for such a lengthy questionnaire. This takes us to our second part: The logic of the questions. Do we really need 17 questions? Would 13 be just fine? Or could we go up to 19? The answer lies in the logic. What are you trying to achieve? That’s what we’ll have a look at next. Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation If you were to head back in time to Japan—no, not 2.4 billion years but closer—around the 12th century, you’d have run into quite a different sort of evolution: the start of the Bento box. During the Kamakura period, dried meals or hoshi-ii was introduced and bento was nothing more than a small bag to store dried rice. But if we speed up through the Azuchi Momoya Period, in the 17th century, we find bento boxes everywhere. Wooden, lacquered boxes that consisted of rice, chestnut, seafood, mushroom, pickles and yes, bamboo shoot. And that’s what a bento box does best With all those tastes and textures and different types of food, it’s critical to compartmentalise the food. Similarly, if you want to get results with your 17-Questions, you have to compartmentalise the questions so that each set tackles different issues. Bento at one of my favourite Japanese restaurant in Auckland Let’s take a look at the compartments for one of our courses, for starters. They’re split into: – The experience: Before, during, on completion of course – The elements of the course: the group, the forum, the notes, the audio. – The teaching system: How it’s taught, the responsiveness of the teacher etc. – Comparison: How they’re compare with other courses – Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the course to others? Why? – Any other comments And while we ask 17-Questions, what’s really vital is the creation of the bento box. You need to create the compartments for your own product or service first, before considering what to put in the individual boxes. Let’s go back to the web designer: What would the compartments look like? – The experience: Before, during, on completion of website – The elements of the website: the layout, functionality, ease of use etc. – Dealing with the developers: The responsiveness, ease of instructions etc. – Comparison: How they’re compare with other website developers or even other similar service providers – Advice/Recommendations: Would they recommend the service to others? Why? – Any other comments While most of the compartments of the bento box has already been created for you, you may still need to work on a compartment of your own. Or, you may need to add, subtract or change some of the questions. This compartmentalisation allows us to get the information we need and it allows the client to see at a glance what they’re expected to answer. We started out this journey by sending the instructions in advance. We then moved into compartmentalisation. And if you stopped right at this point, you are likely to get an outstanding testimonial. But why stop here? Why take the chance that something might still go wrong? The way to ensure a mind-blowing testimonial is to something so simple, it’s easy to miss. It’s called: sending an example. Part 3: Why it’s a mistake not to send examples Let’s say I step into a bar. I have no intention of drinking that cold glass of beer. But there in front of me is someone drinking a cold glass of beer. Guess what happens next? The reason why I’m sipping a beer is because of a mirror effect. This mirror effect also plays out to your advantage when you’re getting a client to give you a 17-Question testimonial. To understand why the mirror effect is so important, we simply have to take away the example. Now the client has no benchmark and their testimonial can be similar to what you’re expecting or wildly off course. A simple way to solve this problem is to send an example As you’d expect the example will be long and detailed. And the moment you send it to the client, they realise what’s expected of them. Despite this example, some clients will still give you terse testimonials. There’s really not much of a point in running such testimonials. However, most clients have a look at the example and proceed to give one just as good. But what if you don’t have an example in place? Well, it’s a good question but the answer is more than obvious. Be persistent and go in search of a client who’s willing to give you a longer testimonial. Just throwing your hands up in the air isn’t going to get you the testimonial you seek. If you need to do an assignment free of cost just for the sake of the testimonial, then make sure you get it done. Without that example testimonial in place, you can still get good 17-Question testimonials, but an example almost always guarantees great results. And once we’ve covered that last bit, it’s time for the summary. Ok let’s summarise The first point was one of instructions When you give clients instructions well in advance. Letting them know that they need to give lots of detail is very important. Without the detail you may have a testimonial but not a complete experience. The whole purpose of the 17-Question testimonial is for it to be like an oxygenation event. It needs to bring life to a testimonial in a dramatic manner. The issue of phone vs. online questionnaire is also something that needs to be tackled. Using the phone is far superior if you have fewer clients. If you have a large number, then you have to make sure it’s all online or it  may take too much time and never get done. The second point was one of compartmentalisation You need to split the main facets into something resembling a bento box. For us, we break up things into the experience, the teaching system, comparison, advice etc. And your compartments may be slightly different but still remarkably similar. All you need to do is sit down and create the compartments before putting in the questions in each bit. You can have fewer than 17 questions and possibly more. But you should get tons of material with 17. We’ve filled up entire booklets (just the Article Writing Course prospectus has over 80 pages of testimonials). The final point is one of beer—sorry, examples Send an example to a client. When she can see the example it’s a form of instruction. She knows what’s expected of her and will deliver accordingly. Without an example a client may meet your expectations, but equally they may go wildly off in some weird direction or not meet your quota. The example needs a mirror effect and it’s your job to provide the mirror. Start with the bento box. Create the compartments Fill it with questions. An example of the questions and answers Example: Alison’s answer 1)What was your primary reason for taking this course? I wanted to write in a much more engaging way. And to write faster. And I wanted to know when I had succeeded and failed in my attempt – to have some way of assessing for myself the quality of my output. 2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began I had the Psychotactics Outline stuck to my wall behind my computer screen. And I had tried like heck to implement it but I was trying to do it all at once. So it was hard and I knew I was failing or making such slow progress. And I did not really know how to get better on my own. I tried to outline and write in the same session. And I did not plan ahead, I just tried to write. And it took a long time, but I just thought, “hey, that’s life.” 3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course Mid way through the course we were doing disconnectors and the first 50 words. And man, that was hard. Trying to figure the right way to disconnect, trying to reconnect smoothly, trying to ‘bottle’ the drama and tip it onto the page at just the right point. It was hard, hard work. 4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course Now I’m feeling confident. I can get a sense of my ‘One Word’ quite easily and once I have it, it’s pretty simple to come up with a disconnect. And I have a more trained eye, so I can quickly goback and ‘audit’ my work to make sure I have put in all the elements I need. It’s much, much easier. 5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made? I was the only girl in my small group, so sometimes I would ‘sneak out’ and read what was going on in the other groups, with people I knew from the Cartoon Course. But my small group was fine, and we kept nudging each other along and the accountability to do the work was excellent. We didn’t lose anyone!. Now that the forum has opened up to Group 2 I really appreciate being in a smaller group most of the time – sheesh, having all of us buzzing around would have been overwhelming. 6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped? I love working in the forum because it’s so flexible. And you get almost instant feedback because of the different time zones. Instant feedback is so motivating. And you could get so many different comments on your work. And go back and correct it to make it better. And read other peoples work to learn from their mistakes 7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology) It’s like working with a gemstone – you are polishing a single facet of the gem before you worry about any other facet. And you just trusting the process that when you finish, the gem will look magnificent. That’s where you have to trust Sean (and I did, because I had seen great results cartooning!) Describe Sean as a teacher (yes, even the irritating part). I did not find Sean irritating at all. I found him to be unfailingly (and surprisingly) patient and prepared to revisit things and help even further (like the extra calls, the Mistakes audios etc) and explain again and differently. He was very insightful and excellent at deconstructing errors and showing how to vapourise them. I also noticed on other threads that he is very robust and unprovokable. A very mature teacher who does not take complaints personally. And overall, he was just everywhere. Don’t ask me when he sleeps or how he keeps up with everything. I’m just grateful he does. And inspired to push my own envelope more to achieve what I want to. 9) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it? I did not have a particularly low point. I knew it was going to be hard, I had been warned, I expected it to be hard and it was! But I made a pact with myself that I would show up every day and post an article. So in my mind I was never going to miss a day, even if I wrote a crappy piece that I was not happy with and just could not stay up any later. 10) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc). ‘One word’ was certainly my biggest breakthrough because a break through there flows into everything else. I have been reading Sean’s stuff for a couple of years now and struggling to pin down this One Word thing. But it suddenly clicked and I don’t know why. It’s not that I hadn’t seen its prominence on the first chapter of notes and audio – I just could not wrestle it into submission. And with writing mostly travel stuff, different angles etc felt elusive. So the breakthrough came when I was outlining about different towns . And each place had a very particular character. So I realized that what I wanted the reader to take away was what the feeling or vibe of that place was. And that was my one word. So one place was ‘party place’ and another was ‘tranquil’ and so on. I have now managed to capture that for other types of topics the baby stuff and the finance stuff. It’s a really powerful feeling. 10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course? Being able to assess my own stuff better, to know where I am most likely to fall short and hone in on that. Outlining so fast! And seeing the outlines more clearly and easier. I think the most unexpected learning was the work process/ work flow. Of choosing a series, and outlining it, and then writing. That is of immense help to me, I struggle with strategic planning. 11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help? The Audios on mistakes were invaluable. And having the calls recorded. The extra calls, these last 2 Thursdays, were very valuable too. Surprisingly so, who would believe so much benefit could come from recapping stuff this late?! 12) Why would you recommend it? It works. If you are prepared to follow the process through, Sean gets you to the other side. 13) Can you describe why you (personally) find it unique? I love the ‘Psycho’ approach Sean uses to punch you through the Bully Brain zone. I love working with people from all over the world. And I love working hard with others who are determined to work hard and succeed too. 14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why? Cartooning – for fun and to get my creative brain working and to challenge myself to do something I had never thought I could do. I would consider doing the Info products and the Copywriting and Pre-selling course once my bank balance has recovered from AWC. 15) What advice would you give to future participants? Decide beforehand that you will not quit. Clear your decks if you can, and expect it to be hard 16) How did the course personally help you? It gave me a good realization of how often we make excuses. So I started asking myself in other areas of my life “Do I want to do this? Yes? Then how will I make it happen?” instead of putting things off and being passive. Getting an insight on Sean’s personal program has encouraged me to push my own personal envelope to achieve what I want to. 17) Anything else you’d like to add? Thanks. A huge whole lot. It’s been great and I would do it again in a heartbeat. Useful Resources 1) Do you know why some businesses get wonderful clients, while others seem to get clients that are a pain in the neck? Find out more here. 2)  Find out: Why Clients Don’t Buy (Understanding The Elements of Risk) 3) About 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems  

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! --------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to work with a timer Part 2: The power of sleepPart 3: Why you need to focus on the road, not the destination. Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. --------------------- I’ve always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut. Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily. To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut. She’s just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don’t need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter. We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They’re gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the biggest productivity tools is to do nothing. Intrigued? Well, follow along. The three points of gentle productivity are: 1) Working with a timer 2) Sleep 3) Focus on the road, not the destination. Part 1: Working with a timer The Psychotactics Article Writing Course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world. And rightly so. In fewer than 12 weeks a participant has to go from a “frozen state” to being able to write an article exceedingly well. When you look at all the components involved in article writing, you run into a mountain of elements to master. A single course covers “topics, sub-topics, outlines, how to start an article, different types of formulas of writing, subheads, objections, examples, summary, sandwiching and yes, the incredibly important task of starting an article.” And in the process of juggling all these components, the participants do something that jeopardises the entire learning process. They will try to write an article that seems to meet their own standard Participants complain about the quality of their article. After they write their articles, they somehow feel something’s missing. So they go back to write and rewrite until they reach some sort of “quality standard. No one starts off wanting to spend three or four hours on an article, but invariably that’s how we go about trying to get our work to a higher “quality”. In reality, all that’s happening is the build up of exhaustion If you spend four hours writing an article today, and four hours writing an article tomorrow, will you be awake on the day after? The chances are you’re just going through the motions as the tiredness seeps into your bones. When you’re tired, you’re not only robotic, but you miss out on very important learning cues. It seems very much like a Catch 22 situation. You can’t create a “great” article unless you work hard at it. And yet, working hard leads to so much exhaustion that the rest of your work suffers. Is there really a way out of this mess? The answer lies in a timer The Article Writing Course runs to a timer. You have a fixed time to do the outlines; a fixed time to do your assignment; and yes, a fixed time to spend your time on the forum looking at the work of others in your group. When your time is up, you’re done. But does this make any sense at all? With a fixed time would the quality not get a lot worse? After all, when you labour over your work, you get time to fix the glitches, tidy the work and make it better. A student that is given just 90 minutes to write an article may well be dissatisfied with their work, but give them 180 minutes and they don’t turn out 200% better work. Their work is probably improved by a mere 5-10%. But their exhaustion level goes sky high when they take more time to do the task. Tasks that have fixed deadlines may not be the best in the world but they’re the key to productivity I draw a daily diary of cartoons in watercolour. I’m fastidious about doing one watercolour every day. Then a big project comes along and I’m suddenly lost. I skip a day, which turns out to be a week. Soon a month has slipped by without any work being completed. What’s worse is that I ache to do that watercolour every day, but hey, a watercolour takes me anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why I can’t handle the watercolour when that project rolls along. But what if I only painted for 15 minutes in the day? Instantly I feel the need to rebel. I know it takes 45 minutes so how on earth can I achieve something in 15 minutes? Anyway, I made the rule, so may as well use it, right? And so I did. I did what I could in 15 minutes. Was it as good as the 45 minutes painting. Probably not, but that’s what we found on the Article Writing Course as well. At first, there’s this intense sense of rebellion coursing through the logical part of our brains. Yet, the moment we realise there’s no way out, the creative side seems to take over and we work out how we can achieve the task in a shorter duration. Will it be as awesome as the 45 minute watercolour? Let me be very clear with you. I’ve slaved over a watercolour for 5 hours and it’s not like additional time makes a better painting. Granted there are going to be deficiencies in the final product, but if you keep up the speed every single day, something interesting happens. You manage to put out not average, but some really good work in a fraction of the time. And most importantly, where there was a blank canvas, there’s work. Not only did I do my painting, but I’m proud to have something, instead of nothing. Instead of giving up, I’m moving ahead by putting a restriction on how much time I can allocate to the project. Amazingly this has reflected in the dropout rate of the Article Writing Course When you call a course the “toughest writing course in the world”, it usually lives up to its billing. And at least 20% of the students drop out (most other courses online have a drop out rate of 80-95%). Yet, once we put the timer system in place, we are in Week 7 of the course, and only one student seems to be teetering. Will that student come back? We don’t know for sure, but a lack of exhaustion is the key to productivity. It seems ridiculous to let a timer dictate your output Yet, the timer system works for our courses, for workshops, for our personal productivity and even when Marsha’s doing her school assignments. Given endless time, she fills in the time in some magical way. Put her on a timer and she astounds everyone, including herself. In trying to get more productive we’re looking for that super-big tool that will change our lives. Instead the first of those tools is the humble timer You may go overtime—but you’ll finish your work quickly enough. Will it be amazingly good? No it won’t. But if you don’t use the timer, nothing gets done, which is a lot worse. And that’s the first gentle tool of productivity. So what’s the second tool? You know this one well. It’s called sleep. Sleep? How are you productive when you sleep? Part 2: Sleep enhances productivity—but how? Sleep helps us in many different ways, but we don’t relate garbage disposal to sleep, do we? Lack of sleep affects brain function, reduces learning and impairs performance It also seems to prevent us from transferring short term memory to long term memory. However, researcher, Dr. Maiken Nedergaard has a mind-blowing theory (he submitted a paper to the prestigious journal called Science). His research shows that the brain apparently goes through a garbage clearance when we’re asleep. Nedergaard’s team showed brain cells shrink during sleep. This shrinking of the brain cells opens up the gaps between neurons, which in turn allow fluids to wash the brain clean. The research also suggests that failing to clear away some toxic proteins may play a role in brain disorders like dementia. But let’s put brain disorders aside for a moment, and focus only on the and think of what happens when you don’t sleep. With every sleep deprived hour, more toxins keep building up in our brain, impairing our productivity. We’re more sleep-deprived than ever, and we have the idiots to prove it Everywhere you look, you’ll have the so-called gurus berating you for dreaming about the weekend. Very few people seem to take breaks, let alone weekends. Sleep is associated with laziness, and there’s utter disdain for the afternoon siesta. In many countries, they derogatorily call it the “nana nap”. Yet Nedergaard is pretty clear about the value of sleep and how it affects the clearing of junk from your brain. “You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.” Productivity is the house party! The more productive we are, the harder we work, the greater the amount of “garbage” we seem to accumulate. And boasting about little sleep is hardly the way to go about getting rid of the garbage. I know this seems ironic seeing that I’m the 4 am guy, but I’m well into counting sheep by 10 pm or earlier. Then there’s a solid hour or even two hours of sleep in the afternoon. This regime of getting more sleep, rather than less is what counts towards productivity. But what if you feel groggy after an afternoon sleep? Many people do. And it’s good to measure how much sleep is restorative and how much makes you groggy. Some people nap in sleep cycles. I’ve found I can sleep in 45 minutes or 90-minute cycles. If I’m woken up in between, I feel groggy. But here’s the really interesting bit. I sleep longer when I’m more rested. On workdays, I’ll sleep for about 45-90 minutes, but on vacation that sleep gets extended to an enormous 3 hours. While no one is asking you to sleep three hours or even 45 minutes, you should try a 20-minute nap at the very least. Instead of trying to create yet another to-do list, your biggest item should be garbage clearance Lauren Hale is an associate professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University. She reckons screens of any kind inhibit our sleep. Whether it’s a phone, tablet, computer or TV, it affects our sleep. Getting rid of all those devices at least 30 minutes before you sleep is one way of getting a sounder sleep. Anyway, it stops us from checking e-mail or looking at Facebook, which only increases the churn in our brain instead of letting us sleep well. Sleep may be on everyone’s to-do list and no one’s productivity list We don’t see sleep as important, and yet it’s been amazingly useful when training clients in courses. In the 2008 version of the Article Writing Course, for instance, clients needed to write five articles a week, with no limits on time. And they all turned out decent articles. In the 2016 version of the Article Writing Course, clients are required to write 2-3 articles a week, and there are limits on time. In every instance, the 2016 batch is writing far superior articles in smaller portions of time. And how do I know this to be true? A skill like writing can never be treated like an objective science and it’s always going to be subjective. Yet, I think I could easily slide into a bit of a judging role as I’ve written between 3000-4000 articles in the past 16 years. It includes 52 articles for the Psychotactics Newsletter and between 3-5 articles for 5000bc per week. It doesn’t include several books or reports. And every Article Writing Course generates between 800-1000 articles. Seeing I’ve conducted over ten consecutive courses, that’s about 10,000 articles read over the past ten years. Add it all up and we’re looking at least 14,000 articles over the past 16 years. I know it still makes the skill subjective, but I’d say I have a pretty good handle on good vs. not so great article writing. And the more rested the student, the better the articles. I’d like to say writing more articles per week would make the client a better writer, but it doesn’t. Not in the early stages, at least. Once they’ve got a good handle on the elements of article writing, they write quickly, create less garbage, and they’re able to write every day, if necessary. And yes, without too much of a strain. Even so, sleep helps tremendously which is why weekends and breaks are crucial. This improvement in productivity doesn’t need a team of researchers does it? It’s not just a finding when it comes to article writing. You know from your experience how much you stagger about like a drunk when you’re sleep deprived. You don’t need to get into a lab coat to figure out that sleep does beautiful things for your productivity. Knowing that it helps with removing all that garbage, helps, doesn’t it? Now you can sleep a lot more and contribute to your productivity. This, of course, takes us to our third element: staggering the task. Part 3: Most of us are told to start with the end in mind. The goal. The destination. The dream. And it’s that end point that more often than not, unravels our entire sequence of productivity The end point is why we get involved with any undertaking. We join a cartoon course to learn to draw cartoons. We get into karate class so we can protect ourselves should we find ourselves in a bit of a bother. And yet for most of us, the end point is fuzzy. What would the cartoon you draw in six months from now look like? What kind of moves would you make in karate a year from now? No one can answer that question, no matter how prescient we happen to be. So the end point is important, but in reality it’s just a point in the road. A better way to see an end point is to visualise the drive to your weekend picnic spot. You clearly know your destination, but as you get in the car and get going, what are you looking at? Yes, it’s the road right in front of you. Every turn of the wheels forces you focus not on the endpoint, but the process instead. Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time Behind Phelps’ amazing track record is his coach, Bob Bowman. And here’s what Bowman has to say about process. “Champions value the process more than any outcome. Because that’s what controllable and within our ability to deal with”. What he saying is that the journey itself is the benchmark—not the destination or outcome. For example, if we were learning how to write a sales page, we shouldn’t be focused on the end point. We should be more aware of managing the process. On a sales page there are so many elements: headlines, bullets, features and benefits etc. If you’re learning to write headlines, you should be  focusing on the headlines. If you’re writing bullets, they should be your benchmark. You shouldn’t be asking: How is my sales letter doing? That’s the wrong question to ask. Instead, you should say: Am I benchmarking what I learned today? Or this week? The moment we shift our focus on the end point, we’re easily frustrated That’s because every journey has diversions or speed bumps. And if we haven’t accounted for those diversions, we get upset and start to wander away from our destination. And rightly so, because the destination is still a zillion miles away. However, if we focus on the immediate road, things change. Even if you hit diversions, that’s part of the journey. Productivity is often measured by what you do Instead, we also need to measure it by what gets in the way. The moment we’re focused on the end point, we come up with rather silly statements like, “My work isn’t up to the quality I expected”. The reason for this seeming failure is you’re evaluating the entire project, and we’re not there yet. Frustration sets in, and you end up berating yourself, thinking everyone else is better than you. And can you believe being productive when your mental state is in a shambles? The way to approach productivity is to break up your journey into smaller bits When clients write an article, I advise them to first do the outline. Then do nothing for hours on end. After those hours have ticked away, write the First Fifty Words. Again, you can walk away from the article. Bit by bit, mile by mile that article gets built until a day, even two days have passed. But how much time has the client spent on the article? Often it’s just a little less than two hours in all. Yet, how do many writers attack an article? They sit down and try to do what I used to do. I’d be adamant that I wanted to get to the end point, so I’d spend all day on the article. As the hours ticked away, I’d get so lost that many articles never made it to the finish line. Instead, I’d throw yet another article in my article writing graveyard. What seemed like a good idea—the finish line—was, in reality, a terrible mistake. I lost energy, didn’t work with a timer, didn’t have the nerve to take a nap to replenish that energy. And so that article never did make it to the finish line. I was trying to be productive but ended up doing quite the opposite. The end point is just a point. There are points all along the road. No one point is more important than the next. If you managed to get 70% to the end point, it’s better than dropping out. And since productivity is about getting things done, 70% is a lot better than nothing. Next Step: Read or listen to How To Beat Inertia And Why Logic Doesn’t Work http://www.psychotactics.com/beat-inertia/   .

There seem to be two sets of clients: really painful ones and amazing It’s the painful ones that seem to drain an enormous amount of energy and time. They’re the ones that you constantly have to battle with. But how do you know in advance how to avoid these clients? There are red flags in place. In this episode you’ll learn  how at Psychotactics (for the most part) we avoid painful clients. ---------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why and how to add  barriers Part 2: How to filter through testimonials Part 3: How to spot ‘Red Flags’ Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. ---------------- How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Which ants have more offspring? The ants that forage more and hence have more food supplies? Or the ants that are do less foraging and hence have less food? Incredible as it may seem it’s the ants that restrain their foraging that fare better Biological studies have almost always believed that species that have the greatest food supply tend to do better. A Stanford study by Deborah M. Gordon demonstrates how harvester ants experience greater success when they’re picky. This picky, picky, picky habit applies quite neatly to client acquisition When you first start out in business, it seems like a good idea to go out and forage for new clients all the time. Over time, you’ll learn that there are good clients and energy-sapping clients. And that by appealing to everyone you may get success, but at Psychotactics, we’ve found that seemingly counterintuitive behaviour seems to work a lot better. That instead of trying to increase our reach, we’ve narrowed it down In the ant world, success is measured by a greater number of offspring. In our world at Psychotactics, success is measured by the amount of control we have over our lives. The ability to work with the clients we want, earn a profit that’s sizeable, yet within a pre-defined limit. Most importantly, it has allowed us to take three months off and travel the world on vacation. In a world that’s increasingly driving itself crazy, we live with an island mentality. And a significant part of this success lies in the fact that we have great clients. But no one just has great clients. You have to pick great clients. So how do we pick our clients? Over the past 16 years, we’ve used three core methods. And these methods have worked amazingly well for us. They are: – Adding barriers – Filtering through testimonials. – Red flags Part 1—Barriers: The First Step To Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Let’s say you tried to buy the copywriting course off our site. You randomly go to the sales page, plop down a couple of thousand of dollars and then wait for your download. The download might never show up. Instead there’d be a back check on your record Yup, just like an employer does a check on your past before hiring you, a check is done on your history with Psychotactics as well. Have you been a subscriber? For how long? Have you bought The Brain Audit yet? When did you do that? Have you bought other smaller products? If the answer is no, it’s likely that you’ll get your couple of thousand dollars right back in your bank account. So why is the case? It’s a barrier in place. And we have rules. And the rules are simple. You need to have subscribed. You need to have read The Brain Audit. Without jumping over those barriers, you’re not truly qualified to be part of our system. So yes, we may check if you’ve bought and consumed the products with another email address, but if the answer is no, then the money goes bouncing right back to your account. I remember an event in Chicago quite clearly I’d just spoken at the System Seminar. I’d just given a presentation, and a member of the audience approached me to buy our info-products course. Was he a subscriber? Did he have The Brain Audit? Would he buy The Brain Audit? His said he wasn’t planning to buy The Brain Audit. He just wanted the info-products course. And he was willing to spend his couple of thousand dollars if I just swiped his credit card. You can tell how this story goes, right? To this day, customers can’t understand why we’d walk away from thousands of dollars over a measly subscription and a copy of The Brain Audit. But think about it for a second. Would you marry someone who you’d never had a first date with? Would you even consider marrying them without engaging with them at least a couple of times? And if you’re not the marrying kind, it doesn’t matter. We still understand the concept of testing the waters, putting up the barriers just to see how the other person reacts. At Psychotactics, we know how the other person reacts The greater the barriers the client has to climb, the more they stick around. The more they stick around, the more we get to know each other and help each other move forward. And that is why we have a 3% or less refund rate on bigger products. It’s because the client has qualified themselves repeatedly. It’s not like there’s a zero-refund rate. Sometimes, despite all the due diligence between the client and us, there’s still a mismatch of the product. A client may expect the product to do one thing, and it may do another. That’s fine in our books. We know the client has gone through the steps and one rainy day doesn’t make a monsoon. The opposite is true as well The refund rate climbs to about 98% if the client is not a subscriber. Yes, read that again. A whopping 98% of those who easy come, also easy go. If the client hasn’t subscribed or bought The Brain Audit, they still can’t buy our bigger products. They can buy the smaller, specific products like Website components or ‘Black Belt Presentations’, and they do. The moment we see that order come through with no history of client/Psychotactics interaction, we can be almost sure that a refund will follow. It gets worse… Some of those folk won’t just ask for a refund. They simply ask for a chargeback. It means we get a black mark against our name (Too many chargebacks and your merchant account can be closed down). Plus there’s a $20 penalty that we have to pay. That’s not nice at all, is it? This punk, whoever he is (and it’s usually a “he”) is running rampant picking up stuff only to refund it or ask for a chargeback. Even if the person simply asks for a refund, that’s another 10 minutes of your life down the drain as you go through the process of refunding the amount and responding to the “customer”. So why not put the barrier in place for the smaller products as well? Remember that you’re running a small business. And so are we. Some things can be monitored and others can’t. A stream of small products go out of the door every single day, but less so with the bigger products. So while we push hard for clients to have a relationship, some of them are just walk in with every intention of sneaking away in the morning. Everything can’t be monitored, but as the products and services get bigger, the barriers can indeed be put in place. Having barriers in place is a good thing The moment someone puts a few thousand dollars in your bank account, you feel pretty entitled to it. And some folks have put in $10,000 into our account (when we used to do the Protégé sessions) and yes, you feel entitled to that as well. But don’t cozy up to the dollars just yet. You need to do the background check. Find out if the person is a good match. Do your due diligence. A little due diligence goes a long way Clients that jump over the barriers stick around for years to come. You don’t have to be like all those marketers out there chasing endlessly after new clients. Instead, you can have a group of clients that trust you and will be more than happy to buy your products or services in future. And yes, there will be the occasional refund, but nothing very dramatic. And that’s what barriers will do for your business. Yes, it’s scary Yes, it’s necessary. Do the background check. Put up the barriers. It makes good business sense. But barriers are only one way to avoid energy-sapping clients. Most trouble shows up well in advance, and we just ignore the red flags. So how do you learn to work with red flags? Let’s find out in this second part. Part 2—Red Flags: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Do you know where the word “vaccination” comes from? It’s derived from the Latin word for “cow” (which is “vacca”). And there’s a strong connection between cows and viruses. For 3000 years, smallpox was wantonly killing people. In the 18th century alone, over 400,000 people died of smallpox. But in 1796, a British doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that dairymaid got cow pox Cowpox was a less dangerous virus but still related to smallpox. Once they contracted cowpox, the dairymaids were completely immune to smallpox. So Jenner injected a young boy with the cowpox virus and then later inoculated him with smallpox. And the boy didn’t get sick because the body has an immune system. And that immune system was able to figure out the virus with the lowly cowpox. When smallpox came knocking, the body had the red flags in place. It was able to identify and destroy the virus before it was able to do any more damage. At Psychotactics we’ve learned to look for red flags when dealing with clients -Not showing up on time -Not doing what they said they’d do -Not returning calls or emails -Clients that want quick results or to bypass the usual barriers. These are all red flags for us at Psychotactics And sometimes you get caught unaware by a situation. Just like an unknown virus that may attack your system, it’s possible for clients to make seemingly mundane requests. Like the one that a client made at one of our workshops. “Can I bring my teenage daughter along to the workshop?” he asked. He promised she wouldn’t be a problem, and since he was going to be in the workshop for three days, he asked if she could sit at the back of the room. She wasn’t going to participate, just quietly sit and watch the presentation. Can you see a problem in that request? Well, neither could we. That seemingly simple request caused an enormous amount of grief. Instead of simply sticking to the back of the room, she went along with her father for the group sessions and began to participate. Not only was the group unhappy with the introduction of the daughter, but the father started to get aggressive. He’d defend whatever the girl said, much to the frustration of the group. Most red flags are consistent in a business You’ve experienced the issues before, and you can see the problem approaching at a great distance, yet sometimes we lower our guard and let the virus in. And this creates great havoc and sucks up a lot of energy. I had to tell the client that his daughter could no longer sit in the workshop or participate in any way. This got him all upset and both he and his daughter left. Now, if a client asks for exceptions, we walk through what can go wrong and make a decision accordingly. However, the least energy-sapping plan of action is to have everything down on paper You need to let the client know what they can do, and what they can’t do. Writing down what they can’t do allows you to anticipate the issues before they pop up. It’s like a form of cow pox injected into the system, so that if a problem should arise, you’re ready with your paperwork. Incredible as it may sound, the moment something is down on paper, clients tend to play along. When we choose clients, we make sure we put barriers in their way, but paying attention to the red flags makes sure that once we avoid disruptive clients. However, these are only two of the methods to getting good clients. The third one does all the grunt work without us lifting a finger. Incredibly, this system of choosing clients comes from the usage of testimonials. Testimonials? That doesn’t make sense. How is a testimonial a filtration system? You’ll be surprised at what a photo and text can do. Let’s find out in this third part where we take a deep dive into testimonials. Part 3—Testimonials: How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics If you ever had the need to go to a dating site, you wouldn’t start reading the information, would you? You’d first look at the photos We instinctively look at photos because we recognise ourselves in the photos. A photo tends to reflect who you are. And you get a live demonstration of this phenomenon when you go to a marketing site where they have exaggerated promises. They may promise you’ll make a lot of money, or get results quickly. But don’t read the information, just gaze at the photos You’ll find to your amazement that you don’t like the look of many of the people in the testimonials. You don’t know those people, yet there’s something about them that sets off tiny alarm bells. Yet, there are others who want a quick result. They want to become millionaires overnight. They are desperate, and unlike you, they find the photos very appealing. Photos send out a powerful message to potential clients If you put photos of clients that are reliable, ethical, clients that you like and want to work with in future, that’s what you’ll get. Which is why we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time. And what’s the result of this photo strategy? If you’re a client or have been on our courses, membership site or workshops, you know what’s coming next. The clients on our courses are easily the most helpful and the kindest people you’re likely to find on any course. Clients often ask: “How do you get such great people in your courses?” What kind of filtration system do you have in place?” The answer lies in the photographs In the past, we’ve made the mistake of putting a photo of a client who didn’t meet with our picky nature. Almost immediately, we’d get other painful clients. If you’d like to try this experiment for yourself, put photos of painful clients on your site and you’ll start to attract similarly migraine-inducing clients. If you put in the photos of clients you like to work with, you’ll attract great clients too. It’s a simple filtration system, and it works amazingly well. But photos alone will not do the job You will also need testimonials that read like an experience. When you look at the testimonials of our membership site at 5000bc, you’ll see they don’t just say “wow”. They read as if someone were talking to you. When it comes to more expensive products or services, the testimonials are sometimes 500-1500 words long. And the entire testimonial is about the user experience. A testimonial that says, “that was the hardest course in my life” gets attention But it also attracts the right kind of audience. It drives away those wimpy people who don’t want to put in the effort and think that business is just some magic trick. It drives those people to the “gurus” of the Internet. When those “get rich quick” crowd clear, what we have are kind, friendly, hard working people. People who have similar goals, similar ethics, and behaviour. And most of all, we at Psychotactics have no trouble. We get to do the things we love. Clients admire that we work hard and that we take our three months off as well. They cheer us on because that’s their goal as well. And that’s pretty much how the Psychotactics strategy for getting great clients. Time to summarise, eh? Summary We started with barriers Barriers may seem counter-productive and yet they’re a filtration system. The biggest reason why you have to wait to join 5000bc, or pay to be on a waiting list or can’t do a workshop until you’ve read The Brain Audit, is because we’ve put a barrier in place. And the bigger the price of the product or service, the bigger the wall. If clients don’t get over that barrier, they’re not serious about succeeding. That speed bump drives out the “quick and easy” crowd and leaves us with clients that appreciate steady progress and hard work. The red flags that show up are the next factor to consider When you’re in business, you get taken aback by client requests. And at first, you want to make the client happy. But you’ll find some situations are consistent red flags. It’s not like we don’t ignore the red flags. We do, and when we do, we pay the price. But by and large, when a red flag goes up, we pull up our rules and regulations and stick firmly what’s written on paper. Putting down what we will do and won’t do enables us to predict the future a bit. So yes, we get out that paper and write down what we will not do. Putting down our red flags on paper, ensures we get clients that stick to our guidelines and not spoiled brats who want to make their own rules. Finally it’s the role of testimonials Testimonials have many aspects to them, but the main aspects are the photos and the experience. We pick and choose photos of clients who we adore. We put their testimonials on our site, and not surprisingly we get similar clients (Note: If your photo is not on our website, it’s not because we don’t adore you. It’s just a space issue). We also don’t just put testimonials, but put in experiences instead. An experience is a before and after scenario. And it may go on for a few sentences but often for over 1000 words. And this again filters out clients. Those who are in a hurry don’t read the experiences and just leave in the hope of amazing riches. And we’re happy to see them leave because our goal is to create clients who value not just information, but skill. It’s the skill of writing, of creating your sales page—it’s these skills that matter in business. There’s no easy way and when our clients describe the effort they need to put in, it drives away those who want shortcuts. Ants that succeed forage less often We at Psychotactics have grown our list very slowly over the years. We’ve done almost no affiliate-sales, no advertising, don’t have Google AdWords and joint ventures. And yet, we’ve had a lifestyle that most others only dream off. We take weekends off; we take three months off, and we have clients that keep coming back to do our courses, workshops and buy products and services. Like the ants we’re picky Which is why we’ve had a blast. Over the past few years, we’ve had lunches, dinners and had wine and beer, individually, with over 1000 clients. We’ve gone on vacations with clients too. They’ve been invited to our home and in turn have made us comfortable in theirs. Being picky has its rewards. You get the cream of the crop. And you get to lead a satisfying life on your own terms. What else could you want? Next Step: Read or listen to—The Meaning Of Life? Or A Life of Meaning? How To Solve This Eternal Problem http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/   P.S. Do you sometimes wonder if planning books are written just for the ‘organised’ people? So year after year you sit down and create a list of things you want to achieve. Then suddenly it’s April, and you’ve not really moved ahead as you’d expected.And hey, this phenomenon isn’t new. It’s not like you’re not trying to achieve stuff, but something always seems to derail your goals. How do you stop it from happening yet again? Find out if Chaos Planning is for you. http://www.psychotactics.com/products/chaos-planning-forget-business-planning-and-goal-setting-start-with-chaos-planning/

In an interview with Tim Ferris, marketer, Seth Godin says that 97% clients drop out from his online courses. And under good conditions, 80% drop out. Yet there's are three core reasons why clients drop out and unless you tackle those issues, it's impossible to stop the dropout rate from spiralling. At Psychotactics, our dropout rate is a measly 10%. Which means that 90% of the clients finish the course. How is that possible? How come there's such a massive difference? This episode shows you what you can do to achieve far superior goals than many, if not most trainers online. ------------------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The power of energy management Part 2: Why the Safe Zone is important Part 3: Why you need group filtration and how to design it ------------------------------------ The Dropout Factor 97% of client drop out in most online courses. 80% of clients drop out from my courses. – Seth Godin The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. – Michel Thomas When you think about dropouts, you almost always think about the student. Yet, the responsibility lies with the teacher. It’s this seismic shift that rattles most trainers because in their mind it’s clear that they’ve done the best they could. Despite their best efforts, students still drop out. So why does this dropout occur? And what could you do as a teacher to avoid this dropout? There are three core areas which cause a dropout 1) Energy management 2) Safe zone (or the lack of it) 3) Group filtration and design Dropout Factor 1: Let’s start with energy management Back when I was about 12, my uncle gave me a Nintendo video game called Snoopy Tennis. The game was pretty simple. Snoopy, the dog, had to bat off the tennis balls being hit at him by Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had this languid, easy-going serve that was easy to handle. And then Lucy would show up and hit the tennis balls at high speed. If you survived the Lucy barrage, she’d go away, and it would be back to the nice and easy Charlie Brown serves. So what’s Snoopy Tennis got to do with energy management? Energy management involves designing your training module. Does it just have modules that jostle each other for prominence or is it designed like Snoopy Tennis? A training module that has Snoopy Tennis in mind will have modules that are easy, slightly difficult and then screamingly tough. But you can’t sustain the screamingly tough part for too long. You have to go back to easy once again. If you don’t, you get dropouts When the going gets too hard for too long, your clients are going to have an enormous amount of energy depletion. Handling Lucy in that video game is fine for a while, but if the intensity isn’t reduced, the client gets tired. Tiredness, not your course, is the biggest reason for dropouts. Once the fuel needle goes consistently down to zero, dropouts are guaranteed. To avoid this situation from ever occurring, you’ve got to sit down and design your course. But design is often not enough because you’ve also got to consider flexibility in your agenda Take for example the Article Writing Course that’s in progress right now. The entire course has been designed to be like a Snoopy Tennis game. From Week 1 to Week 4 there’s a gentle progression. Week 5 is a bit of a jolt. After spending the first four weeks building up topics, outlining and working on the start of their article, the writers now have to turn out a chunky part of the complete article. Almost immediately the “truancy” rate spikes The writers are frozen because the jump is so great. And yet there are times when you can’t help but bring on Lucy into the game. In the past, I’d make sure Lucy stayed on for a long time, and it would cause an enormous amount of exhaustion. Exhaustion is one thing, but I noticed that if I reduced the intensity shortly after, the work would get better. So once the intensity is turned on, you keep it on, but then you get Charlie back into the mix. Which means that one week will involve writing 3-4 articles, but the following week will slide down to just two. What you’re working on all the time as a teacher is managing energy You’re making sure you keep designing and re-designing the assignments, so that it’s not too easy, or too challenging. And that you have to keep your teaching agenda flexible if you see a considerable spike in “truancy.” This energy management doesn’t apply solely to online courses or training It applies to workshops as well. If you get to a Psychotactics workshop, you’ll find we have lots of breaks. There are a ton of tea breaks, group breaks, walking assignment breaks. All of them are designed to lower the Lucy factor and let the brain absorb what it’s just learned. We also have a scavenger hunt and depending on the type of workshop, we may have a day-long break. For instance, for the New Zealand workshop in Queenstown, we have a four-day workshop, but we work for two days, then go off to eat, drink and be merry. It’s only then that we return to our work. All these breaks may seem frivolous to the untrained mind Why bother with breaks when you have so much content to cover? It’s because of how your brain functions. As you spend time thinking and learning, your brain starts to accumulate a ton of waste product. The more waste product you have, the harder it is to function. You’re now in Lucy mode all the time. But the moment you get a break, the brain is back in Charlie mode and absorbing the information. This brings us to the end of the first reason why we have dropouts It’s a lack of course design. A lack of the trainer to watch what’s happening and to mindlessly plough ahead. When trainers blame the student, they’re going against the Michel Thomas principle: The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. And energy management is just one of the issues. The second issue is the safe zone—or rather the lack of it. P.S. We have about 2-3 clients drop out from every course. To me, that’s high. That’s a whole 10-12%. I take responsibility for that. Dropout Factor 2: The Safe Zone (Or The Lack of It) Ask a seven-year-old to learn Photoshop, and they’ll happily play along. Ask an adult to do the same and they hesitate. So what’s changed between the adult and the seven-year-old? The answer is time. A seven-year-old has little or responsibility and therefore endless time. If they get the instructions wrong, they can keep at the learning until they get it right—if they get it right. Adults don’t have such luxury at their disposal. And so we learn to fear mistakes As we grow up, we realise that mistakes not only rattle us but cost us an enormous amount of time and energy. Having to learn new skills seem essential, but all of it is at the expense of precious time and energy. Which causes every zone we enter,  to theoretically,  become an unsafe zone. Step into a new forum, that’s unsafe Learn a new software; that’s unsafe too. Any new venture of any kind is paradoxically exciting and frustrating at the same time. Which is why you have to create a safe zone The first step towards safety is understanding that everything is intimidating—especially when you’re learning a skill. If you’re just a passive learner in a course, there’s no need to apply anything you’ve learned. The moment you have to apply the skill, intimidation is all pervasive. And the only way—yes the only way—to reduce intimidation is to break down everything into smaller bits. Let’s take the cartooning course, for example Even in a seemingly fun-filled course like cartooning (that’s the DaVinci cartooning course), you have almost instant intimidation. There’s nothing to look over and learn, but there are intimidation factors aplenty. The first week isn’t about learning to draw cartoons Instead, a student gets to know their groups, is guided on how to post in the forum and is given instructions on how to link their cartoons to the forum. The entire week is about settling in and getting comfortable. Then, once the course begins, no one goes about drawing Donald Duck. Instead, you have a series of tiny increments that start with drawing circly circles. For many, a cartooning course is far more intimidating than any other course Think of how you feel when you draw something. You feel like you’re a seven-year-old again. Your artwork seems almost Neanderthal—and yet the goal is to become a highly accomplished cartoonist by the end of the course. And hundreds of students have done just that. They’ve done the course, and gone from Cave painting to polished artworks. A lot of this progress is achieved through precise instructions, but the biggest factor of all is the creation of the safe zone. The way to go about the creation of the safe zone is to ask yourself three questions: 1) Is the course being conducted with tiny increments or big jumps? How do you know? 2) Do the clients have time to settle in before the class as well as during the course? 3) Is there a constant feedback mechanism in place? And there’s a benchmark to know if your course is safe Do clients come back to do another course, another training? At Psychotactics, most—yes, most—end up doing two and three courses. Some do as many as five online courses as well as attend live workshops. At the point of writing this article, we’ve announced a live workshop in New Zealand. With no sales page, no real details about the course, six clients have already paid for the workshop. Why would they make such a seemingly irrational move? Why sign up for workshops with no sales pages, attend so many back to back workshops, do so many online courses? There are many cheaper courses both online and offline. So, why bother? A big chunk of the answer lies in the safe zone Unless a client feels safe, they’re unlikely to learn. And your job as a trainer is to create that safe zone through tiny increments, through getting clients to settle in and most importantly to allow them to reach out to you. When they reach out to you through a feedback mechanism, and you make changes, they know they’re being listened to. They know they’re not just a cog in the wheel, but an integral part of the course. The fear goes down The safety goes up. Now there’s less of a reason to drop out, isn’t there? And yet the dropout factor looms large So what keeps the client coming back? The answer lies in the power of the group and how you as a trainer filter the group. What’s this filtration all about? Dropout Factor 3: Group Filtration and Design Back in 2010, we conducted a workshop around Washington D.C and we did something we’d never done before. We decided not to have any filters when letting clients sign up for the event. How wrong could things go, we thought to ourselves? As you can guess, things went terribly wrong Only one person at the event hadn’t read The Brain Audit. That one person happened to cause an enormous amount of confusion, not only during the workshop proceedings but also in the group. And it was all because we didn’t do our usually “pedantic” system of filtration. When you don’t filter the group, you create a wild card, and that can disrupt the entire learning experience. Which is why you need group filtration When you put specific barriers in place, the group members have to qualify themselves to be part of the group. This changes the parameters considerably. In most of the courses and workshops at Psychotactics, all you have to do is read The Brain Audit. Even so, it’s a barrier and attracts people who are united in purpose. It seems bizarre that just a book should make such a difference, but a book often expresses more than just information. It can express your philosophy, method and attracts clients who have a similar ethical standard. However, group filtration doesn’t stop there Whether you’re looking at live onsite workshops or online courses, people aren’t thrown willy nilly into a group. Every group is segregated by: – Existing members alongside non-members – A balance of women and men – Those who we know well vs. those we don’t know as well. In every situation the groups are chosen, which is why there’s so much activity in every group Groups only work together if they feel safe, enjoy each other’s company and then it seems like a party, rather than intense work. In such a case, dropout rates plunge. Clients show up every day, several times a day, helping and spurring each other on. At the end of Week 5, a group of 25 clients generated an average of 1200 posts a week. Of course, I’ve contributed to at least half of those posts, but even so, it’s quite an achievement in group dynamics, don’t you think? The size of the group also matters The group size is ideally between 5-7 members. If you have fewer and just a couple of clients from that group dropout, the entire group can go into a spiral. If you have more than 7, it’s hard to keep up with what everyone’s up to, and the group soon loses the tight-knit feeling. That feeling of knowing each other well is what causes the group to edge forward together as they take on the tiny increments. And when faced with a tough assignment, they all hunker down and boost each other’s spirits. Leaders emerge within every group, as is the case anywhere, but these leaders are kind and helpful. Why would you want to drop out of such a group? Your goal isn’t to be part of the group. You don’t even know how the group is put together, and yet when you discover the group dynamic working for you, you realise that it’s the group that will get you to your destination. When someone has helped you, your human nature kicks in and you want to give that help back in any way possible. As a teacher, your job is to filter the group Your job is to design the group. And most of all, it’s to get the group to know each other very, very well. The more they interact with each other, the more they bond and the further they’ll go. Not surprisingly, the drop out almost ceases to exist. You’ll still get dropouts But if you look closely at the those that dropout, you’ll see a very clear pattern. They didn’t stay around long enough to bond with the group. In our courses, at least, the maximum number of dropouts (online) occur within the first or second week. If the members haven’t show up consistently within the first two weeks, they’re the most likely to drop out. Which is why, as a trainer, working on the group is almost as important as energy management and creating the safe zone. These three elements become so vital that to ignore any one of these three is like begging for trouble. This brings us to our summary: – Design your training with energy in mind. Let clients have a mix of Charlie Brown weeks before giving them Lucy weeks. And always go back to Charlie Brown. – The safe zone is critical to avoiding dropouts. Tiny increments, feedback loops, getting client to settle in are all very crucial. You know you’ve created a safe zone when you get lots and lots of questions; when clients e-mail you as well as ask questions on the forum; when they bring up issues that might be even slightly confrontational. That’s when you realise you’ve created a safe space. Your final benchmark is the repeat client. If they come back repeatedly, that is the one factor that tells you you’ve made them a lot safer than your competition. – Finally, it’s the group that matters. A teacher can only do so much. The group feels a great warmth towards their members, but only if the members are equally kind and helpful. If you notice a group member not interacting with the group, there’s a very high chance of that member dropping out. And you, as the teacher have to design and filter the group so that they’re a good mix. The dropout rate on Internet based sites is phenomenally high It’s as high as 97% in some cases. But Michel Thomas (if he were alive) would say something quite different. He’d say: The responsibility of the learning is with the teacher. And he’d be right. When you take the responsibility on yourself, you stop blaming the student and redesign your teaching in a way that suits them, not yourself. And that’s when you have almost no drop out rate! P.S. Read or listen to—How To Avoid Blindspots In Your Business: The Rip Van Winkle Effect http://www.psychotactics.com/how-success-causes-blind-spot/