The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Starting up is always rough—and especially when you're a small business that at first has no clients and no credibility. In this episode, 5000bc member, Christopher Cook talks to Sean D'Souza about how to get over the inner chatter. How to get past those starting blocks and whether it's possible to be superhuman. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/61 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems?(http://www.5000bc.com/) Brain Audit: Why Clients Buy (And Why They Don’t)  (http://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-marketing-strategy-and-structure/) Goodies: How To Win The Resistance Game(http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/) -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why Roadblocks Are Universal Part 2: Why Talent Is Not Inborn Part 3: How To Successfully Get Rid of Self-Doubt -------------------- The  Transcript This is indeed The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza.   Back in the year 2000, I was still a cartoonist and I was doing both cartooning and marketing at the same time. At that point, I decided that I wanted to be the best in the world at marketing, but that meant that I had to start up. I had to start up all over again. I don’t know much about marketing. I hadn’t read that many marketing books and this whole factor of starting up was hard enough just as a business. I was also new at New Zealand. I just moved in from India and so it was like a double start up. Often people ask me this question, “How did you manage? What was the start up like? Does this internet marketing thing work just for some people and not for others? These are the questions that Christopher C was asking me and this interview is about that. It’s about debt start up, the obstacles. It’s a whole bunch of questions that Christopher C decided, “Let him answer it,” so here I am answering it. Interestingly, as I was going through this whole interview and listening to it, it seemed like almost a compellation of many of the podcasts that I have done before. We’re covering topics like roadblocks and mindset and routine and you probably heard it before. It’s just a different version of it you could say. It’s on Skype, but it’s still live and we started out with roadblocks. Christopher asked me what the roadblocks are, what do I see as roadblocks in day-to-day life. The thing with roadblocks is that most people think that it only happens to them and it’s not true at all. Part 1:Why Roadblocks Are Universal The first thing is that roadblocks are universal. They don’t care about you and don’t care about me. Their only real purpose in life is to teach you a lesson. When people don’t learn the lesson the roadblocks pop up again and again and again. When you learn that lesson, they disappear and other roadblocks show up. If you don’t deal with the roadblocks in the first instance, they pile up and they become bigger and bigger and bigger and that’s the part that people don’t get. They think that somehow the roadblock is going to disappear and it doesn’t disappear. It’s there specifically to teach you a lesson. I’ll give you a simple example. We have several websites. Over the years, we’ve made them very popular or they’ve become popular and so they attract hackers. In 2014, 3 of our websites attracted hackers. They didn’t really tear it down, but they created enough havoc so that we had to change our whole system. We had to from Dune to WordPress. We had to move all the stuff across and now we’re in the process of redesigning all 3 websites, which is it might seemed like just a simple project but considering the size of our websites that’s about probably conservatively a year, a year and a halfs’ work and this is working very quickly. We ignore that. We ignore the hackers. They’ve been sniping away and then we’ll just fix it, a little bandage here and there. Then eventually they came in a big way and got us blacklisted on Google and all those kinds of things. That’s when we had to pay attention and this is what I see as roadblocks. I see that everyone has them and if you don’t do something when you have the time to do it, which of course we don’t, then they will come back again. Part 2: Why Talent Is Not Inborn The second question is something that I’ve heard many times before and that is, “You, Sean, have natural talent and skills and I don’t have these skills and I don’t have this talent. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I don’t believe in inborn talent.” That’s a completely different topic, but the question was, “You seemed to be superhuman that is Sean, you are superhuman. You get so much stuff done. You draw cartoons. You cook. You write books. You do workshops. You do all of this stuff.” This is not me praising myself. This is just what Christopher brought up. He said that at some level it’s intimidating. At some level it feels like only some people can do it. Is it true that just some people can do it or can anyone do it? That’s when I launched into my answer. They’re exactly right. The reason why I said they’re exactly right is because the person I am today was not the person I was 10 years ago or the person I was 20 years ago. When I look back at what I could do 10 years ago or 12 years ago, it was a lot less than I could do today. I knew a lot less than I know today. I’m not just saying I read more books or did learn some more stuff and went to more seminars. What I’m saying is that even a simple task like writing an article, a simple task like writing an article would take me 2 days, 2 whole days. I don’t know many people that take 2 days to write an article, but it was sure frustration for me. It sounds like marketing, because I sell an article-writing course and it sounds like a good thing. You take 2 days to write an article, now you do it in 45 minutes. It was a reality and the problem was I didn’t know how that article would turn out. The question of me doing any podcast, the question of me doing any webinars, any speeches, anything of that sort it was totally out of the question. The first time I spoke when I got to Oakland I forgot what I had to say. We had to take it in mid-break. When I wrote my first book, it was only 16 pages. We put some cartoons in it and it became 20 pages. When I look at all the cartoons that I did back then, they were pretty amateur and people say, “Yes, but at least you could draw.” Sure I could draw, but I couldn’t write. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do a lot of things that I can do today. Not only am I good at what I do today, but I can be very quick and very effective so I’m not the same person. When you say someone is superhuman, it means that along the way that person has spent a lot of time and a lot of effort and continues to spend a lot of time and effort to get to that superhuman status. You know this to be true because you look at top performers. You look at the top tennis player in the world, the top swimmer, the top runner. You can say you can go blue in face saying that they have natural abilities, which we will talk about, but look at what they’re doing. They’re still in the track 4 or 5, 6 hours a day. They still have coaches. They still have all kinds of training. Then you look at yourself and you think, “I manage to get half an hour of listening to a podcast last week because I was too busy.” I’m sorry but it’s not going to happen by magic. The way to get to that level where you are superhuman is to be able to do something that superhuman people do. The reason why they got to superhuman and I’m sorry that I’m referring to myself as superhuman; that was not the goal, the point is that I see myself completely differently from 6 months ago or a year ago or 2 years ago or 10 years ago. As much as I like, what I’m doing right now I like the articles that I write. I like the cartoons that I draw. I like the stuff that I do. I know that it will be totally crappy in my own eyes 10 years from now. I know that because I’ve learned so much I will change so much, everything will change. Everything has to change because that’s how it works. At this point in the interview, we shifted into the key elements or keystone. Keystone is the foundation on which a lot of things are built. The question was, what keystone elements do you need to be superhuman? I’m still not comfortable with superhuman but since that’s the term being used in the interview, we continue with the term superhuman. I’ll go and get my kryptonite on the side. I think the first element is that it has to be daily. You have to take an analogy of brushing teeth. You can brush once a week. You can brush once a month. You can brush once a year. It totally depends on you. What sets in is a factor of decay and your reign is exactly the same. It’s not going to turn on lights and keep them on if you decide that you’re not going to learn. It just going to switch them off or it’s going to put them in dimmer setting. You know this because you can learn something and you can forget about it and then you learn it again and then it comes up a little brighter. Unless you keep adding to it, unless you keep polishing and unless you have what is called a daily routine it’s not going to work. There is no way on earth that you can be where you want to be unless you have a daily routine. It might be just 15 minutes. You might just take a walk for 15 minutes and listen to something and you never remember anything. You don’t have to remember anything. You just have to listen. Just listen to it like radio, just like you went for a walk with a friend and you listen and you can’t remember 99 percent of what they said. That 1 percent when you add it up, add 1 to 1 you think they would end up as being 2, but it doesn’t end up as being 2. Eventually, the 1 percent plus 1 percent plus 1 percent becomes exponential and suddenly you jump up 20 percent and then 50 percent and that’s how it works. The first thing is definitely that you have to do something on a daily basis. How long? I can’t say. I spend at least an hour learning every day if not longer and I have a very busy day, busier day than most. The second thing that you have to look at is a teacher. You have to. You can waste so much time trying to work your way through a system that if you don’t find the right teacher then you’re just wasting time. The point is how do you find the right teacher. It’s the same thing as trying to find the right spouse in life or right girlfriend or boyfriend or friend for that matter. You have to reject a lot of people. If you go out there and say, “I’ll go to the first person that’s promising me all these instant happiness and riches and stuff,” that’s what you get. You get no instant anything. The teacher makes a huge difference. The daily stuff makes a huge difference. Part 3: How To Successfully Get Rid of Self-Doubt The third thing is just that a lot of people have to get rid of the self-doubt. It doesn’t matter who you are and how successful you are. You are going to have self-doubt. There is no one on the planet who doesn’t have self-doubt. The doubt performers they all have self-doubt. What they do is they have to work out a system to get rid of the self-doubts so that when they run their next race, they’re thinking, “I might not win this race,” but they still end up with the gold medal or the silver medal. Maybe they showed up in that race, but the next race and the next race and the next race. I hate to nail anything down to keystone stuff but this is it. If you find the teacher and the teacher will have a system, they will have a group and you do something daily that helps you get rid of the most critical element that stops you, which is self-doubt. This took us at the topic of daily routine, what I do every single day to make sure that my daily routine stays daily. The thing that you have to do is when you create a habit, you’ve got to understand that there is a cue, routine, and reward. These 3 elements have to be in place. Cue is like an alarm clock. You wake up on cue and then there’s a routine. You put on your shoes and you go for a walk and then there’s a reward. The point is that without that reward in place, the cue and the routine are not going to happen. You decide I’m going to listen to podcast every day or I’m going to read every day. What’s the reward? That’s what I would ask first, what is your reward? If you don’t have the reward every single day, there’s a very good chance that’s it’s going to fall by the way. There’s a pretty good chance that your cue will set up, your alarm will set up, you’ll get into your shoes but then you’ll decide it’s raining I’m not going to go. Cue, routine and reward have to be in place but first you have to ask yourself what is the reward. Some people say, “I don’t need the reward. I have to be self-motivated.” No, no, no, that’s not how it works. You first figure out your reward if you want to learn something what happens at the end of that something, if you want to do something what happens to the end of that something. When people do courses, for instance, the first time we did a workshop that’s speaking engagement very early in our career in 2002. I spoke at this event and there were about 30 people in the room and most of them bought this PDF from me. Right after we did that, we went out. We bought a bottle of wine and we celebrated and I still have that bottle with me; the empty bottle obviously. The point that the reward matters, every time when you have the reward in place you know. This is what going through this whole routine. Once you have that in place you then have to seek out what is called group, because an individual is not usually capable of going by themselves. When you have a group, the other persons buzz you on. They say, “Are we going for a run today?” You go, “We’ll go.” Having these elements in place make a difference. This is how I go for a walk every day. When I go for a walk, I have my iPhone with me so I listen to podcast or I learn languages or I do stuff like that. I listen to audio books so for 1-1/2 hour I’m learning. Some days I’ll just speak to my wife. We’ll brainstorm, but at the end of that there’s a cup of coffee. Then I have my cup of coffee and I come back and I’ve learned something and I’ve done something and that’s the reward. You have to determine the reward and that’s my routine. That’s how I go about stuff. At this point in the interview, Christopher brought up something that I’d mentioned when I just started doing watercolors. You may or may not know the story but in 2010, I went out to learn watercolors. I’d gone to several courses and learn anything. I went to this guy Ted and he told me that I should practice every day. He said, “Get watercolor book and just paint every day.” I decided to paint what I did every day, which is just my life. When I started, I mentioned in 5000bc, which is the membership site, and in the forum I said, “I’m starting on this watercolor journey. I’m not very good at it but I will be in 2 years’ time.” That is what Christopher brought up. He said, “That mindset stayed with me the fact that you said you will be good in 2 years’ time.” I’ll give you a better thing than that. I’ll give you an analogy. Imagine for some reason you went blind. It sounds terrible and I wouldn’t want to be blind, but lots of people go blind for whatever reason. What’s going to happen in the next year, for one, you’re going to be able to find your way around the city almost by yourself. That’s the first thing that’s going to happen. The second thing is you’re going to learn a brand new language that you’ve never encountered before, which is braille. Third, you’re going to be able to hear stuff. Because of how your brain functions, you’re going to hear stuff more profoundly than ever before because you can’t see anymore. When you look at the mindset of what happens to a blind person in a year’s time, they have got 3 sets of you can call them skills that they never had before. It is beyond any doubt that if you decided that you’re going to do something and you do it on a regular basis, you will be better in a year’s time. You don’t have to do much. You don’t even have to have a great teacher. You don’t have to have a great system. You can get there, say, record a podcast everyday. You can, say, do a drawing every day. It’s not going to be very fulfilling because what are you going to do. No one sees it. No one looks at it. The point is that after a year you will be better. If you find a good teacher and you find a good system and you do all that other stuff then you will be a professional in year’s time. It’s not an if or a but, but it is a guarantee. You will be professional in a year’s time. That’s how blind people learn to type. That’s how they learn to write. That’s how they learn to read. That’s beyond any doubt. Then we came full circle with the hardship bit. We talked about scarcity, about not having that skill or resources and how to still go forward. A lot of people they believe that they can’t make that they don’t have the skill. They don’t have the resources. Frankly speaking nobody does. A lot of people when they say they don’t have resources they don’t really understand what they’re saying. I didn’t grow up in a very poor family. I grew up in a middle-class family, but even so I didn’t have access to a library. I had to go out there and buy my books. My father had to subscribe [the stuff 19:44]. A lot of the things that people take for granted especially in western countries you can go to the library. You can get any book you want. You have an internet connection. You have all these things. Even if you just look at yourself going back 25 years, you didn’t have an internet connection. You didn’t have so many things like a mobile phone, all these things that you take for granted today. In that sense, you are quite deprived. You may do with what you had and you were very creative. It’s when a person becomes saddled, all those equipment and this excess that they become worse at what they’re supposed to do. Probably the smartest people work with very little information. They work with very little resources and information is one of those very critical resources. One of the things that stop people consistently is this information. They go, “If I have more information about this house then maybe I’ll buy it. If I have more information about how my business is going to go in six months then maybe I’ll do it.” The people who succeed on a consistent basis they don’t have this resource. They have the same resource as you. They have the same amount of information as you and what they do is they do it anyway. They go ahead anyway and then they keep going and they find the group, they find a teacher, they keep going, they keep going, they keep going. What happens over time is you just get very quick at something. As I said, I used to take 2 days to write an article, it takes 45 minutes. I now have one day and another 14 hours of whatever to play with. What you are really doing is you have to understand that to be very good at what you do you have to work with very little information and just keep going. The second thing that I would add just to finish this off is that something that I had to learn which is rest. We’ve take three months off every year, but the point is that even so I wasn’t taking weekends off. Let me clarify what I mean by that. I wasn’t working the whole weekend but I’m going on a Saturday morning and then I’d work for a few hours and then before I knew it, it would be 9:00 or 10:00 and then someday maybe two or three hours. The downtime is critical. You can’t compensate for downtime. If you don’t take a break, if you don’t disconnect your email, if you don’t disconnect your phone, you are going to find that your work is not as good. When people go and they say, “We went on a vacation,” and all they did was see 700 monuments, that’s not a break. When you were on your weekend and you just check email, that’s not a break. Your ability to work when you have to work goes down and you get more and more tired, more exhausted and then eventually there’s nothing left. There’s no energy left. That’s pretty much what I’d say. Summary: That brings us to the end of this podcast. What we’d covered was the whole concept of roadblocks and how we think that someone else is superhuman. They’re not really superhuman. They just started along time ago and what they did was continue. A lot of people stop. They pause. They think that the other people are somehow succeeding because they have some special gene. If that other person has special gene, it is just to persist over and over again until they get it right until they eliminate all the errors and that makes them what other people call them which is superhuman. The second thing that we covered was this concept of keystone habits. We found that you have to have to work on it like your toothbrush. Your toothbrush does a job and it does it very well. If you can think of your learning and your application as a daily routine, then it changes everything. The third thing that we talked about was the future and how you have to have a mindset for the future that you might not be very good at watercolors today, but in two years’ time you will be. You might not be very good at podcasting today, but in 2 years’ time you will be. It doesn’t matter what you undertake if you go about it with dedication and you find the right teacher. Even if you don’t find the right teacher you still in 2 years’ time you will be far down the road than where you are right now. If you stop today, you’ve just wasted 2 years. In 2 years’ time, you will still know nothing and that is the reality for most people. That brings us to the end of this podcast. We still have the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December and then the 13th, 14th and 15th of December is in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. People wander why they have to tell stories and it’s the flipside of the coin. You have logic and you have facts and you have to have stories, because stories they keep the audience alive and they keep things memorable. You can run on facts and logic alone, but who’s going to remember your story? Who’s going to pass it on? Storytelling is incredible. You read The Brain Audit and you’ll find that almost the entire book is one of storytelling. Read The Brain Audit and also join us at 5000bc.com. If you want to go ahead you need a group and that group is in 5000bc, we don’t have these spammers and these loud mouths. We largely have a group on introverts even though I’m an extrovert. Join us at 5000bc.com and if you like to come to the workshop it’s at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me Sean D’Souza saying bye for now and here’s to your talent 2 years from now. How much is enough? And where do you stop?It’s easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you’re not careful. You can work too much, do too much? And even vacation too much. Click here to find out more about—The Power of Enough. (http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/)

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. That brings us to the end of this podcast. As you know, we’re doing the storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We’ll see you there. You need to find your way to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You would also need to read The Brain Audit. That is at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, then leave a review for us at iTunes. That really helps. The show notes, the transcript, all the goodies, they’re always on the podcast number. This is podcast number 60, so that’s psychotactics.com/60. You can get all of that. It’s 5:32 AM and I have to go for my walk soon. Just on cue, it has started to rain, but I’ll take my umbrella and I’ll head out for the coffee. Thanks for listening. Bye for now. 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

The reason why we find writing to be such a tedious task, is because we don't understand the barriers that get in our way. Instead, we write, edit, write, edit — and drive ourselves crazy. One of the ways to get over the barriers is to use the Captain Kirk and Mr Spock method. What is this method all about? Find out in this episode of the podcast. --------------------  Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/59 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: How to use the Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock method of writing Part 2: The power of preparation Part 3: How to decide on your ‘One Word’ Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t Article and Audio: Three Unknown Secrets of Riveting Story Telling Live Workshop: How to create amazing stories—and connect them flawlessly to your articles, newletters, podcasts, etc --------------------- The  Transcript   Imagine you’re the athlete who’s trying for the Olympic gold in high jump. You look at the newspapers that day and there is the Los Angeles Times and they’re saying that he goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out off a 30-storey window. Then you flip to the next newspaper which is The Guardian and it says, “He is the curiosity of the team.” Then you pick up the magazine Sports Illustrated and it says, “He charges up from slightly to the left of center with a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel.” We’re talking about Dick Fosbury here, the guy who first did the Fosbury flop. While all these newspapers and magazines seem to make fun of Dick Fosbury, it’s unlike he had a great opinion of himself either. It’s unlike Dick Fosbury was arguing with their comments because at college someone bet him that he couldn’t get over a leather chair. He couldn’t jump over that leather chair and he said he tried, but not only did he lose his bet but he also broke his hand in the crash landing. In  1968, when he arrived at the Mexico Olympics he was relatively unknown and yet days later he not only captured the imagination of the Mexican public, but also the rest of the world. He sailed over the bar at 2.24 meters, which is 7 feet and 4 inches. It wasn’t that he sailed over because that wasn’t the world record. It’s that he did it by overcoming the obstacle with his crazy jump which was called the Fosbury flop. What’s interesting about the Fosbury flop is that no one ever did that kind of flop before. No one ever tried to get over the bar in that manner. It was considered extremely weird, extremely camel-like and yet today it’s extremely weird to see people jumping over the bar as they did back in 1968. Today the Fosbury flop is the way people jump over a bar at the Olympics in any sports stadium. What Fosbury did was he looked at the obstacle and he said, “Let me get over this in another way because there’s no way I’m going to be able to do it the usual way.” That’s really what this podcast is all about. We’re going to look at writing and why we struggle with writing, why we have these obstacles with writing. If we go about it the way we’ve always done, that doesn’t seem to work for us because you’re going about it the same way that I used to do back in the year 2000 where I would look at the article and then try to write it and then spend a day, spend 2 days writing that article and getting very frustrated and not knowing what was going wrong. We have to look at the obstacle that bar and look at how we can over that bar in a completely different way. That’s what this podcast is going to cover. We’re going to cover 3 things. The first thing is about editing. The second thing is about preparation and the third is about the one word or the one term. As always, we’ll start with the first, which is editing. Part One: Editing I love making a rice dish called biryani. It is a dish meant for kings. It has all of these yummy elements. If you’ve ever eaten a biryani, you know exactly what I mean. Here’s how you go about making a biryani. You have to get all the things together, like spices and the yogurt and other stuff like saffron and ghee, which is a clarified butter. When you get all of those things together, you got some onions. In fact, you got a lot of onions and then you caramelised the onions. When all of that is done you, marinate it. A few hours later it’s time to cook the biryani. I put it all in a dish, which we call handi. You would call it a saucepan. Before I turn on the flame I have to do one very important thing. I have to seal the handi or the saucepan with dough so that it becomes like a pressure cooker and the meat cooks in it and the rice cooks in it and all the flavours cook within it and it’s all sealed you can’t get in. Did you notice the problem? Sure, you did. It was the dough. It sealed the vessel. There is no way to know whether the rice is cooked or the chicken is still raw. The dough prevents me from editing. Editing is the first big obstacle to writing. Why? Because the writer and the editor are 2 completely different people. The writer is like Captain Kirk; you watched Star Trek, didn’t you? The writer is like Captain Kirk and Captain Kirk has all these great ideas. He wants to go where no man has ever gone before and he is a bit out there. Then you have Spock and he needs to be logical and that’s how your editor acts every single time. We have these 2 people, 2 completely different people and they’re at log ahead with each other. What we do when we write is we put both of those people on the same seat. Of course they’re going to fight. Of course they’re going to continuously argue with each other and of course that’s your obstacle, isn’t it? You’re not going to get over that obstacle because you’re treating both of them as the same person when they were completely different. The first thing you’ve got to realise is that it’s not Captain Spock, it’s Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. You’ve got to start with the writing process and then let it marinate and several hours later you have to bring in Mr. Spock. Just like the biryani, you’ve got to let that marination process take its own sweet time. You probably want to write at one part of the day and then one look at it maybe later in the day or even the next day. This is what I had to do when I first started out. I was not very good at writing. I was not very quick at writing. I would send my article to a friend and a client, whose name is Chris Ellington. Chris would look over it and then fix it and he had a million fixes and then it will come back and then I would send it out again this time to Rochelle. Rochelle would look at all the grammar and fix it and all of this editing process would drive me absolutely crazy plus there was my own creative output as it were. This is the process. There is the writer and the editor. There is this time in between and what we do is we make a Captain Spock out of it. Of course it doesn’t work and there is no reason why it should work, because editing and writing just do not mix. That’s our first-grade obstacle and we have to learn that we’re going to have to do thing differently, do a bit of a Fosbury flop if we want to get over that bar and write great content. This takes us to the second one and the second one is all about preparation. Part 2: Preparation On June 29, 2007, Pixar released a movie about a rat and it was called Ratatouille. It was a story about an inspiring chef called Linguini and her rat called Remy, a rat that loved to cook. Speaker 1: Animation is a very, very complicated business. There’s hundreds of people involved in the actual production. Speaker 2: Many things that we take for granted in real life are difficult to do in the computer. Speaker 3: Pixar is really very good at addressing complex problems. By far, this is the most complicated clothing that we’ve done. Speaker 4: We went to a special sequence on that with the character with Linguini jumps into the sand to try and save Remy. He comes out dripping wet and we had to try and figure out a way to get that look when claw sticks to the skin and you can see just a little bit of colour coming through it. Speaker 5: What do we do? We abused one of our poor coworkers. We make him dressed up in a chest outfit. We doused him with water and we filmed him. What does it look like? We’re on the clothing. Can you see it through to his skin? Where do the chips come off from his face? It’s our excuse to abuse coworkers actually not to think about it. Sean D’Souza: What you just heard in that clip is preparation, preparation and more preparation. The reason why Pixar has to do so much preparation is because they’re not amateurs. They have million dollar budgets and of course they’re wasting a lot of money. They’re also wasting time and they’re wasting energy. When you think about it, that’s exactly what we do when we sit down to write. We don’t create that moment of preparationor really that hour of preparation and that’s how you know the difference between an amateur and a professional. The amateur just sits down and begins to write. They sit at their computer and they decide, “I’m going to write an article today. I’m going to create a podcast today. I’m going to create a webinar.” The professional on the other hand sits down to plan. I was to listening to a podcast earlier today and there was this interview between Brian Orr and Jeff Brown. Jeff worked in the radio industry for many, many years and now he has his own podcast. He was talking about how people just show up on podcast and they start to ask questions and they don’t prepare and how all the preparation is critical. If you listen to Ira Glass on This American Life and he’s on videos on YouTube, he talks about the preparation and how finding the stories takes half the week even though they have so many people in their staff. We think, “We’re just business people. We just have to write an article. Let’s sit down and write,” and that’s not how professionals work. You are a professional when you sit down to write and therefore you have to sit down to plan. What are you going to plan? You’ve got to figure out what topic are you going to cover, what one word are you going to cover, what 3 sub-topics you’re going to cover or at least how you’re going to structure the article, how you’re going to structure this podcast. When I sit down to do this podcast, most of the work is done outside. Admittedly, the music takes a lot of time but the podcast takes only about 45 minutes to record and it takes me an hour and a half to put all the details together, sometimes longer. I’ll go to the cafe. I’ll sit don and I’ll put it all together. You can see a photograph of that. I’ll put it in the show notes. It takes a lot of preparation to create something that is more than average and that’s what professionals do. This is the obstacle that we run into. It’s not I don’t try to beat the system. I try it. I’ll show up here at 4am and I’ll try to record a podcast and then it’s 4:30 and 4:45 and then 5:30. It’s very, very frustrating and so I’ve given up. I’ve totally given up. Every time I want to record a podcast I will go to the cafe and sit there and plan. I don’t have the time that’s why I go and that’s why I plan and this is what professionals do. They plan before they execute. They get the ingredients, put the biryani in the fridge, let it marinate and then later they are cooking it. Amateurs? We just go there and we cook it right away as if something magical is going to happen. We’ve looked at 2 main obstacles and the first one was editing, the fact that we get Captain Spock together instead of having Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The second thing is this whole factor of preparation and how we want to bypass that process of marination.  This takes us to the third part, which is the one word or the one term. Part 3: One Word This podcast started with the story about Dick Fosbury. You have to ask yourself, “Why did that story exist? What is the point of that story?” the story was about obstacles and overcoming those obstacles, but why did the story matter? The story mattered because of that one word or one term and in this case the one term is a different perspective. Right until that moment in Mexico when Dick Fosbury sailed over the bar like a 2-legged camel, there was only one perspective and that perspective was to jump over it, straddle over it. He went over in a completely different way. The one term is about different perspective and that’s how we look at the entire article. We didn’t go about how do we construct our article and what is the structure of the article, but we looked at things that stop us. We don’t realise that they’re stopping us and that is editing and preparation and the one word that one word or one term which is different perspective. It allows me to do both the preparation and the editing. When I’m preparing, I’m thinking of how can I have a different perspective on article writing. Then when I’m done and Mr. Editor has to show up, at point in time I’m going, “Did I do this? Did I actually adhere to the one word or one term?” In a way the one word or one term satisfies the needs of those fresh 2 guys, which is preparation and editing and he does so, so brilliantly. When you’re siting down to write something, create something ask yourself, “What is the one thing that I want to convey here? What is that endpoint?” Once you know the one word or one term you will be able to communicate in a way that you’ve never communicated before. You’d be able to edit it in a way that you’ve never done before. Can it be more than one word or one term? One term is a couple of words. Maybe you could stretch it to 3 words. The problem is that you may want to put in 3 words or 4 words or 5 words to describe your article and the further away you go from one word the more complicated it becomes. It’s very, very hard to then edit something or nail it down so find one word. Ask yourself, “What am I going to talk about today? Is it endeavour or is it scarcity or is it premium?” The point is once you get the one word and the one term that becomes a lot simpler and that’s really what we want. Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast. What did we cover today? We covered 3 things. The first thing was the factor of editing that the editor and the writer they’re 2 different people. They show up at different times of day, probably on different days as well. When you write and you edit on the same day or write and edit, write and edit, write and edit, thank you. You’re just frustrating yourself and driving yourselves completely crazy. Do not edit. Come back another day. Do not become Captain Spock. The second thing is the preparation. The professionals they don’t sit down to write. They don’t sit down to create. They sit down to plan. You need to go away somewhere. Plan, come back then you start to write. If you have to learn how to write, you can deconstruct say this piece because it’s there. It’s there in the show notes. You can deconstruct how it is created and then recreate it or you can do an article-writing course and learn how structure is built and how articles come together and how podcast come together and how … It’s all based on structure and once you understand the structure it’s just a matter of unfolding it like any language. The third thing that we covered was one word. The one word comes before you head out to the cafe, before you sit down to plan. It’s what am I going to cover today, what is that one thing that I want my audience to get. Once you know that and you should know that, then it’s very simple or rather a lot simpler to get to the end result. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you should do today is just sit now and say, “I’m going to write an article. What is the one word that I’m going to cover?” If you’re not sure what you should do, I would suggest you go to the show notes and look at some of the links that I put there. Then deconstruct it and see how you can actually work out what one word was I trying to cover. You’ll start to see a pattern and once you get that pattern you will learn how to do it yourself.. Of course there is no substitute for being with a good teacher and I am a good teacher and you know that. I’m going to be there alive in Nashville, Tennessee and then in Amsterdam in The Netherlands and we’re going to do a storytelling workshop. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m sure you did, this podcast and every podcast is full of stories and that’s what keeps you going. As you’re walking, as you’re driving, suddenly in the middle of all those facts and figures there’s the story unfolding how does that story unfold. When you read the book The Brain Audit or you read the book on pricing or you read the book on testimonials, when you read those books you don’t always know why you like the book so much. Sure there’s a structure. Sure there’s a system, but more critically there are case studies and examples and analogies and stories and that’s what keeps the progression going ahead. Fact and figures they are very good but they are very tiring. Storytelling becomes very critical. It’s not only critical to get the message across in a meaningful way, but it’s also very helpful to know how to construct stories so that your audience remembers them. There are lots of storytelling books and there are lots of storytelling workshops, so why is this one going to be different? This one is different because this is storytelling versus storytelling. When you open a book on storytelling, essentially they’re teaching you how to write short stories or they’re telling how to write a script or a movie. Very rarely are you going to get storytelling that helps you construct stuff from business, for writing articles, for adding to podcast or seminars or just about everything that you do in business. How do you connect it back to the business? How do you create books? How do you create reports? How do you create witch stories embedded in them so they become irresistible? That’s not what most workshops and books online are going to be able to teach you and that’s why this workshop is so critical. Come join us in Nashville on the second, third and fourth of December or if you’re in Europe it’s the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth of December. You can find everything at psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. The prices are going up. We always raise prices and they’re going to go up every 20 days or so. By the time you get to it several months later, which is when the workshop begins, it will be at its highest price. We are still in the early bird stages so go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you there. If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should read The Brain Audit. Why? Because it’s one of the coolest business books you will ever read. It has lots of stories and it’s the barrier to the workshop. You have to rear The Brain Audit before you get there, so either the workshop and The Brain Audit or join us at 5000bc.com. That’s it for me on a Friday evening, not 4am, so that’s a little different. Bye for now. Storytelling is “persuasion with class” Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? You can use all the “buy now” buttons and countdown clocks, but it just comes across as aggressive. You can use facts, figures, and yes, they all work to persuade, but storytelling does it with finesse. See how stories are used in the excerpt of The Brain Audit to get your attention with finesse.

Storytelling struggles without a catalyst. And yet a catalyst doesn't have to be in your face. It can be quiet, almost introspective. So how do you create powerful catalysts for your stories? And then once you have the catalyst in place, how do you connect the story back to your article, podcast or presentation? -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/58 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this storytelling episode Sean talks about Part 1: What is a catalyst and why you need it in your story Part 2: What is the point of a story Part 3: How to use storytelling in your presentations, articles and sales letters Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources and Links Live Workshop: How to create well-told stories that create a bond with your audience without sounding unprofessional Article Writing Article: Why We Struggle To Write Articles: The Myth Of Unique Content Story Telling Goodies: Coming Soon. Email Renuka for more details. renuka@psychotactics.com ---------------------------------- The Transcript This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. In 2003, I stopped watching TV. It wasn’t like I didn’t like TV. In fact, I probably liked it too much. I’d spend two, three hours every single day, watching TV. It didn’t seem like two or three hours; it seemed like just might be half an hour. I’d switch it on at six o’clock in the evening, then it would be seven o’clock, then eight o’clock and then nine o’clock. And of course, there was the morning news. In effect, I was spending three or four hours watching completely crazy stuff. At this point, my brother-in-law Ranjit moved to New Zealand. He lived with us for several months before finding his own place. In the month before he left, we had a conversation. It wasn’t a conversation really. It was more like a bet. He said that I watched too much TV, and I said, “No, no, no, you watch too much TV.” We took this bet, and the bet was that the next person that switches on the TV loses. We didn’t say what that person loses, but right after that discussion, not one of us touched that remote control. The TV sat in the corner for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Ranjit moved out, and it still sat in the corner. We didn’t switch it on. A few months later, we put the TV in the closet and eventually we just got rid of it. What’s the point of the story? What we’re listening to here is this unfolding of the story, but right at the core of it is a catalyst and that catalyst is causing us to move the story forward because that catalyst has speeded up some action, and that’s taking us towards an endpoint. When we look at the same story without the catalyst, it becomes very boring. Let’s run that same story once again. Let’s say, my brother-in-law, Ranjit wasn’t around and that one day I decided to stop watching TV and so I kept the remote to the side. That was it, 13 years have passed, and I haven’t watched TV. It’s not as interesting, isn’t it? That one little factor that came into play, which is my brother-in-law stepping in, the bet and then both of us being very pigheaded about it and not watching TV that’s what causes all the drama. You’ve got to have a catalyst in your story, but you also have to get that story to an end point, and that is what we’re going to cover in today’s podcast. We’re going to look at this understanding of the catalyst, which could be an active catalyst or an inactive catalyst. The second thing that we look at is what is this catalyst leading to, why are we doing this whole story thing in the first place? What is the endpoint? The third thing that we’re going to look at is how are you going to use this storytelling in your presentations, in your articles, in your sales letters? We’ll take a look at some of those things. Part 1:What Is The Catalyst Let’s get started with the first thing, which is understanding the catalyst and how it can be active or inactive. If you look at the rating of all the podcasts, you’ll see a little C symbol on it. That C symbol, it stands for clean. It means that you’ll never get any bad language on this podcast, you’ll never hear any swear words, you’ll never hear anything that you would hear on another podcast. All of this goes back to one moment in time when I was in school. I didn’t use any bad language and then suddenly when I was in the sixth grade, I decided that every third word had to be a swear word. I don’t know how it started. I don’t know why it started, but the moment I’d get on to the playground with my friends at school, I would start to use the swear words. One day, my brother showed up, and he’s standing there and he’s watching me. I’m playing and using all these swear words. Suddenly I realize, “Oh, what is he doing standing there?” He’s got this evil grin on his face, and he goes and he says, “I’m going to tell daddy about this.” That’s the first moment that I realize, “Oh, all these swear words, all the stuff that I’ve been doing, he’s going to report me.” He’s my brother; I couldn’t do anything to him. He still had to get home in one piece. I go home, but now I’m terrified. I know my brother, he is going to tell his story. He is going to tell my father that I’m using all these swear words. I’m expecting some real trouble. I don’t know what the trouble is going to be, but I know there is going to be trouble. My father says to me, “Sean, I would prefer that you didn’t use bad language anymore.” “That’s it?” That was it. That was pretty much it. Over 30 years have passed since that moment and to this day, I am deeply embarrassed if I have to use bad language even by mistake. What we’re experiencing here is this concept called the catalyst. For the story to reach dramalevel, you need that catalyst. You need something to happen; you need something to speed up those bunch of events, so that you get to the other side, whatever that other side is. When we examine this, we say, “Well, what was the catalyst or who was the catalyst?” We could say that my brother was the catalyst because if he hadn’t gone on this big tell-tell mission, then I wouldn’t have had the problem. Somehow I think that wasn’t the catalyst. It was the calm. The fact that my father didn’t punish me that struck a chord. That calm, it became the inactive catalyst. When we look at the catalyst, we look at something that’s active and something that’s inactive. To me at least, the active catalyst is someone or something that’s pretty much in your face. When I told you some stories in some other podcasts about how my friend Joan, she got into the space and she asked me about my trip to New Zealand. When we were immigrating to New Zealand, she became the active catalyst. She was that one force that pushed me along the journey or did I tell you the story about my mother-in-law and how we went for a week into Northland, which is just a couple of hours from Auckland. These were the early days of Psychotactics. I took some books with me, some business books and she said, “No, no, no, we’re going on a break, and you’re not going to read anything on that break.” Here’s what I did, when they went for a walk, I read my business books, sitting in the hotel. When they went to the beach, I continued to read my business books. When I got back to Auckland several days later, I’d finished all those books. I didn’t get any walk and didn’t go to the beach, but I finished reading my books, and that catapulted me into this world of Psychotactics, which is what you know of today. When I’m looking at story-telling, I’m looking at, “Well, is this an active catalyst or is this an inactive catalyst?” To me, an active catalyst is something like the drip drip, drip that water that leak that instant fix that has to happen now. The inactive catalyst is something that is introspective that you have to think about. I would say the mother-in-law story that would be an active catalyst. The story by Joan and how she got us moving to New Zealand that would be an active catalyst. The story about my father and how he was so calm, to me that became an inactive catalyst. It became something that was introspective, something that I had to go back and think about what I was doing. If you want to segregate them into two bits, you can say, “Well, we’re going to have an active catalyst here, someone that is agitating you to move towards that destination that urgency is in place and then you see the interactive catalyst, where you ponder, and you think about it or you read a book and that book changes your life and that becomes the inactive catalyst.” Whether you choose an interactive or an active catalyst, the point is that when you’re telling a story, those elements need to be in place. When you write your story, you need to know very quickly what is that catalyst, who is that catalyst and how did it change whatever you were doing? All that bad language that I was using with my friends that was my everyday life, nothing was changing, nothing changed in that world until the catalyst came along. The catalyst became calm and then I got to a destination. Part 2: What Does The Catalyst Lead To? That takes us to our second part, which is what is the point of this story? What is the point of the catalyst? Christopher Vogler has this story telling seminar, and it’s about the hero’s journey and how the hero goes on this massive journey somewhere and then he comes back a changed person. In one of his story telling seminars, he talks about this sheriff. The sheriff decides he wants to retire, so he’s hanging up his guns. He doesn’t want anything to do with all this violence and gun slinging. He just wants to live peacefully, and while he’s going about doing this peaceful routine of his every single day, he notices this pretty woman. He sees her buying some groceries and then another time; he sees her walking down the street and slowly he’s falling in love with this woman. Suddenly, a group of bandits ride into town, and one of the people that they kidnap is the woman. Suddenly, his whole peaceful routine, it’s finished. Now, he’s got to pick up those guns and get back into this world of violence that he has left behind. Let’s assume the story unfolds as it should. He meets the bad guys. He gets rid of them. He gets the woman back, but what’s the point of the story? When I tell you the story about how Joan got us to New Zealand, there is a point to that story. When I tell you about how I read the book by Jim Collins, which is “Good to Great” and it asked me, “What can you be the best in the world at?” Well, there is a point to that story. When my father said, “Hey, Sean I would prefer you don’t use this filthy language,” there was a point to that story, and that is critical. Most people think that if they just tell the story that’s fine, but it’s not. You have to have a point through the story. As kids, we know that this is the moral of the story, and it’s not necessarily the moral that we’re looking at here. We’re looking at why are you telling me the story? When we started selling the Brain Audit, which was way back in 2002, I had written this book, this PDF and then I went to this guy who was selling stuff online. His name was Joe Vitale. Joe was very excited with the book. He said, “Hey, this book is really good, I could promote it for you.” He got us to do stuff. He got us to get our credit card system in place. He got us to get the sales page up. All of this had to be done in a week and then we were waiting for him to promote it. A week passed, and he didn’t do anything. A month passed, he didn’t do anything. Suddenly, we noticed that people were buying the Brain Audit. The point of the story is that Joe was not supposed to sell anything for us in the first place. He was supposed to be a kicking angel. What I call a kicking angle and kicking angle is someone that comes in there and kicks you and gets you moving and then moves out of the way. They don’t buy anything from you. They don’t sign up for any of your courses. They just make sure that somehow you get moving. Now, you know the point of the story because if I wrote an article about kicking angels, and I started out with the Joe Vitale story, you know Joe was the kicking angle. The point of the story is that when someone promises to sign of course or they decide that they want to come to your workshop, or maybe they just decide to promote your book, but do nothing and yet there is a point to that story. There was a catalyst that catalyst was Joe. He came and he created all of this boat rocking and then he disappeared, and that was the point of the story. His disappearance was the whole point of the story, and so you’ve got to have these two elements in your storytelling. You’ve got to know who or what is the catalyst? Is that catalyst just something that you’re thinking about? Is it something that is introspective and inactive or active like Joe, like, “Come on, get your credit cards together, get your stuff together.” Once we know that catalyst and then we need to know well what was the point of the story because that point of the story helps us reconnect to the article, to the sales, to everything else. Without that point of the story, it doesn’t matter. The story is just a story with no real connection. Part 3: How To Use The Storytelling In Your Presentations, Articles And Sales Letters This takes us to the third part, where we start to look at how do we use this in our communication, whether we’re doing sales letters or articles or presentations or anything at all, how do we use it? On the Psychotactics website, there is a product called Black Belt Presentations. In Black Belt Presentations, I talk about how we manage to sell $20,000 worth of product at a single conference. The story that precedes that conference is even more interesting. That is because I went to Australia, and I spoke at this conference and I hardly sold anything. I watched as other presenters not only sold stuff, but people were stampeding to the back of the room to get their stuff. I wanted to create that stampede, so what I have there is this whole point of the catalyst. I stood there like an idiot, watching as other people succeeded while I failed miserably. The point of the story is very simple; I needed to figure out what they did and how they did it and how I could do the same. That day when we sold $20,000 in a single hour at a conference, it goes all the way back to the point where I failed, and that point of failure was the catalyst. What is the point of the story? Well, if we were just at a party, and we’re drinking some wine and eating some cheese, it makes for some great entertainment because hey you succeeded, but what are you going to do with it when you get to the sales page? This is where stories are so effective because they help the reader to get into that same mindset that you were in. When this goes on to a sales page, and I tell the story, I can then connect it to the Black Belt series. Then you realize, “Well, if I’m going to make a presentation, if I’m going to fail, then no, I’d rather not fail, I’d rather figure out how to be able to set up my slides, how to work out, how the audience participates, how they react, I need to know all this information and me need to know how to put my presentation together.” The reason a client is going to buy the Black Belt Presentations, even though it’s not a cheap product is because of the story. The story starts them on that journey. It sends them through the catalyst and eventually there is a point that you do not want to be standing there and watching while others sell and you do nothing. You don’t always have to tell a story to sell a product, but you have to tell a story to get an idea across. Let’s say I was going to tell a story about how kindness is more powerful when dealing with human beings than say brute force or anger or frustration. Then, I could tell you the story of how my father said, “I wish you wouldn’t use that language.” Now, we have a point to the story. The whole point of the story is that you’ve created change, and so this takes you right into writing your article about change, about kindness. You start off with the story about the father and the son, you then move through the catalytic moment and then finally what’s the point of the story. It’s kindness works better and then talk about how kindness works with dolphins and dogs and people and how all the elements that you’re going to cover in your article. The storytelling that’s the whole magnet. That’s the thing that sucks me into reading the rest of the article. If you do not have the skills to tell a story and you don’t get it through the catalyst and you don’t finally get to the point of the story, well it’s a not wasted exercise, but it’s entertainment, possibly entertainment is good enough. When you’re in business, when you’re writing that article, when you’re writing your sales letter, you need to be able to tell those stories using this catalyst. Summary Let’s summarize what we have covered today. We covered three things. The first thing is the catalyst and how we can have that active catalyst and the interactive catalyst. The active catalyst is something urgent. The roof has just fallen, you have to fix it. Your friend runs into you while you’re grocery shopping, and she says, “No, no, no, you have to get to New Zealand now.” Then there is the inactive catalyst, something you read, something that’s introspective. The catalyst alone is not that important if there’s no point to it, so there must be a point. It’s like, why is this happening? Why is my brother-in-law stepping into my life and taking a bet with me about the television? It’s changed my life. I stopped spending two, three, four hours. I thought I was spending just a little time in front of the TV, but when I stopped watching TV and when I threw it out and gave it away that’s when I realized, “Oh my God, I was spending so much time in front of this stupid device that taught me nothing.” There was a point to the story, and it wasn’t just entertainment. Now, it could be entertainment, but in business, you’re going to have to connect it to something that you’re selling or something that you’re telling. If it is something you’re telling, like an article, then how does it connect? We saw that with the Black Belt Presentation, the whole story could then fit in, so that you would decide, “Well, yes I don’t want to be in that situation,” or if I’m talking about my father’s story then I could connect it to kindness and how kindness works very well in changing the perception of other people. There you have it, the catalyst, the point of the catalyst and then how to connect it back to whatever you’re telling or whatever you’re selling. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Well, the one thing that you can do today it start off with the point of the story. Why are you telling the story? What change do you want to occur? When you do that, then you have to go out and seek the story that fits into that point. You can work it from there forward. It’s not easy. We have to learn how to do this, but always there has to be the point. Otherwise, it’s just entertainment. Talking about entertainment, have you been to a Psychotactics Workshop? Well, there is one showing up in Nashville, Tennessee on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December, and then we go to Amsterdam, the Netherlands on the 15th, 16th, and 17th. Psychotactics Workshop is a lot of fun. I know lots of people promised fun, but this is a lot of fun and you learn systematically, just like you’ve been learning on this podcast, there is a system and by the end of it, you are exceedingly good at story telling. That’s the goal. The goal is not to give you information. Information will come to you in notes and like in all workshops, there will be slides and presentation, but most of the time you will be working and having fun in your groups and learning to write stories, which is what the goal is after all. You go to www.Psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. You have to read the Brain Audit before you get there. You can get the Brain Audit at Psychotactics or on Amazon, but you have to have the Brain Audit, otherwise you cannot attend the workshop and learn how to tell stories like really good stories, stories that you can use in your articles, in your podcasts, in your presentations, on your website, on your About Us page, pretty much everywhere. Storytelling is a craft. You can learn it and you can become very good at it. You also want to check out the membership at 5000bc.com. That’s where we hang around, where there’s lots of information, but also where I am on a consistent basis, answering questions. That’s 5000bc.com and as always I’m on Twitter and Facebook at Sean D’Souza and Sean@Psychotactics.com. Bye for now. Do you want to write that article, because you do have something to say?  And your audience wants to hear it. So what is stopping you? Find out ‘Why We Struggle To Write Articles (And The Myth Of Unique Content).

No matter where you go, you run into people with the same problem?time. Whether you're a small business owner, or run a big company, it's all about time, and getting things done. A lot of time saving can be done without too much effort on your part?and by simply using software. Software that does very smart stuff is what we all need. Here's the list of three core areas where I use the software. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/57 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Software and Hardware Mentioned In This Episode: Mac  Default Folder: http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/ Text Expander: https://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/index.html Dragon Naturally Speaking: http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm Mailbox: http://www.mailboxapp.com Evernote: http://www.evernote.com Dropzone: http://www.mailboxapp.com Plantronics DSP400: Plantronics DSP-400 Digitally-Enhanced USB Foldable Stereo Headset and Software -------------------- In this episode Sean lists three core areas where he uses software to save time. Part 1: How to handle repetitive tasks Part 2: What are the factors of communication Part 3: How to store all your ideas Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links Read about: The Four Critical Zones Required to Speed Up Your Learning Episode 3: Unusual Time Management Ideas (Audio and Transcript) Chaos Planning: Why you should Forget Business Planning and Goal Stting ----------------------- The Transcript   This is The 3 Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. It was almost the end of the Second World War when Boeing came out with a plane that was called the B-29. It was the first ever high-altitude bomber. It could fly at over 22,000 feet. It’s one thing to have a plane that can fly at such heights, but you also have to be able to predict what’s going to happen to the plane at that height. These planes they were at a Pacific air base and 2 Air Force meteorologists were given the job to prepare wind forecast so that they could figure out how they could get that plane going in that height. Using the information that they had, they decided that the speed was 168 knots. However, their commanding officer could not believe the forecast. He thought that they had overestimated the speed of the wind. He thought it was too high. However, on the very next day the B-29 pilots reported wind speeds of 170 knots and that moment in time was when the jet stream was discovered. The question is how do you get to jet stream, because when we look at very successful people what we’re seeing is that they’re flying at these very high altitudes at very high speeds. While our lives might be completely different from these people, what we have in common is the factor of time. They have the same 24 hours as we do and they make use of their time. Today I’m going to talk about time yet again, but this time I’m going to focus on software. We’re going to look at how software can make your life a lot better and a lot quicker and, of course, you have more time to do the things that you really want to do. In today’s broadcast we’re going to cover 3 elements. One is repetitive tasks; the second is tasks that involve communication; and the third one which is tasks that involve storage in finding things. This is where we come to a fork in the road because many of you might be using a PC and I’m using a Mac and I switched from a PC to Mac in 2008 and I have never looked back. There is going to be some overlap. You’re going to get some of the software that is available both in PC and Mac, but what you’ve got to understand is the concept. The concept is more about repetitive, about communication and storage software. You’ll find that on a PC. Don’t be too stressed out that this is like a Mac presentation. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the repetitive task that I have to do every day. Part 1: Repetitive Tasks The first thing that you have to do every single day no matter whether you’re a PC or Mac is to find folder. You save something and you need to find a folder and on the Mac you get something called Default Folder. This is one of the best tools that I have found. What this does is immediately it gives you a little heart option and that makes it a favorite, which means that when you’ve got sudden folders that you use on a regular basis you can assign a little heart to them and then every time you save it you click on the heart, those folders show up and goes to box. My set up is across computers. It would be this folder and subfolder and I would spend a few seconds maybe 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds trying to get to that folder and what Default Folder does is it takes me there in 1 second. I can also set up Default Folder so that it very quickly gets me to that folder by pressing a shortcut and this is in the preferences. Without getting very technical about it, what you’ve got to do is have a software that can get you to the folder very, very quickly. You can generate thousands of shortcuts all sitting on the desktop. This saves you 10 seconds here, 5 seconds there, 20 seconds there but more importantly it saves you all that energy of opening up folders and subfolders, which is what we do on a regular basis. That’s the first thing that is very repetitive. The second thing that we do, which is very repetitive, is answer the same questions over and over again, like for instance your email address. You might be typing it several times a day, maybe your website or a website that you go to. The point is that software like Text Expander will do that for you. You just have a little shortcut, like for instance with me, I just type SX and it types out sean@psychotactics.com. If I type browser X, it will spit out 3 paragraphs that tell the person who’s just emailed me, “Wait a second. You want this download, you have to go and check on another browser because maybe this browser is not working.” It gives us long message of 2 or 3 paragraphs and it does so in 1 second. Every single day what I have is a whole bunch of messages that come to me that are quite repetitive in nature. When I answer, Text Expander will actually say, “You have been using this on a regular basis. You have been answering this way on a regular basis. Would you like to save this as a snippet?” For instance, I use the word The Brain Audit several times, because I wrote the book. Text Expander will watch while I’m doing this The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit, The Brain Audit and then it will say, “Do you want to save this as a snippet,” and then I can put in a little shortcut like TBA and then I have The Brain Audit. Not only do I have The Brain Audit, but it’s capitalized like T capitalized and B capitalized and A capitalized. All of this stuff is very repetitive and within The Brain Audit I have terms like target profile or reverse testimonials and I have shortcuts for all this. Who’s going to remember all those shortcuts? The program does it for you. It reminds you every time you don’t use the shortcut, “You had the shortcut TBA for The Brain Audit. Use it the nest time.” After a while, the program is starting to think for you as well. These are 2 repetitive things that you have to do, open up folders and store things in folders and for that you have Default Folder. The second thing is just answers that you give clients, stuff that you have to write in email, email addresses, maybe just your address, maybe you just have to type in your address send this to whatever PO Box number, whatever. That can be made very unrepetitive with this software called Text Expander, which then takes us to the second one which is a factor of communication. Part 2: Factor of Communication When I moved to New Zealand in the year 2000, I moved into a rental place. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of money so I bought myself a little plastic chair, which was about $10 at the store. Every one who was back home; my wife Renuka was still in India, all my friends were in India, I didn’t know anyone in New Zealand. What I was doing is using messenger. Back then I was using the PC, so MSN messenger. I would spend several hours on MSN messenger just chatting. At some point I got what is called RSI, that’s Repetitive Stress Injury. The RSI got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night. My shoulders hurt. My forearms hurt. My fingers felt like there was an electric current going through them. I had to go for physiotherapy and then I had to go for acupuncture and it seemed I was so afraid of so much as opening the garage door because I was in so much pain all the time. If you just wrapped me on the knuckles, I would fall down on the floor in pain. At that point in time, I didn’t have this software. When Renuka got to New Zealand, she was actually doing a lot of typing for me. I wasn’t working. I had to stop working and she started doing typing and the point I was building websites. What is the point of this story? The point of the story is that you don’t need to get RSI to get on to the software. This software is Dragon Naturally Speaking. If you use Dragon Naturally Speaking several years ago, you’re probably very frustrated with the way it worked. You needed to practice for about half an hour train the system then it would get most of the stuff wrong. It wouldn’t work on browsers. It wouldn’t work on forums. It would do this and it would do that. It is got very good in recent years. You can now train it for as little as 5 to 7 minutes and it will recognize your accent and it will start to work just out of the box. Almost out of the box, 5 to 7 minutes is not a lot of time. The point is that it’s not very easy to get into that mode where you’re dictating, but think about every single bus in the ’60s and ’70s was already doing this form of dictation. They would say a sentence, putting the punctuation, do all that stuff to their secretaries. It’s not like it’s something that is very hard to do. You just have to get used to it and the way to get used to it is to use a phone. A lot of phones have this system where you can dictate into the phone and that’s how I started. I started using Siri on my iPhone and I would just respond to emails and after a while I got used to speaking like this, which is I will return your email later, full stop. In fact I got so used to it that one day I had to leave a message on an answer phone and I said, “I will call you back later, full stop.” You can actually switch very quickly between the way we speak or the way I’m speaking right now and then moving into punctuation. This saves you a lot of time, because you cannot believe how fast you can go through this whole system of dictating answers and that is how I get through a lot of my email every day. I have to be careful that I read whatever I have dictated, because the pronunciation is not always very clear. The computer will spit out whatever your say, because fort may sound like fourth and that’s what the computer will type. You’ve got to do the editing and you can’t afford to be sloppy. I’ll admit I had been sloppy and then I’ll hit send too quickly, so you have to do that a little bit at least, but it saves you enormous amount of time. This is just communication and this is just 1 software in communication. The second software that I use with communication and this saves me an enormous amount of time is something that Dropbox gives absolutely free. It’s called Mailbox. What it does is it allows you to postpone your email for later. You can postpone it for a month or you can postpone it for a day or tomorrow or later this evening or whatever. When you think of it the first time you think, “Wait a second. You were just procrastinating.” No, what I’m trying to do at all times is keep my inbox down to zero. Here’s the reason why I have to do that. I have to do that because every time the inbox is filled with, I don’t know, a dozen, 2-dozen, 3-dozen, 4-dozen emails I have to scan through all those emails and that’s no good. Either I act on the emails or I put them off until later. What I do is supposing I have to get in touch with someone a month later. I will swipe and say, “Get this email back to me after a month,” and then exactly a month later it will show up and then I can act on it, so it acts like a to-do list. Of course, you’re human and you don’t want to deal with some email and you will procrastinate and that’s fine. Most of the time your goal should be to get that email box down to zero. There is other software like SaneBox and other stuff that you can use. This Mailbox it’s free and it works really well. The goal is to keep your inbox down to zero. You cannot believe how addictive this is. After a while you’re swiping and deleting and responding and finishing off your email so that you don’t have to deal with it and you don’t have to scan through al those read emails and figure out which one do I have to get open into the box and put in that folder and this folder; no, nothing like. I know you’re skeptical. My wife Renuka she is skeptical off a lot of stuff that I think I wonderful because I think a lot of stuff is wonderful. I showed it to her a few months ago, she wasn’t interested. I showed it to her 2 weeks ago, she wasn’t interested. Then last week for some reason she got interested and now she’s hooked. I can tell you, you will be hooked. Try and get your inbox down to zero by using Mailbox. With communication, there are these 2 things that helped me get to jet stream and that is Dragon naturally Speaking. It’s amazing and often enough they give it to you at a discount so go and look for the discount. You’ll get a Dragon Naturally Speaking and get yourself a Plantronics. If you’re swayed by Dragon telling you to buy their own microphone, don’t do it. Get yourself a Plantronics 400 and that’s a very good microphone. I’ll list this at the bottom of the podcast. The second thing you want to do is you want to get Mailbox. What we’ve covered so far is we’ve looked at stuff that’s repetitive in nature and Default Folder will help you there and Text Expander will help you there. We’ve also looked at communication and what I use a lot is Dragon Naturally Speaking and Mailbox and finally we’ll look at storage. Let’s go to the third part which is storage. Part 3: Storage When you write articles, when you create presentations, when you have to write books, you’re going to put facts and figures and let me tell you this. Facts and figures are really, really boring. They are so boring because they first of all are intimidating the hard to remember. The only thing that your clients really remember are stories, but the problem is that you cannot the stories. You cannot get to the case studies. You cannot get to the examples and so then you spend enormous amounts of time in research. The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to write your article. The worst time to do research is when you’re sitting down to do your presentation. You need to have all of this information in advance and episode 41 covered that. It said, “How to save 2 zillion hours in research using Evernote.” Go back to episode number 41. Listen to that or read the transcript and you will learn how I use Evernote. The second thing that I use and we have brought Default Folder right back. Default Folder allows you to tag your files. If you’re even slightly interested in finding a file then you want to tag it when you save it. This is very important because let’s say you did a cartoon and the cartoon was about a bear. Then later on you wanted to find something to do with intimidation or fear and you typed in intimidation or fear. What kind of results would you get? Nothing. What you do when you save a file is you put in some little tags. When you put in those tags and Default Folder does this really well then every time you type in those keywords or something close to those keywords it will bring up that file, which is called bear.psd. You look for intimidation and fear and you got bear and you go, “I could use the bear,” and that’s what I do. When I’m saving files, I’ll give them little tags. You might not do this because you think it takes time, but it only takes time on the front-end. Once you get started and you really are in a project you need all the energy and all the resources at your disposal and all of this software really comes to help you and that brings us to the end of this episode. Summary We’ve covered 3 things. The first is repetitive, the second one is communicative, and the third one is the storage. We looked at Default Folder and how it will take you exactly where you need to be. We also looked at Text Expander and how it expands little snippets of text or huge amounts of texts and it does it in a matter of seconds. We then went to communication. We looked at Dragon Naturally Speaking and we looked at Mailbox, which can also be procrastination heaven, but let’s face it. Your inbox is procrastination heaven already. You might as well have an empty inbox. Finally, we looked at storage and we looked at Evernote and that’s episode number 41. Go and listen to it, read it. Default Folder, if you use tags well you will find things like you can’t imagine. These are the 3 things that will get you into jet stream, but what’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is find a Text Expander. I know this for sure that the PC has Text Expander as well. I think one of them is called Breevy that is B, R, E, E, V, Y. I don’t know how well it works. I know Text Expander works really well. Get yourself a Text Expander and stop this typing over and over and over again. You will thank me later. You will send me chocolates. You will send me to Disneyland. You will be really thankful that you use this software. When you finish this podcast, go back to your office and buy a Text Expander, whichever one for the Mac or the PC and there you will enter your own jet stream. An interesting fact about the jet stream with climate change that jet stream has changed. It’s taking pilots 11 minutes more to get to their destination. Of course, when they spend 11 minutes more in the sky they are causing more climate change so it might take you longer to get to your destination. You don’t want to do that in your office. You want to get to that jet stream and you want to get there as quickly as possible. Get the software and start using it today and then you can send me the tickets later. You can send me the chocolates later. Before we go, there is a storytelling workshop coming up. It’s in Nashville, Tennessee and it’s on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of December. We have dates and we’re also in Europe in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and that’s on the 15th, 16th and 17th of December. Story telling is used everywhere, but the beauty of storytelling is its stickiness. When I tell you the story about The Brain Audit, I only have to tell you that story once and then you can tell it 100 times over and never lose the impact and that is the beauty of storytelling,. Storytelling is used for podcast that’s why you like this podcast because there are so many stories. You read The Brain Audit, there are so many stories and so many case studies and so many examples. It’s not enough to just tell the story. It’s how you craft the story and that’s what we’re going to learn. We’re going to learn how you find the story, how you craft the story and then how you connect the story to your business. It’s very easy to create … It’s not easy to create story but once you know how to do it, it’s easy. The hard thing is connecting it back to your business in a professional way and we’re going to do this at the storytelling workshop, where learning how to create a driveway moment, where people just want to listen to the end of your story. Go topsychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop and we’ll see you either in Nashville, Tennessee or in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You have to have read The Brain Audit however, because that’s the condition, that’s the barrier. If you haven’t read The Brain Audit, you should be reading it anyway. It’s at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. Read the stories. Read the examples. See for yourself how facts and figures intimidate and get yourself into the jet stream of storytelling. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now and thanks for listening to The 3 Month Vacation. Bye-bye. Still Reading?  In business to save time, we have to learn time crunching software. And to get better at our marketing, we have to understand our customers. One of the ways to get better is to understand how the brain works. Does the brain actually process thoughts in a step-by-step manner? Click here to get a free excerpt on Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don’t). Get ready to enjoy the concise and easy to absorb information.  

Storytelling has a lot of guidelines and rules. Yet, some of the critical elements slip under the radar. You don't realise storytelling elements and secrets that are hiding in plain sight. And storytellers can't always explain what they're doing?and so these elements of storytelling get left out. And yet, they're incredibly powerful. Like for instance, the concept of "anticipation" before the "problem". It's nowhere to be found? Unless of course you listen to this episode on how to tell riveting stories. Welcome to Goldilocks land!  -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/56 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about how to create stories that are very powerful. Part 1: How the ‘The Wall’ changes the pace of a story Part 2: The power in using the ’The Reconnect’ Part 3: Why anticipation is so critical in storytelling Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links The Brain Audit: How to introduce your product in a language the customer understands Read or listen to: How to double your writing speed Special Bonus: How to design the pricing grid for your product ----------------------------- The Transcript This is The 3 Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. I was about 2 years old when I first had a bout of convulsions. It didn’t start up as convulsions. I was standing there on the balcony, looking out on the road, and then I fell off the stool that I was standing on. As the story goes, I ran to my mother. She noticed that I was having convulsions, and she panicked. Now, panic would be the wrong word to use because what she did next was bundled me in her arms and ran with me to the hospital. To put you in the frame of mind of what India was when I was growing up, there were no phones or most people didn’t have phones. They didn’t have cars. You probably had a scooter if you were well off. That’s just how things were back then. What she had to do was run a distance of 2 kilometers, maybe 3 kilometers to get to the nearest hospital. When she got to the hospital, they wouldn’t admit me because I had meningitis and the hospital was not in the position to deal with cases of meningitis. Somehow, she managed to get them to admit me. At that point in time, they asked for the mother. Now, my mother was very young at that point in time and they assumed that she was somehow the sister. They said, “No. No. No. You have to get the mother.” This is very odd in India because people tend to get married very early in India and yet they were insisting that they had to have the mother before they could go ahead with anything. There I was, not doing so well and the hospital authorities wouldn’t go ahead without dealing with the mother. Now, she convinced them but once they admitted me, there was one more problem. The doctor wasn’t so sure that I would survive the meningitis. He told my parents, and by that point, my father was there as well. He said, “I have to tell you this. Your son will either die or he’ll go mad.” What you just heard was the story of my youth. The question is, why did you keep listening? Why did the story work? What is it that caused you to pay attention and not move away from the story? In today’s episode, we’re going to cover storytelling elements: How to Avoid Boring Articles? The core of avoiding boring articles is to be able to tell stories, but stories are useful for presentations. They’re useful for books. They’re useful for webinars. They’re useful for pretty much everything. What happens is most of us load up our information with facts and figures, and those are very tiring but stories, they encapsulate everything. We’re going to learn how to create stories that are very powerful. The 3 things we’re going to cover today are one, the wall; second, the reconnect; and third, the anticipation. Part 1: The Wall Let’s start off with the first one which is the wall. Every afternoon, every weekday, I go through the same routine. I pick up my niece from school. She’s now 11, that’s Marsha. We speak about stuff in the car. We do multiplication tables. Recently, we’ve been doing storytelling. I usually when I asked her, “Tell me of story about what happened in the weekend.” She goes, “Nothing.” Then I say, “What happened in class?” She goes, “Nothing.” This is the interesting part. You think that there’s nothing happening in your life, but there is a lot happening all the time. Then, we have to zero in onto one little thing and make it interesting, just about anything becomes interesting in the way you dealt it. I said, “Tell me about your piano class on Saturday.” Her little face brightens up and the smile comes on, and she goes, “I didn’t practice before going to piano class on Saturday. Then when I got to the piano class, I was really afraid because I thought I would the play the piece really badly. But as it appears, I played quite well. In fact, I played it so well that the piano teacher said, ‘I’m going to put you on a more advanced piece.’ Of course, once she gave me the advanced piece, I couldn’t play it. She said, ‘No. No. No. No. No. You’re playing it in the wrong key.’ I should try to play in the right key, but it didn’t worked.” The piano teacher gave her another chance. Of course, she was not playing the piece well, so they went back to the old piece, which is what she had practice. Marsha was quite happily playing her old piece, but playing it by ear, not reading the notes. Happy as a luck when she looked at the corner of the room and there was her mother. According to Marsha, her mother was glaring at her because Marsha hadn’t improved and she was back to square one. How could the day have been worse for Marsha? Now, that was a really short story. Why would you hook in to the story? The reason the story works is because there were these little blips along the way, what we call the wall. What is the wall? The wall is … Think of it as like a heart monitor. The heart monitor, when it’s absolutely flat, will go “Beeeep.” There is no sound. Then when the heart is beating, it will “Dub dub, dub dub, dub dub.” There is this little spike that jumps in every now and then, and that creates a wall. That creates that fact that you know that your heart is actually working. This is what happens in storytelling. Most people tell a story in a very boring fashion. The reason why they tell that is because there story would just go from one end to the other without the spikes. What were the spikes in Marsha’s story? The first spike was the fact that she was afraid she hadn’t practiced. That got your attention. Then she went on to a new problem, which is that she had to go there to the class and then play a new piece. Then when she couldn’t play that new piece, she ran into a whole bunch of problems. She was thrown back to the old piece, which was a good thing, at least, to Marsha’s eyes but bad thing in the mother’s eyes, which is why the mother was glaring at her from the corner of the room. Then as Marsha finished the story, she says, “How could the day get worse?” This is a perfect, little story just told from one end to the other with all of these little blips, these little blips, the other wall. The other wall that you have to climb across so you can get into the alley and there’s a wall there and you have to climb over that wall to get to the other side. This is what creates interest. The wall can be an obstacle. It can be something funny. It can be something unusual. As long as it changes the pace of the story, it becomes the wall because you now have to get over that wall onto the other side before the story can continue. More stories don’t run that way. For instance, if we look at Marsha’s story, we could say, “We went to piano class. On the way, I almost slipped in a banana peel, but then I recovered because I wasn’t feeling so well. Anyway, I got to the class and I played my piece. Then, I played the second piece.” You can see where the story is going, but at one point in time, when she slipped in the banana peel, you got that spike in your head. Even though you might not have thought about it at the time, there was that spike and you see the spike everywhere. What’s more important is the spike has been with you right since you heard your first story being read to you as a kid. If you look at something like Red Riding Hood, it’s a very simple story. The girl goes to her grandmother’s house and she’s got this bag of goodies that her mother has packed for the grandmother. What happens along the way? Red Riding Hood runs into the wolf. Before that, there was no problem at all. The forest was not that intimidating. She got flowers along the way. Then, along came the wolf. The wolf creates the spike in the story. Now, this is a wall that she has to get over. She has to solve that problem. If you look at all the stories that you heard or have told your kids, you will find a consistency in this wall, this obstacle, which means that we have to create stories with these spikes, with these obstacles. Then, we have to climb over these obstacles or rather take the reader or the listener across the obstacle and then to the other side. Here’s what I do with Marsha. I make her sit down with a sheet of paper. Then I get her to draw a line across. At the starting point, she has, say, maybe she’s going to piano class. The ending point is whatever happens at the end. In between, I get her to draw little dots or little spikes, whatever you want to call them, and she has to put in those obstacles. As soon as she puts in those obstacles, we fill in the rest later. The point is once you identify those obstacles, you are able to turn out far better stories because now what you’ve done is you have created that bounce, you have created an obstacle, you have created a wall, and of course, people have to then go over it. When I started out this podcast, I started out with a story about meningitis. I didn’t spend time explaining to you how I was looking out of the window. I went straight into the bounce, straight into the wall. I had convulsions. I fell down. I then had to run to my mother. You have been thrown right in the middle of this bounce. Of course, the bounce didn’t stop until we got to the hospital because now you’re thinking, “Okay, things are going to get okay.” Then, we have another wall. They won’t admit me to the hospital. Then, we get over that wall. Now, they were asking for the mother because they don’t believe that my mother was the mother, that they thought that she was the sister. Then, when all of those problems have been resolved, the doctor says the chances are not good. What we have of these bounces all along the way, these walls all along the way, and you have to cross over, get over these walls to create a great story. This is just the first element of storytelling. Part 2: The Reconnect The second one is the concept called the reconnect. What is the reconnect? Right at the end of the previous section, which is when I was talking about the wall, I went right back to the story of meningitis. Immediately, your brain went from wherever it was right back to that original story. This is what storytellers use very effectively. They use the reconnect. They connect back to something they told you a while ago. It’s very powerful because that creates a bounce of its own. It takes you from where you are to where you used to be. If you’re to watch the movie Star Wars, there is this concept called the force. It’s used the force. Luke used the force. How many times does the word force show up in Star Wars? Apparently, more than 16 times. There you are in the cinema or watching the movie on a DVD or maybe on your computer, but you run into this concept of the force. Every time that reference to the force shows up and you don’t really notice it, but it just shows up, it takes you back to wherever you originally heard it or saw it. Why is this reconnection so cool? The first thing is that often, it makes you feel very intelligent. The story is set up in a way that you know what is coming. When it does arrive, it makes you feel extremely intelligent. That’s what storytelling is about. It’s about making the reader feel a lot happier or a lot sadder, that they use to feel. You can feel that happiness or sadness as I edge into the meningitis story. You know what is coming next. You know how that story ended. It makes you feel very intelligent. It makes the reader or the listener feel very intelligent. The second thing it does is it creates bounce. It bounces you back to wherever you were, and that creates that spike. It’s doing a dual job, but it does one more thing. It closes a loop. You can start off a story, and then knot in the story. Noticek what happened with my story. I can close that loop. I told you that the doctor said I would die or go mad. The loop wasn’t closed. What you can do is if you’re reconnecting at some point, you can close that loop. It’s very trendy to keep the loop open, but it drives people crazy. This morning, I was on my walk and I was listening to an audio book about the brain. This author was talking about how he was at a David Attenborough conference. He was sitting there with someone else. They were having a discussion. Then he went into the discussion. About 20 minutes later, I’m going, “What did David Attenborough had to do with it?” He never closed that loop, and he will never close that loop. It will leave that gap in my brain, and that’s not a good thing. You want to create that disconnect, but then you want to reconnect later, you want to close that loop. That is the power of the reconnect. Part 3: The Anticipation With that, we go to the third part, where we talk about anticipation and why it’s so critical in storytelling. We were doing our workshop in Campbell, California around the year 2006. One of the participants stood up. She was going to tell her story. She told us that her mother was very, very beautiful. She also told us that her sister was a lot like her mother. She then went on to tell us how her father would take photographs, but photographs of the mother and the sister. Notice how we haven’t completed that story. We haven’t really told you what comes next, but the anticipation is killing because you know what comes next. This is the beauty of anticipation. You create anticipation knowing fully well that you’re not leaving any gaps, but that the client, the listener, your reader is filling in the story, that 10%. This is what Anil Dharker told me when I was growing up and I was just starting out in my cartooning career. Anil was the editor of a newspaper called Mid-day. I was drawing cartoons for that newspaper. One day, he came up to me and he says, “Sean, you’re giving too much away. You need to get the customer, the reader to anticipate that 10%. You’re giving away 90% of the story, but you are getting them to anticipate the 10% because readers and listeners and clients are very intelligent. What you should do is leave out the bits. Don’t give the entire story.” Now, when you think about the advice you’re getting here on this podcast, you think, “Wait a second, you just said not to leave out gaps.” Yes, you don’t leave out the gaps. You reconnect, but you don’t tell the entire story upfront either. We’re taking the example, you got the story about the meningitis. You’ve got the story about how I got admitted to hospital. What happened next, you don’t know the rest to that story. That gap hasn’t been closed and yet you’re intelligent enough to figure out that there was an ending and how that ending shows up, that we’ll find out. The reason why we have anticipation is because it creates suspense, it creates unknowing suspense. When you say the boy got on the bus, he would never get off. What you’re doing is you’re going into the brain of the customer and they can see something bad unfolding. When I told you about that father that never took photographs of one of the daughters, you could see that insecurity building up. You could see that loneliness, that detachment. No one had to explain that you, but you can do this very simply by saying, “I woke up expecting it to be a great day.” Within those few words, you have already created anticipation. The reader knows, the listener knows that it’s not going to be a great day. How is it going to unfold? These are the lines that you have to put in your speech, in your presentation, in your writing because when you put in these lines, they create that pause, they create that white space, they create that breathing space. It allows the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next. How is it going to twist and turn? Into Marsha’s story, where she talks about just how she went to piano class, she could say, “I thought it was going to be a very bad day.” Immediately, your mind goes [whizzing 00:19:00] forward to, “Wait, she said bad day but she didn’t sound like it was going to be a bad day. Did it turn out to be a bad day or not?” When she got to the piano class and she was able to play, now you’re relaxing. Then she puts in the other spike, and she goes, “I played that piece really well.” That created another problem for me. You notice what’s happening, the anticipation is setting you up for that spike, the problem that comes next. For us, the anticipation, then the problem. The anticipation, then the problem. Really this is what you have to do when you’re writing great stories. You have to get the reader in the framework, in that frame of mind so that they know that there is something going to change, something I was about to open the drawer when or I walked down the garden, expecting it to be a completely miserable day. It had been raining all morning. You know, even though you don’t know the story is going to unfold, you know that there is going to be a change. You’re creating anticipation. You’re creating that space for the reader and the listener to fill in the gaps in the head. That makes them again feel very intelligent. It also sets it up for that spike that we talked about in the first section. Summary What we’ve covered in today’s podcast has been 3 things. The first thing has been the wall. The wall creates those spikes. It creates that drama. It creates all of those blips that cause you to pay attention to the story. The second thing we looked at was the reconnect. How we start of something at the beginning; then somewhere in the middle, we connect; and then, we connect at the end, and there are these connections all over. If you listen to Episode #54, you can hear all of these connects. Go back to Episode #54 and you can see all these reconnects, walls, and anticipation. Of course, that takes us to anticipation, which is that moment that tells you that something is going to change. It creates the suspense. It’s very, very powerful in storytelling. It’s this breathing space, this quiet just before the storm. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is go back to Episode #54 and listen to that episode because I listened to it just a few days ago. It has all of the stuff. Most of the podcast have it, but I just listened to Episode #54, so I know it’s there, so go back and listen to it. You will see that the wall, the reconnect and the anticipation is there. You’ll get a much better idea because you’ll be able to know in advance when that’s showing up. I had mentioned that we were going to do some workshops in Nashville, Tennessee and in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. We are still looking for a venue. If you know some venues, let us know. In the meantime, if you would like to sign up for a storytelling workshop, then just email me at sean@psychotactics.com. We will send you more details. It’s still work in progress. As you know, we still haven’t found venue, which is the first step. If you know something, let us know. Storytelling is incredibly important. A lot of us leave out storytelling. We give facts and figures. This is why most books and presentation and webinars are so boring. The reason why you find the Brain Audit so interesting is the number of stories and analogies and examples, and then go back and read your copy of the Brain Audit or go to www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit and buy a copy, and you will see how critical it is to have these stories and how it reminds you of what you learned weeks, months, years after you learned it. In the end, statistics don’t sell. The story, the emotion that’s built in within that story, and a story well told is what sells a product or a service. You go for this year and the years to come must be to tell better stories, not to give more information. That brings us to the end of this episode. If you’re in 5000bc and you’re a member, then, please go in and ask questions about storytelling and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions. If you haven’t joined 5000bc, then get your copy of the Brain Audit first, read the stories and then join 5000bc. You know how I started this episode with the doctor saying that I would die or go mad. I didn’t die. That’s me, Sean D’Souza from The 3 Month Vacation saying bye for now. Bye-bye. Still reading? When we try to tell stories, we get stuck. When we try to learn a new skill, we get stuck. So, how do you dramatically increase your rate of learning without getting stuck? Find out here—Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition: Episode 52

When you're writing articles, it's easy to get locked into the mistake of simply starting up the article. That's a mistake—a big mistake. Outlining is what counts most of all, and yet outlines are hated with a vengeance. Is there a way to create outlines so you don't drive yourself crazy? And how do you create outlines for products, workshops etc? Let's find out in this episode on outlining, in The Three Month Vacation.- ------------------- Note: To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/55 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: What is the ‘Concept of Curiosity’? Part 2: The Three Part Outlining System Part 3: What is the Extraction Method? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links 5000bc: How to help you layer out distractions, and focus on the things you want. Read or listen to : How To Get Ideas When Writing Article. Special Bonus: How to increase your prices using the ‘Yes-Yes System’.   The Transcript   This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. In the Antarctic summer of 1912, a rescue party set out in search of Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition team. Scott and his group of explorers had been missing for over eight months. Now, when the search and rescue team found Scott’s body they were horrified at the irony. All of Scott’s men were dead, but not just lying in the snow a million miles from nowhere. They died just eighteen kilometers from a supply depot. This supply depot would have given them all the food and the heating they needed. This depot could of saved their lives. Instead, there they were frozen to death in the unrelenting snow. What was even worse was what Scott and his team knew when they died, and that was that they had missed their opportunity to be first at the South Pole. Roald Amundsen got there first. Now, the difference between Scott and Amundsen could be attributed to many things including bad luck, but the core of Amundsen’s team was based on planning. Amundsen’s team had no friends, they just had experts that would know what to do when things went wrong, and of course there were details. Amundsen labored over the team’s clothing, the ambiance of the prefabricated Norwegian cabin, the supply chain depots. He just went over everything in great detail. In the end, luck played its role, but the better planner won. Amundsen was not only the first one to get to the South Pole, but he also managed to get back safely and to glory. His guide through the entire process was planning the journey. Outlining is about planning. When I was growing up I didn’t have any outlining lessons. I don’t remember going to school and doing any outlining, but I do know that when we do the article writing course we run into a lot of people that have these problems with outlining. Something happened at school that caused a lot of people to absolutely hate outlining. If this hate is so great we miss the opportunity of doing better work and quicker work, and so we have to get over this hate of outlining, because it’s critical not just for your day to day planning, your weekly planning, but it’s also critical for books and podcasts and webinars, and yes of course for articles. Today I’m going to talk about articles, and how you’re going to use outlining, or three methods that you could use to create an outline, without all of that hate of course. One of the biggest objections to outlining is the fact that we don’t have time, and this is critical. When you don’t have time, that’s when you have to outline, because outlining saves time. We spend about a third of our time outlining in different ways. Whether it’s a plan for the week or the month, or if it’s a book that I’m writing, or an article, or even this podcast it has been outlined in great detail, and that’s what enables me to go start at 5:00, by 5:45 I’m done. The second element, which you probably haven’t considered is doing the outline on paper. I always leave the office, I always go some other place, maybe to the library, maybe to the café, but you want to do the outlining on paper. This saves you an enormous amount of time. Again, because you don’t have to deal with phone calls, or technology, or Facebook popping up. It’s just you and the paper. Now that we’ve got these couple of things out of the way, what are the three things that we’re going to cover today? The first thing that we’re going to cover is the concept of curiosity. The second is the three part outline, and the third is extraction. Part 1: Concept of Curiosity Let’s start off with the first one which is curiosity. Let’s say I throw three words at you, and those three words are organic sourdough bread. Now, what is your reaction? Immediately what you have is a factor of curiosity, so you say, “What is it? How long does the bread last? What’s the best way to keep it? Can I freeze it? What are the types of bread? Do you get white bread, and grain bread, and specialty bread?” Effectively what you’ve done is stepped into the shoes of a five year old kid, and that five year old doesn’t know stuff about bread, or clouds, or recording software. What they do know is curiosity, and so what they end up doing is asking you a whole bunch of questions which involve how, and why, and when, and where, and all of these questions, and this forms the basis of an article. This forms the basis of a book. This forms the basis of any kind of planning that you’re doing, but of course it’s the most critical when you’re writing an article, because we tend to write articles more often than anything else. Now there are two ways to do this curiosity based planning or outlining, and you have to go through two stages for this. The first thing you have to do is list a topic. For instance, in The Brain Audit we talk about the concept of target profile. Now, when you have that target profile you have to come up with the subtopics. What you do is you brainstorm. You just sit at the café and you write everything you can think of, not analyzing what you’re writing, just keep going at it. This is how we teach outlining on the article writing course and on the headline course. For instance, we had Kai on the headline course, and he came up with his topic which is search engine optimization. Then he came up with his subtopics, which is Google, Bing, Black Hat, White Hat, spam, Google Update Keywords, keyword, Intent, Biointent, Long Tail, Short Tail, Competition. What he is doing there is he’s got this topic, and then he’s brainstorming all the subtopics. When you look at it, all those subtopics look like big topics in themselves. You look at something like keywords, and that’s a topic in itself, but then you go down to a deeper level and you say, “Okay, let’s talk about keywords. What is a keyword? Why is it important? How does it work? When does it work? Where does it go wrong,” and effectively you’ve stepped into some five year old’s shoe. Almost instantly an objection seems to pop up. You think, “Well, someone has written about this before.” Search engines and keywords, this is not new stuff. Do you have to write new stuff? No, you don’t, because the questions that are being asked are being asked by someone, but the answers that you give they are your own answers. They’re written in your own style. They’re written with your own experience in mind. Even if you have very limited experience, still I want to know it from you, that’s why I’m reading your article. When you are sitting down to outline, you need to do this brainstorming. Without really thinking about anything, and that’s what I do. I’ll just sit there and just write a whole bunch of stuff without analyzing anything, but some days you will notice that I will ask for questions. The reason why I ask for questions is not because I don’t know how to ask how and why and when, it’s just that you get the energy from someone else. If you’re struggling to do this, this brainstorming, just come up with a word, maybe like keywords, and then call a friend. Ask them to pummel you with questions, or take them out to coffee, and ask them to ask you all the questions pertaining to a topic. If they don’t know the topic it’s even better, because that’s when they’re going to ask you the questions that come to their mind. Which of course takes us back to the organic sourdough bread, and you have this factor of what is it, how long do you keep the bread out, what’s the best way to keep it, can I freeze it? Maybe, just maybe at some point in time that topic of freezing just becomes a topic in itself. Now you have to go down, what is this freezing? How do you make it work for you? How do you unfreeze it, what’s the best thing to do, and it becomes a whole new topic in itself and that’s cool. For this podcast, I got all this information about the bread, because someone asked the question. When you go to this website on bread, they ask all the questions, and they answer all the questions, and of course all of them go into the website and in the brochure. When you look at outlining at the very core it is stepping into the shoes of a five year old. In asking all the curiosity based questions, and if you can’t do it get someone else to help you. That takes us to the end of the first part, which is curiosity as a method of outlining. Let’s go to the second part, which is the method I use most of all because it’s the most efficient, and it’s called the three part system. Part 2: The Three Part Outlining System When kids grow up they usually have different sorts of treats. When I was growing up my grandma gave me bread. Bread was my treat. During my vacations I used to go to my grandmother’s house, and when the bread man came, and the bread man used to come to the house with the bread. The bread was always very hot, and they were these little squares of bread, which in India we called pav. Yep, that’s what she’d give me as a treat and I loved it. That’s just a story about bread, but if you would take that story anywhere and split it up you could create three parts. You could say, “Tell us about your love story of bread. What is the state of bread when you were growing up,” and, “How is it different now?” Of course I’m making this up as I go along, but the point is anything can be split up into three parts. When we took that topic of freezing bread, we can ask why do you freeze bread, how to freeze bread, and finally how to defrost bread. What we’ve done now is split up the topic into a whole bunch of subtopics. We answer those questions, and this is what I do in every call, on every workshop, on every book. A topic is split up into three topics. This topic of outlining we’ll split up into curiosity, and three part, and extraction. If you look at just about anything else that I do it’s always three parts. I’m only trying to do three parts always, but the three part system of outlining is more sophisticated, and I’ll tell you why in a second. When we looked at pure curiosity we went what and how and when and where, but when we go through the three part system we say, “Well, freezing bread.” Then we look at what is freezing bread, why is it important, how do we go about it, and so what we have here is a much higher level. Where we take a topic, break it up into three subtopics, and then we go into the curiosity. It becomes a far richer experience simply because of how we’ve approached the outlining. The question that arises when we’re doing this assignment is not that we can’t take a topic and break it up into three parts. We can all do that, the question that arises is, “Well, there are a hundred things to talk about anything.” For instance, if I’m talking about microphones, you can talk about storage, you can talk about how to buy it how to sell it, how to get the best out of your microphone. The topics are endless, how am I going to pick three? The answer is, you just pick three. I always just pick three. There is no specific logic to the three. You have to just connect part one to part two, part two to part three, and as long as you can make the connection there needs to be nothing else that is common between them. If you took a topic like buying bread, and storing bread, and freezing bread, it looks like there’s a logic, but there is no logic. Those are just three topics. If you go into a bread website, you can find a hundred topics. It’s just that what we’ve done is said, “Okay, we’re going to take these three topics, and then we’re going to connect them one to the other,” and that’s how you create an outline. What we’ve covered so far are two ways to create an outline. The first is curiosity. Just sit down and write who, what, why, when, et cetera, and you will start to outline something in a way that a five year old does. Then we looked at the three part system, which is we take one topic and then we purposely split it up into three topics. Knowing fully well that there are probably seven or eight or a hundred more things that you could talk about that topic, but the third part is what I often use as well. Part 3: What is the Extraction Method? Which is called the extraction method. What is the extraction method? They already know that we have a membership site at 5000bc. At 5000bc people, clients will often ask me a question, and I encourage them to ask me a question. Then I answer, but I don’t answer in the form of an article, or I don’t outline anything, I just answer. This is a forum, at least part of 5000bc’s a forum, and I will answer as if I were answering in a forum. Which is just a free flow of information. There is no specific structure to it. Of course, there will be some structure in my mind, but it’s just a free flow information, and then as I’m writing it I realize, “Okay, I’m covering this point and that point and that point,” or at the end of it I could go back and go, “What were the points I really covered in this?” You will find that when you do this free flow you just answer a question, you will find that you’re covering two or three points in a longish answer. If someone were to ask you, “Which are the best places to visit in your city?” You could answer that question. You could say, “You should go here, and you should go there. You should go there,” and there you go. Once you’ve gone into that one, two, three, you’re now going to go into a lot of detail, and that is because you have to justify what you just said, and so you will talk about those three points in great detail, but you’re doing it in a free flow system. I don’t want to call it a system, because it’s not even a system, it’s just free flow. This may not sound like outlining but it is, because you come back and you look at the points that you’ve covered, and there will be three things that you’ve covered. Then you have to go backwards into the three part system, and then further back into the curiosity, and take every one of them and expand them. Now, you’ve written all of that stuff, so you’ve covered a lot of that just by answering their question. Maybe you don’t have a forum, but then you do have email. Clients will ask you questions on email, and if you don’t have email you have Facebook. You can ask people to ask you questions on Facebook, and if you don’t have Facebook you can go to another forum, you can go anywhere. You have to get into this habit of getting this free flow answer out, because there is no pressure when you’re in this free flow mode. Go for it, just answer the question, then pull out the stuff, and now you’ve got another form of outlining. I know all of these three systems of curiosity, of three part, and extraction seem relatively easy, and they are and they will become very easy over time. I use all three of them in different situations. I don’t have a system in place, as in I don’t sit down and go, “I’m going to do a three part. I’m going to do curiosity, I’m going to do extraction.” It depends on what’s in front of me. If someone has asked a question in email, I will take as much time as I can to just free flow an answer, and then I will extract. Put it into three parts, then go to curiosity, and now we have an article. Now we have probably a booklet, or if there’s enough information, and there always is, it can become a book, or even a course. This is the beauty of outlining. If you use one of these three systems, or all of these three systems whenever you feel like, but what’s the one thing that you can do that gets consistent results? That to me is the three part system. I will take a topic, and I will make three subtopics or six subtopics. I will pick a subtopic, and then that’s subtopic will be broken up in three parts. Like bread, which is the main topic, and then storing and freezing and cutting, whatever and then I’ll pick freezing. I’ll say, “What three things can I cover in freezing?” If I have to look up information and research that’s fine, but I can cover three things. Then I will expand that, and that’s how I get pretty much everything I do. The reason why you find that Psychotactics runs all these articles, and reports, and websites, and all of this stuff, this whole element of being prolific comes from planning. It comes from being Roald Amundsen. It comes from making sure that you have all of your stuff ready for this South Pole expedition, and you can’t take anything to chance. You’re definitely not going to go in an article sitting at your computer and trying to work it out, no, no, no. You’re going to work out all the details at the café, on a piece of paper, and especially if you don’t have time, because outlining saves you time every single time. When in doubt use the three part system, because that’s the most efficient of all. That’s your one thing that you have to do today. Take a topic and break it up into three parts and work from there. Summary While that brings us to the end of this podcast, there are a few announcements. The first is a storytelling workshop that we’re going to have in Nashville, Tennessee, and probably in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands. If you’d like to register for this workshop, and yes there are no prices and stuff, but if you want more information email me at sean@psychotactics.com. It’s a really good price, because this is a beta workshop doesn’t mean that it’s going to be crappy. It’s going to be as good as any workshop. For the first time we’re having it, it’s going to be three days, it’s going to be in December, email me for details. While you’re waiting for the workshop get to 5000bc.com, that’s our membership site. Why is it important to you, because you get questions answered. Most of the stuff on the internet … Well, you don’t know if it’s pertaining to you. You can’t ask back and forth questions. In 5000bc I’m there 5000 times a day, so that’s 5000bc.com. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook at Sean D’Souza, and of course my email sean@psychotactics.com. That’s it for me, and The Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. Still Reading? One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our writing is because we run into resistance. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.

It's easy to pick up bad habits. Knowing what causes bad habits to succeed enables you to make good habits meet with similar success. In this episode we dig deep into the trio of trigger, routine and reward mechanisms. And how every one of them play their role. But then we go deeper into the world of groups and how the groups matter. If you've struggled to maintain good habits on an ongoing basis, this audio (and transcript) will show you the elements you have to put in place to succeed. ==== Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/54 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below: iTunes   |  Android   |  E-mail (and get special goodies)   | RSS -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about To create a good habit or a bad habit you have to have three core elements in place. Part 1: How a good habit start with the cue Part 2: Why routine is important Part 3: Why no reward  leads to failure Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.-------------------- Useful Resources and Links 5000bc: How to get helpful and specific feedback for your complex marketing problems? Episode 14: How to Get Things Done: The Power of The Trigger Resistance: How To Win The Resistance Game The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza. You’ve probably heard of Batman. Now how does Batman get summoned by the police commissioner, who happens to be Police Commissioner Gordon? Apparently Batman was being summoned by a pager. Every time there was a crime in Gotham City that pager would go off in Batman’s pouch and he would have to respond to a crime. Now you compare this with the bat signal. The bat signal is a distress signal that appears in various interpretations of the Batman myth. According to Wikipedia it is a specially modified Kleig searchlight with a stylized symbol of a bat attached to the light so that it projects a large bat on the sky or the buildings of Gotham City. No one knows for sure how that pager got thrown away and this elaborate bat signal came into play, but one thing we know for sure: that pager was no match for the elaborate bat signal that came up after one of Batman’s encounters with The Joker. Batman said that he was no longer happy to get this pager and skulk around in the shadows. He wanted this elaborate bat signal that would be projected on the building, that would be projected in the sky. That was his trigger. Most of us don’t have such an elaborate trigger every time we want to achieve something. Let’s say we want to go for a walk every day or maybe we want to wake up every morning and do yoga. Maybe we want to learn how to draw or write or do something and learn a scale or a language. We seem to fall by the wayside simply because we don’t have the trigger. Is it just the trigger? In episode number 14 I covered this concept of the trigger, but since then I’ve realized that it’s a lot more. In the Power of the Habit by Charles Duhigg he specifically talks about three elements that need to be in place. In this episode we’re going to cover those three elements, and then we’re going to add the fourth missing element that makes the big difference. To create a good habit or a bad habit you have to have three core elements in place. They are a cue, a routine, and a reward. What makes that cue, routine, and reward more powerful, especially when you’re trying to get a good habit rather than a bad habit? That’s the power of the group. In this episode we’re going to look at what is a cue, what is a routine, what is a reward, and how the group helps tremendously. Let’s start off with the first element, which is a cue. Part 1: The Cue Let’s go back to 1900. In 1900 one of the biggest problems that America had was that most people didn’t brush their teeth. Not a few people but most people. Now imagine you are someone who manufactures toothpaste and you want to get an entire country, probably the entire world, to use toothpaste. What do you do? If you’re lucky you have someone like Claude Hopkins around. Who was Claude Hopkins? Claude Hopkins was one of the first advertising geniuses of our time. He wrote the book Scientific Advertising. If you haven’t read that book, you should read it. As the story goes, Mr. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with an amazing new creation. It was a minty, frothy toothpaste named Pepsodent. He somehow had to convince everyone that they needed Pepsodent. He has to create this habit from nothing at all. He has to create a cue. He had to create a trigger. What was that cue or trigger? In the book The Power of Habit Charles Duhigg goes on to talk about how this trigger came about. It seems that Claude Hopkins signed on to run the ads on Pepsodent but he had to go through a pile of dental textbooks. In his autobiography he wrote about how it was terrible, dry reading. In the middle of one of the books he found a reference to something. That something was mucin plaques on teeth, which Claude Hopkins then called the film. When you wake up every morning you have this kind of film on your teeth. Most of us don’t notice it. Well, we didn’t notice it back in 1900. Now this film is a naturally occurring phenomenon and you don’t really have to worry too much about it, but Claude used it as the trigger, as the bat signal. He started running ads all over the place. He said just run your tongue across your teeth and you will feel a film. That’s what makes your teeth look off-color. That’s what invites decay. Then he pushed that button further. He said millions are using this new method of teeth cleaning. Why would any woman have dingy film on her teeth? Pepsodent removes the film. In that one action with that poster and that ad campaign, Claude Hopkins changed the habit by sending out that signal that when you wake up every day you’re going to have that film on your teeth. You’re going to run your tongue over it and you’re going to feel that. That became the trigger. This is the starting point for any habit. We do this. We have an alarm clock that tells us we have to wake up and go into our yoga, or in my case I have Tuesdays, which is when I record my podcast. I know that by Tuesday morning I’ve got to get this podcast out 4 in the morning. It’s not enough to have the cue because we all sleep through the alarm. We all let Tuesdays slip into Wednesdays. Before you know it it’s Friday and then you’re all stressed out. To solve that problem you have to have the second element, which is the routine. Let’s look at routine. Part 2: The Routine When I started out as a cartoonist many years ago I used to do two sets of comic strips. These are daily comic strips. You do them every day five days a week. Now I had to do two sets, which means I had to turn out ten comic strips a week. The thing is that I was young. I was in my 20s so I didn’t have time to think about my actions. I just said yes when the newspaper editor said, “Would you like to put your comic strips in five days a week?” Then when you sit down and think about it, do you really want to do a comic strip every single day? Wouldn’t it be better to just do it once every week or once every 15 days? Instead, what I found surprised me a great deal. I found that it was easier to do one or even two comic strips in this case and to do it every single day rather than to do one every 15 days. You know this to be true because it’s much easier to go for a walk on a regular basis or do something on a regular basis than to do it once every 15 days. Then when we went front cartooning into marketing, I started up this website called 5000bc.com. Now it’s the membership site of Psychotactics. It started out in 2003 and it’s still going. We still have our members and we still have a great time, but that’s not the point. The point was when I started out 5000bc I had no ability to write articles at high speed. I was taking two days to write a single article. Then I started 5000bc and I promised the readers that I would put in five articles a week. Now how did I come to this five articles a week? I don’t know. I looked at some other membership sites and they were doing five articles a week so I decided to have five articles a week. So the habit started. The routine was that somehow I had to have that cue, which is Monday morning or Tuesday morning, and then there was the routine where I had to go one, two, three, four, five. It was the end of the week, and then the next week. What you find with routine is that it’s much easier to do things on a regular basis than it is to do it every now and then. We took these concepts and we started applying them to our courses. In 2006 to 2008 we ran a completely different article writing course than we do today. At that point in time someone would write an article once a week. Then I would look at it and then comment on it. Then they would go away and then they would write another article once a week. When you think about it, that’s pretty good. To write an article once a week, that’s pretty phenomenal. Around the year 2008 my instructions were misunderstood. I started up the article writing course as always and one of the participants … yes Paul, you know who you are … Paul decided to write an article every day thinking that’s what I meant. The rest of the group, they thought they had to write an article every day. I was sitting there looking at them writing an article every day and thinking should I tell them. I went to my wife Renuka. Should I tell them? I let them keep on writing. Now this should have been amazing to me because to write an article every single day, how difficult is that? It wasn’t amazing. I’d learned this with the cartoons. I’d learned this with 5000bc. I’d learned this before. I knew that the routine helps you move along at a far greater speed. We see this with our daily brushing as well, which what Pepsodent started all those years ago. We brush our teeth once a day, many of us brush it twice a day, so the routine sits in. What we’ve covered so far are two things. First is the cue and the second is the routine. This takes us to the third part, which is the reward. Part 3: The Reward If you started out that yoga routine every morning and then you suddenly find yourself not continuing, there is a reason for it. It’s not because of the cue or the routine. It’s because of the reward. What you have to do to get a habit in place is you have to have the reward in place. All bad habits are created by rewards. You start eating a muffin today at lunch time and then tomorrow at lunch time and the day after at lunch time. Suddenly you know the reward before the cue or the routine. Afternoon doesn’t have to show up. In the morning you’re thinking about that muffin. For good habits you need so much more energy. You have to have the reward in place. When we go for a walk every day, and I’ve said this before, the reward is coffee, but not just any coffee. Because if the coffee wasn’t so good and in between we started running to these cafes that were not so good, your reward falls apart and then everything else falls apart with it. We had to look for this café that was open at 6:45 in the morning. Not 7:00 but 6:45, because that’s when we reach our destination, have our coffee, and then turn around. We found this café where the barista was one of the top three in the All Japan Championships. As you can tell, the coffee is consistently good cup after cup after cup. That becomes the reward. That becomes the reason why we wake up when it’s raining, when it’s windy, when you have good weather or bad weather. We’re on the road and we get that reward. This is what you have to set in place whether you’re writing a book or learning a language or doing just about anything. Pepsodent had an in-built reward that no one really talked about. When you have a great product, then you have great competition. Other toothpaste companies tried to sell their toothpaste just like Pepsodent had and they didn’t meet with a lot of success. This left all of those toothpaste companies totally confused. As far as they were concerned, there was a cue, that was the film, and then there was the routine, and that was waking up in the morning. The reward was clean teeth, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t, because Pepsodent had citric acid. It also had mint oil and it had some other exotic chemicals. When people brushed their teeth they got this tingling sensation. That tingling sensation was their reward. It took the other competing companies a long time to figure out what this secret ingredient, this reward was really all about. If customers didn’t feel that tingling sensation in their mouths, they would feel like they hadn’t brushed their teeth at all, so there was no reward and the whole exercise fell flat on its face. This is the reason why Pepsodent’s sales continued to soar and the habit continued to set vs. the other one where it wasn’t so good. That’s the same thing with the coffee. The fact that we know that there is a cue and the routine doesn’t make any difference if at the end of the trip the coffee is not stunningly good. I have the same kind of reward with the podcast. When I finish recording the podcast I have to then put in the music. The music is my reward, because I enjoy the music. I enjoy putting in all those little bits of music and increasing the volume just a little bit and reducing it. That’s my reward. All those cues and all those routines make no difference if there is no music. If you told me to record this podcast without the music, yes I would do it but I would not have fun. If I don’t have fun, there goes the habit. This is why bad habits are so good, because they have fun, they have reward. Every time there’s that muffin at the end, you don’t need much of a cue or a routine. You can quite easily get to the muffin. When you have a bad habit, it’s very easy because there’s always that reward in place. This is thefundamental flaw with habits: that the reward needs to be in place right at the start. We have to do this in the article writing course or all our courses. On Friday you get a gold star. You have to do your assignment on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, and on Friday you get a gold star. Now it’s just a little icon. It’s just a little icon in the forum and you would think people would not be interested with that icon, but they are. That’s the reward. People crave that icon. How do we know that? We know that because you take it away and you see their reaction, and people say, “Hey, where’s my gold star for this week?” The reward can be tested. If you put a reward in place and you take away that reward, that is your benchmark. That’s how you know that the reward is really good. If you take it away and no one cares, you have to change your reward system. This is whether you are setting a benchmark for yourself or for your clients. You have to start off with the reward, then work out the cue, then the routine. Then we have a habit in place. What we’ve covered so far is the cue, the routine, and the reward, which can be benchmarked. But we found out that there is something else that matters. That is the group. Without a group it’s far easier to fall off the bandwagon. To give you an example of the group, let me talk about having a bad group. Now how do we define a group? A group is just more than one person. Two people, that’s a group. Four people, that’s also a group. Eight people, that’s also a group. 25 people: is that still a group? Apparently not. This is what we found when we started doing the courses. Now when you look online at many marketers they talk about how a thousand people turned up and 500 people turned up and 200 people turned up. Does that lead to change? Does that lead to a change in the habit? It doesn’t. The reason why 95 or 98% of those people don’t reach their goal, whatever it is, to write a book or sing a song or do whatever it is, the reason why they don’t is because the group is too large. What we did was we had to break it down so that we had, say, only 25 people. Then the introverts stood up and they said, “No no no, 25 people is like having 500 people.” We asked them, “How many people do you need?” and they said, “How about six?” We found that six or seven people constitutes the right group in terms of the maximum number of people. Two people, that’s just you and someone else, that’s the smallest group possible. You have to have the group if you want to set a habit in place, especially because we’re so hopeless at creating and sustaining these habits all on our own. The reason the group is so important is because one, you get to know other people, so it becomes a social environment but with just five or six other people, not with 500 people where you can get lost and no one can notice if you’ve dropped off. Even in the group of 25 it’s very easy to drop off and no one would notice. The may need to you have a tiny group, everyone notices. You know that everyone is noticing and so you show up. Once you show up, you become a responsible memorable of that group and you start pushing the group forward, the group starts pushing you forward. Now you have a habit. Now there are other elements of the group that make it so powerful but at the very core, that element of someone else needing your support, that is what makes the group so powerful. Again, like the coffee, if the group doesn’t know each other or if they are anonymous, it doesn’t work because you have no connection to the group. The may need to you have a connection to the group you have a responsibility to the group. As soon as you have that responsibility, then you know that the other person is waiting for you to go for the walk. It sounds crazy. When you’re looking at a course there are people from South Africa, there are people from the United States, from New Zealand. Why would they be interested in someone else? But they are, and that’s the power of the group. That’s what creates that habit. That’s what sustains the cue, the routine, and the reward. Summary If you really want to create a habit, you have to start off with the reward, then take away the reward. Does it make any difference to you? That’s when you know that it’s a great reward or not. Then you find a group. Once you have the reward and the group, then you go into setting up the cue and setting up the routine. Then you have cue, routine, reward, and group. That is how you get a habit in place. It’s 5:46 AM and at exactly three or four minutes from now I’m going to get my cue. It’s going to come through Facebook Messenger. Yes, my wife Renuka, she’ll Facebook me and say, “I’m up. Are you ready?” I have to respond, “I’m ready.” The group forms at that point in time. Then it’s time to hit the road and get our cup of coffee. When you’re working all by yourself it’s very difficult to form a habit, so here’s what I would suggest. At a primary level, join 5000bc.com. That’s our membership site. It’s very reasonable. It’s just $259 a year. Once you join, there are groups there and they will help you move forward. We purposely keep the groups very small. For instance, we’ve taken the info products course and we’ve set up groups. They’re working through the info products course. The second thing that you want to do is you want to join one of our courses. You missed the headlines course and you’re probably missing the cartooning course, but there will be a course, there will be a workshop. You want to come to these events because you want to see how we implement these things. The reason why clients come back and pay $2,000 and $3,000 for the course is not because of the content alone. A lot of people give great content. It’s not just us. Now our system is different and we have the system of tiny increments, but at the very core we have this core of cue, routine, reward, and group. You’ll want to do one of the courses just to work through the system and see how it works for you and how you can implement it with your clients. That is the magic of Psychotactics. Start off with 5000bc.com. Go there today and sign up, because there is a waiting list and we take two or three weeks to approve you before you get in. Get there quicker, get on the waiting list, and then you can join 5000bc.com and see how this reward system, how this cue and routine is put into place. Later, much later, you can do a course with us and you can see how that system works as well. It’s not just about courses but the applications are for pretty much everything whether you’re doing video games or just about selling toothpaste for that matter. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. See you in 5000bc.com. Bye bye. Once we have good habits, we have to then maintain the good habits—but we run into resistance.Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’.

Haven't you visited a web site and left shortly after reading an article? Why did the site fail to get you to sign up? Or why didn't you buy a product or service? The answer lies in the content of your articles and the way you structure them. Article writing is about creating a solid "next step", so that clients follow one of three sequences. What are those sequences? Find out in this podcast on the "next step". In this episode Sean talks about The 3 successful ways to creating a next step with your articles.Using these steps you will sell more products or consulting or workshops or whatever it is that you want your customer to go ahead or go forward with. Part 1: The importance of the 'Editorial Next Step' Part 2: The 'Sales Next Step' and how it causes resistance Part 3: The 'Embedded Next Step'  and how to use it.    This is The Three Month Vacation, and I'm Sean D'Souza. Christmas for me was the most fun time of the year when I was growing up, and that was because as a kid, there were always presents and gifts. Then as I grew up and entered my 20s, we used to go dancing. In Mumbai around Christmas time, we have this very unusual setting where whole football stadiums are allocated for Christmas dances and New Year dances. Several months before Christmas rolls along, you have to the buy the tickets to the event, you have to book your table and then it's the night of December 25th, and you have to put on your best suit and your tie and get your partner and go to the dance. The music would start at about 9 o'clock at night and go until 6 in the morning when we'd stagger home after this night of revelry. It was at one such dance when I met my wife, Renuka. Because we used to go in a group, I didn't really know the names of all the girls that were around and I suddenly didn't know Renuka's name. All I know that she was wearing a red dress and because of the red dress, I called her Santa all night. Well, that caused a problem because I didn't really ask her name and then the dance was over and she went her own way and I went my own way. I happened to have her sister's phone number so I did call up their place and I was about to ask for her when I couldn't remember the name. What do you do on the phone? Do you ask for Santa? I very quickly put the phone down and I let it go. There was no next step. Having a next step is extremely important when you want to go ahead with anything in life. The same applies to article writing. When you're writing an article, you think, "Well, I'm creating all these credibility," but that's not the end point. The end point is the next step. Where are we going to go from there. Today, we're going to explore 3 ways in which you can create a next step with your articles so that you can create even more credibility and then that finally ends up with either selling more products or consulting or workshops or whatever it is that you want to go ahead or go forward with. In this episode, we'll look at the 3 methods. The first is the editorial next step, the second is the sales next step, and the third is the embedded next step. Let's start looking at the first one which is the editorial next step. Part 1: Editorial Next Step What is the editorial next step? In every article, your goal is to get the reader to experience a new world. The reason the reader gets to your article at all is because you're taking them on a journey, and this journey depends on what you're covering in the article. Now you may be showing the reader how to increase prices without losing customers. You may be showing them how to fix a roof on a garden shed. You may be asking them to watch a specific video. In every case, you're setting out to change or at least to nudge the customer into doing something. Now that is your goal right from the start or you wouldn't have written the article in the first place. Let's say you've written the article and the most obvious thing that you want to do is you want to direct the reader to go forward to the next step. Now this step has no sales edge to it. There's nothing that you are selling, no products or services or workshops. You're just creating a deeper sense of credibility, and the way you do that is just to put a little link at the end of your article. It's the most obvious one but a lot of people don't do this, and that is either read more articles on pricing strategy or read the continuing series on how to create more durable roofs or watch this video and you'll see how the soil erosion is affecting our planet. The point is you are really not trying to sell anything. You were just moving them to the next step. When you write your article, you have to ask yourself, "Do I have a next step? Are they doing something as a result of reading that article?" When we look at our own website or our own blogs, we'll have an article and then we won't have a next step. When we look at us posting our articles on someone else's blog, what we'll have is some kind of footer information and that is not good enough for people to go to the next step. What you've got to do is create some kind of encouragement. What we found very effective is to have a kind of report. When you look at a lot of the articles that we'll post on guest blogs, at the end of the article, before that footer information, we're going to have a little report and that creates a next step. That creates the enticement for the reader to continue into that same trip as it were. If the article is about pricing, then the report will be about something that the reader has not considered about pricing and that will be the enticement so that they come to your blog or your website and then sign up for that report and of course they get into your subscriber list. On your own website as well, you want them to move along so either you give them a report, yes you can do this on your own website, or you can drive them to read about more articles on the same topic or similar topic and that gets them deeper into your website and deeper into your information. You have to remember that a customer buys long before they pay, and when they're buying into your stuff, they're buying into you and your credibility and your ability to transform their lives. The more time they spend on your podcast, the more time they spend on reading that information; the more they are going to like you, the more they are going to trust you, and the more they are likely to buy from you in the future. When you write your article, the first thing is the editorial next step. What is that editorial next step? Is it going to be a report or is it going to be another series of articles? Whatever it is, you need to have that at the end of every article. This takes us to the second type of next step which has nothing to do with editorial at all. Part 2: Sales Next Step This is called the sales next step. The sales next step is simply a call to action to buy something or to do something that is more likely to lead to sales. How would you know if the nudge is leading to sales or to editorial? You have to ask yourself this question, will the customer feel a bit of resistance when they go to that next step? If so, then you're actually selling. It's a sales next step. If the customer has to fill in a form or they have to opt in or they have to jump over some barriers, they have to sign up, pay for something, then it's a sales next step. The editorial next step, it seems like friendly advice. It's like, "Hey, see this movie," or "You should read this book," or "Go read other articles," or "Watch this YouTube video." The sales next step is different and you know there will be at least some resistance when your reader reads your message or listens to your podcast or watches your webinar. It's more likely that your message will be sales. It will be sign up for this course, sign up for this workshop. For instance, we have a sales letter for the article writing course. When you read the sales letter, it doesn't read like a sales letter. It actually reads like an article. It talks about how I struggle with my article writing, how I used to take two days to write an article, and how I wished I had a fairy godmother, and what the fairy godmother would do to make my life simpler when it came to article writing. Then at the end of it, there is the link to the article writing course. It seems like editorial and it yet leads to a sales pitch. In advertising, they call this the advertorial; seems like editorial, it is editorial, it helps you a lot, but at the end of it, there is some kind of decision that you have to make that involves resistance. You want to put this in all of your articles at some level. You could have this as links in between your articles. Let's say I'm talking about the Brain Audit; I could hyperlink that as I was talking about it. Or right at the end, I get them to move to the next phase, that next step. That next step is very important. If a customer spent all their time reading your article, they want to know what to do next and if you just leave them hanging there, then it doesn't really work in their favor or your favor. We've covered 2 ways that you have to move that agenda forward. The first one is the editorial step and the second one is the sales next step. This takes us to the third one which is the embedded next step. Part 3: Embedded Next Step The embedded next step is where you have the entire sales pitch within your editorial. Let's say I was talking about pricing and then within that whole pricing model, I talk about a membership site at 5000bc and how it was priced and then I go on to how to increase the prices and what was the effect of that on 5000bc. I bring up 5000bc half a dozen times but all the time, it's editorial; all the time, it's informing you; all the time, it's giving you examples about 5000bc. What this is doing is embedding 5000bc in your brain and there's nothing subconscious about it. It's pretty straightforward. However, there's no doubt that at the end of it, you're going to be curious about what lies behind this doorway. What lies behind this membership at 5000bc. Even as you're listening to this, even as you're reading this, you will start to think, "Well, I wonder. I should go and explore what 5000bc is all about." This is what an embedded next step is, where you're giving complete examples of something else. Maybe it's a product that you have or a service that you have, but you're breaking it down into editorial. You're giving where you succeeded, where you failed, what happened, what didn't happen, all the time that brand name, that product name is coming into the picture. Yes, we're talking about articles here but I do this in presentations as well. A podcast is a presentation and if I were to give you a lot of examples from the Brain Audit about how customers buy and why they don't buy that eventually, you're going to be curious about the Brain Audit. Even as we're doing this podcast, you can see how this is working. You're thinking about 5000bc, you're thinking about the Brain Audit. It's part of the editorial and this is called the embedded next step. Is the embedding sales pitch? It is. Some people may not see the sales pitch in it at all. It may appear to be 100% editorial and really, that's the beauty of the embedded next step. It has no next step involved. It's not asking you to buy anything. There is no link inside anywhere. There's nothing, but part of or the entire article revolves around their product or service. It creates the curiosity and so you take that next step. Should you put a link at the end of it? If you do, it looks like you are pushing me towards that all the time. I avoid it, but it's up to you to decide what you want to do. My advice would be to create it as editorial only, giving all these examples, creating that embedded next step, and then the customer makes their own mind up and goes to the next step. Summary Lets summarize what we've covered today. The first thing is the editorial next step. The editorial next step is part of the article itself. Often, it's just after the summary. It's towards the end of the article. It's more than likely to be the last few sentences of the article where you're driving the customer to read more, to watch more, and to create greater credibility for you, for the future is an investment in the future. Second type of next step is the sales next step. Now that has a clear demarcation. It sits away from the editorial and it's clearly a sales-based nudge and anyone looking at it should be able to tell that it's a next which is going to have some resistance involved. You either have to fill in an opt-in form or you have to have some barrier or you're going to have to pay for it in some way, and they should be clear. Sometimes we can put links within the article that leads to a product or a service, but having it at the end is also a very good strategy and that is the sales next step. You'll see this at the end of all the Psychotactics articles. There is this nudge. This is how customers go and they buy products and services from us. Finally, you have the embedded next step which is embedded in the article itself. If I were to talk about 5000bc right through the article and explain how it is built and how we went about stuff and how we were pricing it, eventually you get this feeling that you want to go to 5000bc. It's the same thing with any product or service when you break it down and you explain it as a case study. Now what you're doing is creating an embedded next step. People want to part of that experience, they want to know more, and the logical step is for them to go and find out more about it. When do you use these next steps? You can have the editorial and the sales next step in every other article. However, the embedded next step you need to use with some amount of prudence. You use it every now and then and clients get to know your products and your services in great detail to get the inside view, but you don't want to use this a lot. The other ones, use it freely all the time, there's no problem. This takes us to the one action that we have to do. One of the things that you can do right away is go and look at 3 of your articles, any 3 articles, and look if there is a next step. Is there an editorial next step, because there should be one. Even if you don't have anything to sell at this stage, you need to have an editorial next step. If you're writing an article about pricing, then lead them to other articles about pricing. If you're writing an article about article writing, lead them to other articles about article writing. That way, you're creating credibility. People are buying long before they pay. You will get your payment at some point in time but you need to create that credibility, you need to get the customer that crossed you today. Having that next step makes a big difference, which also takes us back to our Christmas ... I couldn't get in touch with Renuka after the Christmas dance because I really didn't know her name and I was too embarrassed to ask for Santa, and so I let it slide. Luckily, 3 months later, all the friends gathered around for a picnic and there she was yet again. This time, I made sure that I asked her name, got her phone number, and yes we worked out the next date and that's a long time ago and we've been pretty much together ever since. I say pretty much together because there is some story there as well, but that'll have to wait for another podcast. Right now, we have to go to our next step, don't we? A good next step for you would be to send me an email about the questions that you have so that I can answer them on this podcast. I can create new information based on your questions. You can send it to me on Twitter on @seandsouza or on Facebook, again Sean D'Souza or sean@psychotactics.com. If you haven't already done your good deed for the day, then go to iTunes and click on the subscribe button so that you can subscribe to this podcast and of course, you can also leave a review because hey, that's your good deed for the day. I have been embedding 5000bc and the Brain Audit in this podcast. If you haven't already read the Brain Audit, you should. It will completely change the way you look at how clients think and why they do what they do and why they back away at the very last minute. You can find that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit. That's it for me, Sean D'Souza and Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. Still listening? Often, you want to organize a next step but sometimes life takes over. Like for instance when we had the InfoProducts workshop in Washington, DC and there were 2 belly dancers in the group and they decided that everyone in the room would like to do some belly dancing. Off we went, half of group formed the instrumentation as it were and half of them did the belly dancing. There was no compulsion, but everyone took part in it, took about 15, 20 minutes and we all had a great time. There you go. You don't always have to have this organization. Sometimes you just go with the flow. That's your little snippet from the Psychotactics archive. Bye for now.  

How do you dramatically increase your rate of learning? And why do we get stuck when we're trying to learn a new skill? Strangely the concept of boxes comes into play. We move from beginner to average—and then we spin in that middle box, never moving to expert level. So how do we move to expert level? And how can we do that without instruction? Interestingly, there's an answer. Listen to the episode to find more about not just how to learn, but how to teach as well. ----------------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Understanding the three boxes of learning Part 2: How construction and deconstruction plays a role in learning Part 3: How you can start using this accelerated learning system, today. Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.  ----------------------------------------- Useful Resources and Links  Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance GameDaVinci Cartooning Course:  How to draw cartoons to liven up your website, blog or presentations?Story Telling: How to craft amazing stories----------------------------------------- So how do you subscribe to this free podcast? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:   iTunes   |  Android   |  E-mail (and get special goodies)   | RSS   The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's a relatively unknown fact that the world's best chicken sexers come almost exclusively from Japan. Now chicken sexing is simply about telling the male chick from the female chick. For poultry owners, especially commercial poultry owners, this knowledge of which is a male chick and which is a female check is very important because that enables them to feed the female chicks and basically get rid of the male chicks, which are unproductive. In the past, the poultry owners had a problem. They had to wait for about five to six weeks before differentiating male from female. When you have a problem there's always a solution, so from that problem you got the Zen Nippon Chick Sexing School. It began courses in training people how to accurately discriminate the sex of a day-old chick, not five or six weeks but day-old chick. People were able to discriminate instantly. Of course you had all these experts who over time became very good at distinguishing the male from the female. Well, then you came along. What are you going to do? How many months or years are you going to spend trying to learn this skill? As it appears, you can do it extremely quickly. But you can't do it through traditional methods, which is where someone tells you exactly what you have to do. Instead, it's more a factor of the brain taking over. We see something very similar unfolding in the Psychotactics cartooning course. If you went into a café and asked about 10 or 15 people, "Can you draw cartoons?" there's a very good chance that almost all of them will say no. Yet within just a few weeks of starting the cartooning course you will find that people are drawing cartoons like Snoopy and Sid from Ice Age and all these complex cartoons with relative ease. How does this transformation occur? What's really working? What is causing this factor of accelerated learning? That's what we're covering in the episode. Because accelerated learning enables you to do the very same task at a very high speed. Therefore you can go on more vacations. Yes, I know, everything ties up to the Three Month Vacation. You want to get very good at your skill and be very quick at it. That's what this episode is all about. It's about accelerated learning and how we can get there in a fraction of the time. To understand this concept of accelerated learning we have to look at three elements. The first is box one, two, and three. How do they play a role and what causes us to get bogged down, and how can you move past that? Then in the second part we'll look at construction and deconstruction, and how that is important. Finally, we'll look at the practical usage of all of this stuff that we're going to look at today. How are we going to actually use this so that we can learn but also teach, because we're all teachers. Let's start off with the first element, which is understanding box one, two, and three. Part 1: Understanding Box One, Two, and Three Let me tell you the story about my hairdresser. His name is Francis. Now Francis grew up in Samoa and he was brought up by his grandfather. His grandfather was a fisherman, but he also cut hair. Now Francis was 11 years old when his grandfather got him into their saloon, or what he considered to be a saloon. Francis was not allowed to touch the scissors. He was only allowed to sit there and watch or sweet the floor and watch, but all he was doing was watching and watching and watching. No matter how many times Francis asked, his grandfather said, "You're not ready, Francis. You're not ready." Francis went through several years of just sweeping the floor and watching. Then one day when he was 15 he came home from school and he walked through the door, and his grandfather says, "Francis, you're ready." Francis turns around, "Ready? You're ready for what?" He says, "You're ready to cut hair." He gives him the scissor, and there is this guy sitting in the barber's chair. Now that happens to be Francis' grandfather's friend, so obviously he was ready for that kind of haircut from this absolute beginner who hadn't touched the scissor, who hadn't cut hair. He was trusting him to do a good job. As Francis tells the story, he had no problem whatsoever. What's happening here? Why is Francis able to cut hair when he has no experience whatsoever? Why is he not feeling any fear when he's cutting the hair, when he should really be extremely fearful? This is the concept of box one, box two, and box three. Box one is when you are kind of hopeless at a task. We want to do something. We know we should do it, but we're not very good at it. Box two is the middle box. We're kind of good at the task but not that great. Eventually we get to box three. That is when we have this fluency and when we don't have to drain our brain's resources. The problem is that most of us get stuck at box two, and it's the middle box, but you can effectively call it the muddle box. Because when we go from box one ... say we're learning a language like Spanish, so we go from box one to box two, and then we get stuck. We have phrases like "where you from" and "what's your name," and "I'm a professor" or "I'm a student," whatever. Then we're stuck there and we're spinning there. Why don't we go to box three? Because it's very difficult to go to box three. That's what the chicken sexers learned. They learned that it was very easy for them to tell the male chicken from the female chicken, but they couldn't tell you how to go about it. Here's what they had to do. They got you to lift the chick and for you to guess. You could guess and you could say, "That's male," and they would say yes or no. Then you would go about putting the chick in the box, and so you'd go forward. Male chicken, female chicken, male chicken. They would say yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. Then suddenly you get it, and no one gave you any instruction. You can probably imagine the surprise on their faces when they figured out that they didn't have to teach. The students were learning all by themselves. What was really interesting was that these beginners were doing as good a job as the experts. Now granted, chicken sexing is not a very complex job like drawing cartoons or writing a book or flying a plane. Still, to move from box one to box three, how do they do that? The answer lies in how the brain works. The brain really has two parts: the left brain and the right brain. The left brain is the bully brain. This requires all the steps and methods and logic. This requires all the steps and methods and logic. Then you have to right brain. It doesn't require all of that stuff. It's the creative brain. The creative brain is able to work out the elements that you need to get to that point and then feed it to the left brain, and then work out all the logic. Sometimes that logic never has to happen, which is why those chicken sexers couldn't pass on that skill by telling them do this and do that, and go here and do that. What the right brain is really doing is it's identifying the errors and eliminating them. When you look at talent, talent is a reduction of errors. These people are getting this skill by reducing the errors, but not knowing what errors they are reducing because the right brain doesn't care. Eventually you're able to get to that skill without having the steps and the logic and the system in place. There was another part of the secret that needed unfolding, and that was that you needed to learn by example. You know when they were picking up those chicks and going male chick, female chick, male chick, female chick, well you had to go through about 300 examples before you figured it out. But not just 300 examples, but 300 good examples. This is where the expert came into play. The expert was accurate every single time, so they were able to tell you that you were wrong, so you had 300 great examples. Then you were able to do the task. We see this on the cartooning course as well. What we do is we put people into groups. The groups don't matter as much as the examples. Year after year we get lots of good examples. You curate those examples and you show those groups the examples. What they do is they start to recognize a pattern. They see all these different examples. If you were to tell someone draw a circle, how many ways can you draw a circle? As it appears, many ways some people draw circles with pencils. Some people draw big circles. Some people draw complete designs or a swimming pool with circles. Some people draw characters with circles. Suddenly the brain is working out a pattern. It's working out how to get from box one to box three, completely eliminating box two. Those 200 to 300 good or great examples of what people need to learn, or rather to eliminate the errors, and that makes them great artists, or great chicken sexers, or great writers, or great speakers. When we look at the Renaissance, we see Michelangelo Buonarroti. We see Leonardo da Vinci. We see Rafael. We see Donatello. We see all of these great artists. But what's really happening at that point in time? What we are seeing is 200 to 300 great examples, all of them in the same or similar workshops experimenting but also comparing each other's work. There is an explosion of talent. There is this moment in time and history when you have amazing art and amazing architecture, and we can't explain why it happens, but we can. It's going from box one to box three requires those 200 to 300 good examples. That's how you move ahead, especially when a skill cannot be taught. We see this in the article writing course or the cartooning course, or any of the courses that we've constructed. We've constructed it in this way because we know that if the clients just show up and they do their assignments, and we give them those great examples, they will get very good at that skill. Now granted that cartooning or copywriting or article writing is far more complex than, say, chicken sexing. Still, when you go through those examples and you go through a system, that's when your brain eliminates or reduces the errors, and that's when you get talent. It's not something inborn. It's something that can be acquired. You can go from box one to box three in an accelerated way if you know how to get there with those examples. The key to a Psychotactics course is the quality of the examples. There is another element, and we'll talk about that in the next section, which is construction and deconstruction. This takes us to the second part, where we're talking about construction and deconstruction, and how it plays a role in learning, but learning in an accelerated format. Part 2: Construction and Deconstruction I think most of us remember when we learned to ride a bicycle. One thing becomes very clearly apparent, and that is no one can actually teach you how to ride a bicycle. You can have a mother or a father or some kind of guide, and they're teaching you how to ride. They're saying just pedal pedal pedal, balance, go to your left, go to your right. But they're not giving you an instruction. In effect, the left brain, the bully brain, it can't do anything. It's stuck because it requires this instruction and it requires it in a systemized way, and it's not getting it in a systemized way, and you're crashing to the floor all the time. Then the left brain takes over and it works out the errors and eliminates those errors, and soon you're just riding down the road at top speed with no problem at all. Most of us are not prepared to fall down and get bruised all the time when we're learning a skill like cartooning or when we're learning writing or storytelling or presentations. What we need now is a factor of construction. This is where a good teacher comes into play. Good teachers are teachers, not preachers. There's a huge difference between a teacher and a preacher. A lot of information that you have in books or courses or workshops, or even presentations, is based on preaching, not teaching. The reason why it's based on preaching is because it's easy. You can take information and stack it up one over the other and you can have a book, you can have a course, you can have anything you want. Teaching, that requires deconstruction, so the teacher must be able to break it down to a very, very small part that you're able to apply. When you're looking at how you're going to learn very quickly through the method of deconstruction, you have to look for the teacher, because the teacher will have a system, and the carrier will have a group. Within that group there will be examples. To begin with, the system will have very tiny increments. This is what we do at Psychotactics. We make sure that you go one inch or even one centimeter a day. You move very slowly ahead, because you master that skill and then you move to the next, and then you learn skill A and skill B, and then skill A and B and C, and you have this layering system. Groups make a huge difference as well, because groups or members of the group start to make mistakes. When they make mistakes, those mistakes can be identified, those mistakes can be corrected, and essentially that's what talent is. Talent is a reduction of errors. You have to know the errors in the first place to fix them, and that's how the group works. A great teacher will have that system, will have those groups, will have those examples. That's how you learn, because they have deconstructed everything down to those tiny increments. You only have to do one little step every single day. You will still make the mistake. When you make that mistake, others learn from it, and of course the teacher can step in and fix the mistake. You compare this with learning by yourself. First of all, you have this book and it has chapters. Within the chapters there are subchapters, and there's more and more and more information. There's not this factor of tiny increments. When you don't have tiny increments, and you don't have examples, and you don't all of this facility to learn, then learning becomes very difficult. This is why we abandon learning. This is why we need to change the way we look at learning, which involves the teacher, the system, the group, and the examples. Because the examples, those 200 to 300 examples, they're very important. Examples can come in many forms. They can come in stories, in case studies, in how to. But essentially those examples become the critical element that allows the brain to filter out all the rubbish and keep what is important. Suddenly, you become talented. This brings us to the end of the second part where we look at the system that you could use to learn. One is through construction, which is what the brain does automatically. The second is to find a teacher that is really good at having the system and examples and group. They will teach you through these tiny increments and you get deconstruction. Then you can put the bits together and improve your skill, and become talented very quickly. Now this takes us to the third part, which is how do we use this? Part 3: How Do We Use This Accelerated Learning System? How do we use this while learning or teaching? I mentor my niece Marsha every day. Marsha was having a problem with writing stories with drama. Now all of us know that we have to write better. One of the critical elements of stories is drama. How do you create this intensity where people want to listen to you, where they want to read your stuff? She was writing these stories that just didn't have any drama. How are you going to teach an 11 year old kid how to work with drama? As it appears, it's remarkably simple. what I did was I used the same concept of chicken sexing. I started out with a good story, then a boring story, then a good story and a good story, and a boring story, boring story, good story. You know how this is going to unfold, don't you? Marsha was able to identify which was the boring story and which was the good story. Once I gave her a number of examples, and I continue giving her those examples whenever she's writing, what we have is a situation where she'll go back and she'll write a great story. Now notice that I haven't specifically given her any method to write great stories, but she's worked it out. Her brain has worked out what is a boring story, what is a good story. Without too much effort, it has gone from box one to box three, and there's very little input except identifying which was good and which was bad. This is now where the second part comes in, which is the construction bits. Now when you have to system, when say now we're going to concentrate on this little bit, then you can build on that, and that's when that skill goes from just average to brilliant. It goes from box one to box three, and then box 3.1 maybe. We do this on the headline writing course. You are soon able to write hundreds, even thousands of headlines, which incidentally you do on the course. You're able to do it because you can identify the good from the bad, but more importantly, you also have the construction methods, which is what makes a great headline. Most people, they guess. They expect that they can just copy your headline and change the words. They don't understand what's happening. It's important not to understand, but it's also important to understand. The construction and the deconstruction is very critical. The ability to let your brain figure it out all by itself is very critical, but then to get to 3.1 it really helps to have those methods in place as well, the system that a teacher will bring, the tiny increments, the examples. You have high quality examples and high quantity examples. That is precisely what happened in the Renaissance. All those great artists, sculptors, engineers, they all came from one age because they had high quality and high quantity. That is the same reason why Francis could pick up that scissor and cut hair when he came home from school. Which of course brings us to the end of this episode, in which we have covered just three things, which is very critical when you're teaching and when you're learning to learn just a little bit, very tiny increments. Summary We learned about box one, box two, and box three, and how we get stuck in that middle or muddle box, and how it's important to jump from box one to box three. How do we do that? We do that through high quality and high quantity examples. That's when we get to fluency. The second thing is when you're looking at deconstruction and construction. While it's fine to fall around like we're doing on bicycles, it's not very helpful. What we have to do is find a teacher, a teacher with a system, a group, and of course tons of examples. Because that's where the magic really lies. Finally, when you're learning, you want to find 200, 300 great examples. But when you're teaching you can create the situation where you're creating good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. The client is then just made to identify it, and they become very good at it. Then you can bring in the construction bits. Then you can layer over your system and they move from box one to box three, and possibly 3.1. What's the one thing that you can do today? It's going to be very hard to find examples, and hundreds of good examples, and high quality examples. What you can do is you can start to accumulate examples so that when you're teaching someone you have those examples in play. Then you stop becoming a preacher and you start becoming a teacher. Because they can learn just on the basis of the examples that you put together. That takes them to a whole new level of accelerated learning. This brings us to the end of this accelerated learning episode. By the time you listen to this podcast, you've probably missed the headline writing course, so you missed a great opportunity to see how this unfolds. But there is also the DaVinci cartooning course. That's at psychotactics.com/davinci. If you've enjoyed this episode, share it with your friends. They need to learn how to learn better as well. This episode will really help them, so share it with them. If you've already done the sharing, go to iTunes and leave a review, because that really helps. You go to iTunes, leave a review, and there is the subscribe button, the purple subscribe button, hit that purple subscribe button, and yes, you get subscribed to this wonderful Three Month Vacation that comes to you week after week. Finally, if you haven't already subscribed to the Psychotactics newsletter, then you should do so because you can get a great report on resistance. Go to www.psychotactics.com/resistance, and you'll find out why resistance plays an important role in learning, and how it's not just about laziness. That's psychotactics.com/resistance. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. Don't forget to listen to this episode: The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand: Episode 50