The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Is FREE worth it? Or should everything be paid for? How does a person go from free to fee? And how do you stand out in a world where so much is free? There's a simple strategy that needs to be followed and once you do, you'll find client will happily move from free to paid clients. Tah-dah?the strategy follows! Notes To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/42 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee? Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links Amazing Cartoons for your ebooks, presentations, blog: Cartoon Stock Series How To Avoid Boring Testimonials : And Get 1000-1500 Word Stories Instead The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t The  Transcript This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Often in Hollywood movies, you get this concept of the ugly duckling. You’ll see this girl who obviously looks pretty, but they make her look as if she’s got pimples and her hair is not that great. Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, she magically turns into this beautiful swan. Ugly duckling to white swan. That’s how free-to-fee works. When you’re giving away information free or even if you intend to give away information free, you’ll feel like an ugly duckling. You’ll feel as if you’re giving away all that hard-earned knowledge that you’ve gained. You’re not going to get much response from it or result from it, and you’re somehow hoping that there’s going to be a middle of the movie when things change and that ugly duckling scenario turns into a white swan. Yet, there is a logic and a strategy that enables you to go from free to paid products or paid services. As always, we’ll cover three main topics, and then we’ll go to an action plan, so you can implement it. The first element we’ll cover is this concept of why free should be non-crappy. In the second topic, we’ll look at some of the tactics and strategies that you can use to go from free to fee. In the third topic, we’ll cover the fear and how to get over that fear, so that you can successfully jump from free to fee. Let’s start off with the first one, shall we? The reason why your free should be non-crappy. Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy Yesterday, I was on Twitter, and I was talking to a guy called “Craig”. Craig, you know who you are. He was telling me how he was binge listening to these podcasts. What is causing Craig to binge listen? Then, as I smiled my way through the morning, I got another email. It was from a guy called “Michael”. Michael said he’s been reading all the articles on our website, and he’s been reading them for hours on end. He said he’s going to come back to read some more. That’s how it should feel. When you’re giving away information, it should feel like you’re giving away something valuable. Not something crappy. It shouldn’t be something that you found in your drawer that you’ve had since 2003, and you just didn’t get rid of. That’s what a lot of people do. When they give away things free, they give away stuff that is not so valuable, and it goes into the crappy basket. Their logic is, “Let me keep all the good stuff for my book. Let me keep all the good stuff for my consulting program. Let me keep all the good stuff for whatever it is I’m going to earn from, and let me not give away all that valuable stuff.” That’s completely contrary to what I’m saying here. I’m saying that you should give away at least a bit of the good stuff if not a lot of the good stuff. In today’s world, there is so much information, so much free information that people don’t have any regards for free information anymore. If your stuff doesn’t hit them right between the eyes, there’s probably not going to be a second chance. How do you sort out the good stuff from the crappy stuff? One of the ways to go about creating really good stuff is to go deeper into a topic. For instance, in podcast number 38, it was about not planning testimonials or rather how to get testimonials before you finish a project. Now, a main topic would just be “How to Get Testimonials” or “How to Get Good Testimonials”, but this topic is very niche in a way. It goes deeper into the topic of testimonials which is “How to Get Testimonials before the Project is Even Complete”. You have to sit down and work out how could this problem be solved. Your clients might ask a question like this, and then you have to sit down and work out this puzzle like a Rubik’s Cube, or you might want to sit down with a mind map, and then go deeper into the topic. The main topic is always usually an overview topic. It’s usually crappy. This is what you see on the internet a lot. When you go deeper, things change. For instance, with testimonials, you can write about how to get a great testimonial, but then, how to get a great testimonial, and you add something else to that, so how do you get a great testimonial before the project is over, how do you get a great testimonial using six specific questions, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re just starting out, how do you get a great testimonial when you’re new in the country. The key is to take that main overview topic, and then add something to it that makes it very specific. Now, your brain is able to focus and go, “Well, how would I solve this problem?” When you solved this problem, it becomes interesting. It becomes non-crappy. It becomes valuable to the customer, and that’s when they go, “Wow. This is being given away?” That’s when you’ve got their attention. Now, you’ve got to move them from free to fee. How do you do that? This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is how do you go from free to fee? Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee? If there’s only one word you’ll remember, remember this word, “packaging”. Packaging changes everything. We’ll talk about more about free-to-fee, but packaging changes everything. The moment you change the packaging, everything changes. Let’s say you’re listening to the radio, and you’re listening to your favorite music. That music is free, isn’t it? What do you do? You go out and buy a DVD, or you go out and you download some MP3 from iTunes or some other place. Essentially, you’ve gone from free to fee, and the packaging has changed. The way it has been distributed has changed. Then, you will go to a concert. It’s the same song, isn’t it? You could have listened to it at home or better still, you could have listened to it on the radio, but you went to the concert. Then, at the concert, they sold you some DVDs or some kind of deal, and you bought in to that. I’m a big fan of Sting, and I can’t even remember where I found his music or when I started listening to it because I was not into rock music at all. In fact, when I was growing up, a lot of the music on Indian radio was country music, believe it or not. Country music from the middle of the United States was streaming on radio in India. Anyway, I didn’t listen to rock music, so I didn’t know who The Police were, and I certainly didn’t know who Sting was, but at some point in time, that free music came over the radio. I listened to it, and I liked it, and then I bought a tape. Yes, as we did back then, and then a CD, and then a DVD. Often, the same album over, and over, and over again. Then, he showed up live in Oakland for a concert, and I paid for tickets to be on row 9, so I could actually see his face rather than up there in the bleachers. If you ask me, “Would you go to another concert?” Yes. “Would you buy some more albums?” Yes. It’s moved the whole thing from free to fee, and there’s no going back. I’m probably going to listen to another couple of free songs on the radio, but the moment I know that he’s got another album out, the chances are I’m going to buy it. The customer makes that move because they don’t have that much time to fill around with the free stuff after a while. They want to get great stuff. They want to maximize their time. They want to move ahead, and you want to create that situation where free goes to fee very quickly. You might think, “Well, that’s Sting, and he’s a rock star, and he’s known really well,” but take for instance just Psychotactics. When I wrote the book “The Brain Audit”, it was just 16 pages. It was not supposed to be a book. It was just the notes that I had given at a seminar. Then, I went around trying to improve my speaking, and so I’d speak at different small events. Really, breakfast events, and we drive … I don’t know, two hours to just speak at this event where three people would show up, but a friend of mine told me, “Why don’t you try and sell this PDF?” and so that’s what I did. The people that came to the event … It was just a networking event, and it was technically free because they’d already paid their membership fees at the start of the year, but it was free. They came for this speaking thing that I wasn’t being paid for, and then I put on a really good show. What happened as a result of that really good show, they decide they want to buy the book, so it goes very quickly from free to fee. In most cases, the people that have bought The Brain Audit online have bought it afterreading free articles that were really useful to them. They read free reports that were really useful to them, and then they decided to buy The Brain Audit. Once they bought The Brain Audit, they bought in to a Brain Audit course. They bought in to other courses, and some of our courses are $3,000, $4,000, $5,000. I’m not for a second suggesting that you’re going to go from free to $5,000 overnight, but I am suggesting that if you give really great information, really sub-subtopic information, that’s when you’re going to start attracting people to you. A yoga class can go from free to fee, but in that yoga class, you’re going to have to go into a subtopic. If you just do what every yoga class is doing, it’s not that interesting. If you start doing webinars, or podcasts, or just write articles and your topics are just at the top level, it’s not that interesting. If it’s interesting, then customers are willing to pay for a change in packaging. Let’s take this podcast for example. It’s absolutely free. Now, there are about 40 podcasts, and you can go through them, and you can find out the ones that you like and stuff like that. In time, there will be a hundred, 200, 300 podcasts. Now, you’ve got a real problem if you’re searching for one topic. Supposing you’re searching for a topic like pricing or supposing you’re searching for a topic on how to speak better or testimonials. If I would take the 10 podcasts that were only on testimonials, you’d be willing to listen to that because it would save you a lot of time having to go through 200 podcasts, and then find the ones that work and download them. You’d be willing to pay $10 to get just 10 podcasts that are free online simply because it saves you time. If your sub-subtopic is saving your client time and it is valuable, they’re willing to pay for it. There are two core ways in which you can move a client from free to fee. The first way is to give them something free, and then move them up the chain as it were, so people come to subscribe. Then, they buy The Brain Audit, then they go to 5,000 B.C., and then they buy other courses. That’s one way. The second way is to take the information that you already have and to change the format. If it’s an audio, make it a PDF. If it’s in PDF, make it audio. Sometimes, it just takes a bit of sorting like I gave you the example with this podcast where all I have to do is go through 200 podcasts and just find the 10 that are really good on pricing or 10 that are really good on headlines, and that becomes valuable. That’s where the customer is going to buy. Even as we decide we want to go from free to fee, we have this fear, and this takes us to the third part, which is how do we get over this fear? Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear? A few years ago, I started a cartooning course. I didn’t actually want to start a cartooning course, but a member of 5000BC, his name is Joe, and he suggested that I start the cartooning course. I didn’t really want to because I was writing books, and marketing, and stuff. I really didn’t want to go into cartooning, but he told me, “Look, I bought all the books in cartooning. I’ve done all the courses, and I still can’t draw cartoons. I think that you can teach me to draw cartoons.” I wasn’t that keen, and you can say that keenness just let me down. What I did was I offered the first cartooning course free. I know this sounds bizarre to all of you who have paid a thousand dollars for it, but that’s how it was. Of course, because it was free, it was slightly experimental, but it was still good. About 35 people signed up for that course, and we did the course, and they turned out to be cartoonists, and they gave us testimonials, and we put the testimonials up, and now you know how the cartooning course runs year after year at Psychotactics. What was a free course with great information turned out to be a paid course. What was the difference? The difference was the testimonials. When you put out information, you’re not really sure if it’s great information or not. Sometimes you think, “Well, this is too basic. Everyone should know that.” As you go from topic to subtopic to sub-subtopic, you will find that the information is great. At that point in time, you can have a free course, but the most important thing is to get these outstanding testimonials. You want to listen to podcast number 38 to begin with, and also to go to Psychotactics and look for the six questions that you need to ask to get great testimonials. It’s also in The Brain Audit, by the way. Testimonials make a difference. Great testimonials make a difference, and that’s what will, first of all, reassure you that your stuff is not basic, but really great, that is changing lives. Then, you can move from there on from free to fee. Put a price, and then you go from there, increasing the price as you go along. The cartooning course started at nothing … Well, you could pay whatever you wanted, and some people gave me an Amazon voucher, but today, it’s a thousand dollars. That one course with 35 people generates $35,000 every time it’s run. That’s how you can take something from free to fee. Hollywood often has this ugly duckling to white swan scenario happening, and there is no ugly duckling. That woman has been good-looking and smart the whole time. Your products were good-looking and smart the whole time. They just happened to be free. Some of your products and services could continue to remain free, and the rest of them, you can sell it for a fee. We’ve covered quite a bit, so let’s just summarize what we’ve learned so far. Summary We started off with the concept of free not being crappy. They call it the “ugly duckling”, but it was never the ugly duckling. It was always the white swan. To know if your product is really good, go from topic to subtopic, subtopic to sub-subtopic. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing training, or consulting, or writing a product, you want to explore those depths of the sub-subtopic, and that’s the way you get the attention and the customer. The second thing that we covered was how you can go from free to fee by changing the packaging, and we saw how you listen to stuff on the radio, and then you buy the DVD, and then you buy the MP3. Then, you go to the concert, and then you go to another concert, and then the whole sequence starts all over again. The point is that over time, customers don’t want that much free stuff. They want to pay for stuff. They want to get from one point to the other as quickly as possible. When customers first start, they want to test the waters, and that’s why they go for the free stuff to see that you are good in the first place. Once they have established that you’re good, they don’t really need to read much or do much in terms of free. It’s only the new customers that feel that way. After a while, they’re just buying everything in sight. They’re getting value from it, which is they’re buying everything in sight, not because you put a magic spell on them. Packaging makes a big difference, but also organization. As I said with the podcast, if I just pull out the stuff that’s relevant to you, you’re going to listen to it. Say for instance, just 10 topics on pricing. Packaging and organization will take something from free to fee. Finally, there’s always this fear that your stuff is too basic, that it’s something that nobody wants to buy. Do a free course. Get the testimonials, and those testimonials will assure you and assure your prospects that you’re doing a great job and that it’s worth paying for. What’s the one thing that you can do today? It’s got nothing to do with today’s podcast. It’s got everything to do with the testimonials. You want to go out there and find out, “How can I get good testimonials? How can I get great testimonials?” First, you want to listen to podcast number 38, and that’s because it deals with the topic of testimonials. The second thing you want to do is read The Brain Audit because it shows you how the customer thinks, and it gives you those six questions that you need to ask. Now, you can get those six questions free online anyway, but you will find that The Brain Audit is a really good read to understand the entire strategy. There you go. I’m taking you from free, which is the podcast, to a paid product. You’ll find great value, and then you’ll come back again. It’s that simple. It’s 5:21am here in Auckland, New Zealand, and I’m not going for a walk today. Now, the point of recording this podcast, we’re leaving for the United States in about 48 hours, and I’ve got podcasts to do and presentations to finish. I know it’s an excuse, but it’s a valid excuse this time. I just do not have the time to go for a walk, but when I get to Italy, when I get to the United States, I’ll more than make up for it. This is a rare instance. Normally, it’s just part of the routine. It’s part of the routine for a simple reason. When I go for a walk, a lot of things happen. It’s not just the health and the fitness, but it’s also that I get the chance to then listen to the podcast, and then listen to an audiobook, and it fills my brain with information. This is critical. Input is everything. Facebook is nothing, and that’s where we spend a lot of our time. We should spend more time going for a walk, listening to the podcast, listening to audiobooks because once you have that input, you have stories, you have strategies, you have tactics, and you’re able to then take your knowledge to a completely different level. When I first started out, I was on this site by Jim Collins, and I read the fact that he reads a hundred books a year. I thought, “Well, he’s an author. He’s busy. If he can read a hundred books a year, so can I.” I found that just reading books was not getting me very far because you have limited time to read in a day. I found that just by listening to stuff in the car or walking, even if 90% of it just went one ear and out of the other, it didn’t matter. People make these excuses. They talk about why they can’t remember stuff, that they need to make notes. It’s just listen. There you go. That was my preach for today. What’s happening in Psychotactics land? Nothing for the next month or so, but when we get back in June, I’m going to start off with the cartoon stock, and you’re going to be able to get all these cartoons that you can use in your blogs, in your presentations, stuff that you just do not get online. Look for that. You’ll have to stay on the newsletter for that because we’re going to have a limited number. I’m not saying this for scarcity sake. I just do not want the cartoons all over the internet. The second thing is the article writing course, Version 2. If you haven’t done the live version, you want to get the home study version, and that is Version 2.0. If you’ve already bought this before, yes, I’m giving it to you free. Later in the year, we’re going to have theHeadline course, the Headline Trainer Course and The Brain Audit Trainer Course. There you go. All the events stacked up in a row, waiting to land. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com. Get on the newsletter. Yes, it’s free. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode:  #41: How To Save Two Zillion Hours in Research (Using Cool Techniques with Evernote)

How much time does it take to do research? Yup, those zillions of hours go down the drain and get us exhausted. And that's because we go about doing research the "wrong way". Most of us do our research once we sit down to write an artilce, create a webinar or podcast. A zillion hours later, the content is still not ready and the hours have flown away needlessly. That needn't be the case at all. Almost all research needs to be done in advance and stored away. But how do you find it once it's stored away? That's where the power of "opposite" tagging", default notebook and the phone and iPad come along. Find out how to reclaim those zillions of hours back—right now! -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/41 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Finding Money In My Jeans 00:05:31 Table of Contents 00:06:08 Part 1: How To Take Pictures 00:12:12 Part 2: Why Tagging With Opposites Matters 00:15:51 Part 3: Default Notebook 00:19:35 Summary 00:21:14Final Comments + Offers ==== Transcript This is the 3-Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When I was a teenager, nothing was more interesting to me than finding money in my pant pockets. I'd have all these pairs of jeans and obviously I'd use some of them and then not use the others, and just mix them around. Then eventually I'd go back to the same pair of jeans, yes, dirty jeans, we know. You're a teenager, remember? Then I'd find money and I'd announce it to the world. My mother would go, "But, it's your own money."                                     I just found it really interesting. I found it very exciting to find money that I thought I didn't have. I don't know what it might feel like to win the lottery because I'll never buy a lottery ticket, but this sure felt great. To me it felt like winning the lottery. There was of course, a problem with this method, and that was I couldn't find money when I needed it, and so it was not such an efficient method. Evernote on the other hand, is an amazing tool. If you want to find information, you can find it every single time.                                     When I first got Evernote, I thought it was a pretty average tool. I didn't understand it. You know how you sit down and you do research every time you're writing an article or you're writing a book or you're creating a podcast or a video? That's the worst time to ever do research. Research should be done in advance. Evernote is a research tool where you collect all your information in advance and then you're able to find it easily. In fact, you don't have to remember anything because Evernote will remember it for you. In this episode we're also going to cover a concept of tagging that you've probably not considered and that will make your entire presentation, your books and other stuff, amazing.                                     Back in 2010, I was doing a workshop on uniqueness and we were doing the workshop in California, then in Washington D.C. and then in Guildford, which is just outside London. That summer was a brutal summer for me. Remember, summer is December in New Zealand, so all of December, and a good part of January, I was really tired because I had been writing the notes for the workshop. We always send the notes month in advance for all our workshops. We send all the participants the notes a month in advance. Then once I finished the notes I had to start on the slide. When I'm working on slides, I'll put most of the information together and then I'll leave some slides blank for examples and more information that I need to add later.                                     The time came for us to leave on our trip and off we went to the U.S. We reached Campbell, California. That was our first stop. After the first day, which went really well, I sat down in the evening and I went through my slides for the next day. At that point in time, I found a whole bunch of slides that had blanks in them, as in they had the information but there were no graphics and there were no examples and I just cannot have a presentation without a ton of examples. That really helps the participants understand the concept. It also breaks up this intensity of information.                                     I've got no examples and it's 8:00 at night. I've been up since 4 in the morning and been running around all day at the workshop. Where am I going to find any examples at this hour? I go to my pant pockets. That's Evernote. I dig into them and there are 108 notes on uniqueness. Now, not all of them are examples, but 108 notes on one topic and I'm ecstatic. I mean, I'm exhausted but I'm ecstatic because at least I can get some of the examples, take screenshots, do what I have to do and I'm ready for the presentation the next day. This is the power of Evernote. It's the power of doing research in advance long before you need it.                                     What are we going to cover today? The first thing that we're going to cover today is how to take pictures and why they're so critical. The second is tagging. It's not enough to just tag. You have to know how to tag in 2 different ways. The third is the factor of the default notebook and this is very powerful when you're writing a book or creating a series or doing something which is a current kind of project. Let's start off with the first one, which is how to take pictures. You think you know this, right? Well, let's find out.                                     How do I pick up stories along the way? Well, I use my Smartphone as a weapon and then I use my iPad as a second weapon and my computer, that's the third weapon. They're all used in completely different ways, but still to capture stuff from Evernote or to Evernote. Let's first start with the Smartphone. Let's say I'm at the café, because I'm always at the café. My eyes fall on a newspaper or magazine. Now, there's an interesting story and it catches my imagination, so what I'll do is I'll take a picture of that story, a photograph. It doesn't matter whether I need the story or not. Let's say it's a story about Singapore Airlines or another story about cockroaches.                                     I'm going to find the story interesting because it has amused me or it has some relevant information or some facts which are really interesting and so I'm going to take a picture. Then I'll just file it under "Interesting Stories." More often than not, I'll be working on a project. For example, a few months ago I was working on the Information Products course and at that point in time, my entire focus was simply on the course, the course, and nothing but the course. Any story I was reading about somehow ended up being on the course. Let's take, for example, Singapore Airlines.                                     I found that whatever story I read on Singapore Airlines was very interesting. It was about how their air hostesses are trained for as many as 6 months before they go on a regular flight. Now I had no idea why I found that point interesting, but to be trained for 6 months before you get on the flight, that was really interesting. What I also found was that they were sent to schools, they were sent to old age homes and as I read the story, suddenly it seemed to have a lot of depth.                                     When you're writing you're completely in a state of chaos. Everything's moving around you, this chapter's merging to that chapter, you have no clue what's happening. It's best to just put away these examples and maybe file them under "Info Products," because I was working on Info Products or "Singapore Airlines," and then forget about it. Now I used to do this in the old days when I had a PC. I had a swipe file and I would store all these things and then of course, I couldn't find anything. The beauty of Evernote is that when you take a picture, the picture has text in it.                                     Somewhere in the text it said Singapore Airlines. Now, I've taken a photograph, but Evernote recognizes text, so if I can just remember one word or a couple of words about the story or about the incident, say I took a picture about cockroaches and there was information about the cockroaches. It just needs to have the word cockroach on the page. I've taken a photograph and Evernote will find it. That's the beauty of it. I can find whatever I want just by recalling one little fact about that entire story. My phone becomes a weapon.                                     No matte where I go, I'm taking photographs of different stories, different incidents, and yes, I do tag them and I will get to that. The point is even if you don't tag them, but you remember one word in that entire story, you are able to pull it back whenever you want it, on demand. My iPad, I use it differently. Usually I'm reading on the iPad. I don't really surf that much on the iPad. I use it to read books on Kindle and that's the reason why I buy the books on Kindle, so I can read them.                                     Then I highlight a certain section. Say I was reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and in that Charles talks about Michael Phelps and how he did this swim almost blinded. I thought, "This is a great story." I had no idea where I was going to use it, but I thought, "It's a great story." On the iPad, I can highlight it. They have a highlighter in the software and so I just highlighted it and I take a screenshot. If you don't know how to take a screenshot, look online, but you take a screenshot.                                     Then, I send that photograph to Evernote. Then later on, 8 months later or 8 years later, I want to pull up a story on Michael Phelps, like I did in the podcast a few weeks ago, and it's there. I don't have to look for it. Evernote will just find it. It will find all the instances of Michael Phelps and there I've got my story. You can be completely disorganized and take picture after picture, as long as you remember the word or the term, you will be able to find it. However, you want to be a little smarter than that and that's when we start to use tagging.                                     Did I tell you that tagging is super cool? Well, I'm about to tell you how super cool it is. My system, this patented system of tagging, it's better than anything you've ever seen. I'll tell you why. There are 2 ways to tag. Let's find out how. Tagging is just a matter of putting in terms. For instance, say you took a picture of the Himalayas. They're called the Himalayas, by the way, not Himalayas. Let's say you took a picture of the Himalayas and then you decided to tag it as "high" and "mountains," or something like that.                                     You want to tag it the inverse way as well. You want to tag it as "low," so you use the tag "high" and also "low." Use the tag for say another picture, "fast" and "slow." You use the opposites. Why are these opposites so important? Because when you're telling a story, you don't have to go with the story itself. Supposing there's the story of Michael Phelps and how the water clouded his goggles and how he won the championship. Well that's a story about victory, but you could just as easily to one about defeat. Let's say you've got a presentation and you're going to put in a picture and you want to talk about defeat.                                     At that point in time, you bring up this story. How's it going to be about defeat? Well, there is a second place, isn't it? Someone lost by 0.001 seconds or something like that. You can show how that person lost simply because someone else was slightly more prepared. Every story has 2 sides. It depends on how you look at it. It's about winning and losing, about high and low, about fast and slow. Everything can be tagged in several ways. In fact, that's what I do for all my cartoons.                                     You know that I draw cartoons on a regular basis. When I draw the cartoons, I tag them, but I tag them both ways. If you're in a hurry you just tag them "high" and "low" and "fast" and "slow," but if you've got a thesaurus at hand you can put in some more keywords. Now, this is very critical because when you're looking for an example somewhere in the future 3 months from now, 6 years from now, you might type a term like "flexibility." Of course you'd be expecting all the stories that show up to be about people doing yoga, but in fact you will get a story about inflexibility.                                     Then you can run this contrasty kind of story where a certain company was inflexible and how flexibility is important. This creates magic. This is the beauty of Evernote. When you file a story, you want to use the tagging system because sure it takes 3 more second and you're in a big hurry, but when you use the tags, which are for and against, "high" and "low," then you create magic. This magic is going to help you when you need it at 8:00 p.m. at night when you have to do slides on the next day and you can barely keep your eyes open. That's how effective Evernote is, but you have to use tagging. Two types of tagging.                                     This takes us to the third part. The third part is called the default notebook. A lot of people don't know about this as well. Here's why the default notebook is really critical. Now, Evernote stores things in folders which they call notebooks. They're just like books and you can put your stuff with tags, but also in that folder. Let's say I'm doing something on pricing. Then I will tag it with whatever tags I want, like "fast" or "slow," or "high" or "low," but then I will also put it in a notebook. Yes, 2 more seconds that you have to take to do this.                                     Interestingly, you might not be in this mood to put it in a notebook. However, if you're out on a mission, say you're taking pictures of pricing related stuff all along the way. Then what you can do is you can assign a default notebook and you usually do this from your computer. You want to look this up. I'm not going to give you a tutorial right now. It saves you a ton of time because you don't have to allocate the notebook every single time that you're putting in some new information.                                     At one point in time my notebook was allocated to talent because I wanted to write a book on talent and so every single photograph I took or any note I made, just went by default into the talent notebook. If I search the talent notebook in the future, it will be easy to find it without having to put in any tags or anything of that nature. My default notebook was Talent and supposing I ran into a story about pricing or a story about microfilms or a story about just about anything, then it's just a matter of reassigning that photograph or that story to another notebook.                                     If you are just working on a single project and then you're taking hundreds of pictures related to that project, then you don't even have to think about it. It just goes into the default notebook and that saves you an enormous amount of time. While we are mostly talking about the phone and the iPad to store most of your information, you can also use the computer. Evernote has some really good browser extensions. You just go to the Evernote site and whatever browser you're using, say you're using Safari or Firefox, it has browser extensions. When you're on a site anywhere you can click on that browser extension and then save that page to Evernote, which is very cool.                                     Again, you want to go through some of the tagging and maybe put it in a notebook, and that makes it very effective. This is a swipe file online. The beauty of the swipe file is that unlike that money which I would find in my pant pocket every now and then, you can find this every single time. When people say, "Well, I don't have any stories, I can't remember any stories," you shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing an article. You shouldn't be looking for stories at the time of writing your presentation. You must not be looking for stories when you're writing your book. They're all there sitting in Evernote, waiting for you when you're ready. Then you just pick from them. That's the beauty of Evernote.                                     What are the 3 things that we covered today? Let's summarize. The first thing that we covered was how to take pictures. You take pictures with your phone and then you just search for them. Evernote will find the text within the pictures. The second thing is the iPad and when you're reading a book, when you're reading a magazine on your iPad, you want to take a screenshot and then upload that to Evernote. Then later on you just use it. The second thing that we covered was this concept of tagging and how you should tag both ways: "high" and "low," "fast" and "slow," which then gives you contrast because it's very average to say, "This mountain is high," and then put a picture of a mountain. If you have something very low that creates a contrast. That creates drama. That's what you're looking for.                                     Finally, it's the default notebook. The default notebook allows you to just take picture after picture after picture without having to do any tagging whatsover. It just goes into the default notebook that you've allocated. Very cool. The biggest benefit of Evernote is that it saves time for me and that all of this research that everyone is doing at the time of writing an article, or writing a book, or doing a podcast, is a complete waste of time. You never do research at that stage. You always do the research in advance. That's what Evernote is. It's your research in advance and it's there to be found on demand.                                     It's 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning and I've been at this podcast recording. This is my second podcast recording for the day. I've been at it since about 3:30 this morning just so that I could have a bank of podcasts because we're going away on vacation. When we go away on vacation, we make sure that we have all the newsletters lined up for the entire month that we've been away and also for a month after we get back. Because once you get back, you're not exactly in the mood to get started right away. It's very easy to just drop the ball. The podcast and the newsletters and anything that needs to go is covered not only for the time that we're away, but when we get back as well.                                     As usual, you can find all of the transcripts and any other information that you need, any resources, at www.psychotactics.com/41. This is true for any of the podcasts, so you just put the slash, number 39, number 38, and you can go there. You can find me on Twitter, at Sean D'Souza. I'm also on Facebook, Sean D'Souza and Sean@psychotactics.com. If you're a member of 5000bc, we discuss these podcasts and other information and if you're not a member, then you want to become a member of 5000bc. When I get back from Italy, I'm going to bring out the article writing course version 2.0. We've had version 1.0 for the longest time. Version 2.0 is coming out. It's really, really good.                                     How do I know it's really, really good? Because it's being supervised by the alumni. They're a strict bunch of people and they're going to make sure that I do a good job. We're also going to have the stock cartoons that I talked about, so you have to be on the newsletter list to get that information. That's going to go pretty quickly because we're going to have a limited number. We don't want the stock cartoons to appear all over the Internet. We're also going to do the headline course and headline trainer and then the brain audit trainer. There's going to be a lot of activity from June to December, but for now I'll say bye and thanks for listening. This is Sean from the 3-Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Bye-bye.  

Success is good. Focus is good. Until it's bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business. So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of "spinning plates", you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/40 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:20 Part 1: The Rip Van Winkle Effect 00:08:17 Part 2: Chasing Everything In Sight 00:10:03 Part 3: Spinning Plates 00:13:24 Summary 00:14:00 Action Plan: The One Thing 00:14:20 How We Add Plates 00:19:26 End ----   Sean:            This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Once upon a time in New York's Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You've probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I've kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife's nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out. He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn't ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep.                           When he wakes up, it's pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it's rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away. This is often what happens in business, especially if you've got a successful business. You get a blind spot. You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else.                           Now, almost instantly you're wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what's the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that's what this episode is all about. It's about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot.                           In this episode we're going to explore three elements. First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time? Let's start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect.                           If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They've just shut off their comments. Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they've decided that they're big enough they don't need the comments, but that's not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place.                           Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It's embarrassing, so they have to turn it off.                           Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing.                           If you made a successful out of blogging or, say, Facebook or any other medium, then it's very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, "Hey, podcasting is a big thing." You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you're doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot.                           This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005l; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it. We never really stepped onto YouTube or Facebook or Twitter in a big way, or even a small way. The reason why we did that is because we had a blind spot. We had courses that were filling up super fast. I mean every single course fills up in less than an hour. We've had workshops in New Zealand, in the US, Canada, Netherlands, the UK, and they all fill up almost instantly.                           Of course we send out a newsletter weekly. We've done so since 2002 without missing a single week. We're able to sell products for as little as 9.99 all the way up to $400, $500. When you look at that kind of model, you say, "Well, that's good, isn't it? It's great focus," and it is. But the ecosystem is connected. When we first started out in 2002, if we wrote an article and we published it on another site we'd get 200 subscribers. Yes, for a single article. Then we had the blogs come out and we'd get about 50 to 60 subscribers per article. Recently, with all those comments of the blogs turned off, we probably get 2 or 3. We're talking about really big blogs. You would think that the really big blogs would drive traffic towards you. It's not true anymore. They've had to relook their strategy; we've had to relook our strategy. Focus is a great thing, but things can change around you and you've got to be watching for what's happening around you.                           This takes us to our second part of today, which is chasing everything that is around you. The opposite of focus is distraction. Most of us are not very good at focus. We are very good at being distracted. Every time someone comes up and says, "Hey, here's a new method," they just put the word new, improved, and we're off like a bullet. It's almost like the diet syndrome: the South Beach Diet, the paleo diet, the Atkins diet, the Zone diet, every single diet. We think that the next diet is going to solve our problem, but it never does.                           It's the same thing for business. If you get into doing, say, podcasting, then you have to be prepared to enjoy it. You have to be prepared to love what you're doing so that you can do it for the next five years or ten years. When we do our courses, they're very tough. They're very tough for me. They're very demanding for me. When we do our workshops I'm on my feet for three days. I never sit down. I'm always running around teaching and doing stuff. Even these podcasts, I've already told you before, they take between three to four hours to produce even though they're just 15 minutes or 20 minutes long.                           If you want to make a success of anything you're going to have to be willing to be there for the long run, but as we found out, the long run can change over time. It can twist and change, and suddenly blogs are no longer fashionable and Facebook is no longer fashionable. Maybe podcasting will not work out as effectively as it does today. It might still be good. It might not be as effective.                           Which is where the third part of today's podcast comes into play, and that is the concept of spinning plates. In the first section we saw the concept of focus on how that focus really helps but also creates a blind spot. Then we saw what happens when you don't have that blind spot and you're chasing everything in sight and not achieving a lot. Where's the happy medium? Where is the happy mix? It's a concept called spinning plates.                           Spinning plates is just simply this: it's like someone you've seen at a fair. They put one plate on a stick and then they start to spin it. It goes faster and faster and faster and faster until it reaches a certain speed. Then the person leaves that plate and goes to the next stick, and then starts to spin that plate, and that reaches a certain speed. As the second plate is spinning, the first plate starts to lose some of its momentum and then you have to spin that and then go back to spinning the second one, and then you can put on the third plate.                           This is how you're really running your business. If you don't want to have that blind spot, if you don't want to fall asleep by just focusing on a few things, then you've got to use the spinning plates method. We started out with a newsletter and we've done that week after week after week since, as I said, 2002. The second thing was we have courses on a regular basis, every year maybe. An article writing course is held once a year, headlines course is held once a year. During the year there are several courses, and that keeps the customers coming back. Once we settled all these courses and we have the agenda and the syllabus and the system in place, then we were able to add on workshops. Once the workshops were going we were able to add on podcasts.                           People often wonder how do you manage to do all these things at once. Doesn't it get you really frazzled? The answer is no. To someone who's not used to spinning plates, it looks like an extremely difficult task, but to someone who's already adept as spinning different plates, it's just a routine thing, as routine as you playing parent and teacher and driver and chef and whatever you do in a day as you spin those plates. It's just a matter of getting that act together.                           Once you're able to spin plates you can focus on your current activities and then add new activities as they come along. You don't stay like Rip did, stuck in one place forever and then the whole world changes around you. On the other hand, you don't start chasing every butterfly that crosses your path. The spinning plates is your answer.                           Let's summarize what we've learned today. We've already summarized, haven't we? You need to focus but you also need to be distracted. To be able to get the best of both worlds you have to get that focus really strong, get that rolling, and then add the plate. Once you start spinning plates, people will wonder how you're able to manage so much, but there is no secret to it. The people that struggle the most are those that are continuously either too focused or too distracted. You want to be where the spinning plates are.                           What's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to sit down and work out what are things that you are focusing on and what are the thing that are generating the most revenue for you and make you most satisfied. Then you look at what's changing around you. Then you add just one more plate. That's what I did last year. We were not podcasting. As I said, we were podcasting back in 2009 and then we stopped. Then I added the podcasting, and though it takes so much time, and we have courses and we have workshops and we're going to events and we're doing all that stuff, I still have time for my Three Month Vacation. I still have time to spend with my niece, who I mentor. I still have time to go to the movies. I still have time to cook. I still have time to be part of the membership site at 5000 BC, to do a painting every day. I also go for a walk for an hour and a half. I run a website at 5000 BC. Are you getting tired yet?                           These are spinning plates. I'm not any different than you, but I've added the spinning plates over time, and that's what you should do, too. Make that list, and then add to that list one by one, and you will be absolutely amazed, gobsmacked at how much you will achieve in the years to come.                         If you like the Three Month Vacation Podcast, then ask your friends to join in with you as well. Maybe make a walking group and all of you put on your headphones, go for a walk, and then you can discuss it later. I'm just kidding, but at least go for your walk and make sure that your friends know about the Three Month Vacation Podcast. It's full of stories, it's full of information, and it really helps your business.                         If you haven't already left a review, then please do so, because I will be reading your reviews. Many of you have asked me if I'm going to consider doing a course on podcasting. Maybe email if you're interested, but we are going to be doing a course on headlines and how to create great headlines every single time, not by copying headlines but by understanding how they work. That's later in the year. We're also having a Brain Audit trainer. This is very expensive because it's going to be a year-long program. Brain Audit trainer, headline course, and headline trainer - that will be announced in June or July when we get back from Italy. I also will be working on the cartoon stock stuff that I talked about. I'll be drawing some really good cartoons, maybe about 200 of them. If you would like to use them in your books, in your covers, in your blogs, in your presentations, this is an amazing set of cartoons. You're just absolutely going to love it. They're lavish and it's nothing like what you would find on Stock Cartoon. That project is coming up as well.                         As you can see, a lot of spinning plates, isn't it? That's how I like it. That's how I thrive. If you would like to get notification for all these events, then you have to get on the Psychotactics newsletter, because that's the only way you'll know. That's at Psychotactics.com. You can find me on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. You can also find me on Facebook at Sean D'Souza. To get the transcript and resources for this podcast, go to www.psychotactics.com/40, and you will get everything there. That's me, the ex-Rip Van Winkle, signing off for now. Bye bye.    

What makes one presentation far superior than the next? What makes you want to binge-listen to some podcasts and just reject the others? What makes one book so readable while the other one is boring? It's the concept of info-tainment. Where information is used to get attention, but entertainment is used to keep that attention. Find out more in this episode. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/39 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Start / 00:01:57 Table of Contents / 00:03:09 Part 1: Analogies / 00:09:45 Part 2: Case Studies / 00:10:00 Case Study: Shantiniketan / 00:13:19 Part 3: History Lessons / 00:17:14 Case Study: Shantiniketan / 00:17:14 Summary / 00:18:14 Final Notes /  ---------------------  Sean D'Souza:            I'm Sean D'Souza. Every morning when I go for my walk I listen to podcasts and I listen to audiobooks. As you know, I also learn a language, but whenever I'm headed out towards the café, it's always podcasts or audiobooks. I started to analyze. I started to think about what is it that I really like to listen to.                                         Now obviously you get a lot of speakers and a lot of different topics, so you can't just boil it down to one thing, but you can. The one thing that I like to listen to, and I find that a lot of people like to listen to, is something called infotainment. That's information and entertainment. People like to learn stuff, become more intelligent, but they don't want to be bored along the way. It's not just a matter of presenting the information in a good way. You literally have to provide entertainment, so how you provide entertainment. As part of my analysis I started reading a lot of articles and books. I started listening to more audiobooks, and then listened to some presentations as well, and I figured out the difference. The difference is a story well told.                                     I like to split up stories well told into three categories. The first is the analogy, the second is the case study, and the third are history lessons. How do we use these concepts to make our information more interesting, to make our articles more interesting, and especially to make our presentations more interesting? More importantly, why would analogies, case studies, and history lesson be so important. The reason is very simple. Information is tiring. That's it. Whenever you give someone information, if they already know the information, [inaudible 00:02:06] just revising the information. If you give them new information, some new concept, so new methods, it starts to seem very nice and very interesting, but as you go past five, ten, 15 minutes, the brain is trying to work out not only what you're saying but also how to apply it, so it gets extremely tiring. That's when the brain needs a break. The brain not only needs a break but it could also do with an example. That's where analogies, case studies, and history lessons come into play.                                     Let's start off with the first one, which is the analogy. In this episode we'll do something slightly different. I'll talk about good analogies and bad analogies, and good case studies and bad case studies, and so on. Let's start off with the good analogy. What is a good analogy? Well, let's start off with what is a bad analogy. I'm sitting there with this photographer and I've been trying to get in touch with him for quite a while, and he's been fobbing me off. Then eventually we sit at this café. It's about an hour and he's going on into this bad analogy after bad analogy after bad analogy. What is this bad analogy?                                     He's explaining to me how photography should have strong foundations. He talks about a house that's built on sand vs. on rock. The point is, has he given me any new information? Is the analogy any different from something I know before. When he's using that analogy it's very boring. I've already heard the story of the house built on sand vs. rock. Then he goes on to even more analogies. I can't tell you what those analogies are because I was completely bored out of my skull. The whole one hour that I was there, he went into analogy after analogy, and then talked about photography in the middle.                                     But I was fast asleep. This is what happens. Your customers are going to be fast asleep because your analogies are not interesting. What makes interesting analogies? You can get interesting analogies from day to day life. I just told you an interesting analogy. I told you about boring, but I didn't tell you about boredom in a way that you probably heard before. I told you a story about the photographer and how he was boring me to death.                                     In The Brain Audit we talk about the seven red bags. You probably heard the story but you might as well hear it again. It's about how seven red bags are put on the flight and then the person gets off at the other end and they're waiting at the conveyor belt or the carousel to pick up their seven red bags. Then one bag comes out, and second red bag comes out, and third red bag comes out. It builds up to the fifth red bag and the sixth red bag, and then the seventh red bag doesn't show up.                                     The difference between this analogy and that boring house on the sand analogy is the fact that you know 90% of the analogy but you don't know how 10% is going to roll out. You stood there waiting for your bags at the airport. You've done that; I've done that; everyone has done that, mostly. We can relate to that concept, but the story slightly changes. That's the beauty of the analogy. The analogy that is powerful is not an analogy that you know 100% in advance, because that is boring. The analogy is taken from a situation that we're aware of, that we are probably 90% aware of, but that has that little 10% twist. In this case, the red bags have the twist, and the fact that the seventh red bag didn't show up.                                     When you're building your analogies, you want to build it in this kind of concept that we already know but there is a little shift in the concept, like the time I was trying to explain how I got stuck. Instead of just saying I got stuck at this conference and I couldn't get out, you shift it just a little bit. I had gone to a yoga class, and after the yoga class it was raining, pelting down. I came out and I was trying to get into my car. Actually, it was my wife's car because, well ... it's a long story.                                     Anyway, I was trying to get into the car and trying to shove that key in, try and get it open because I didn't have an umbrella and it's raining. The door wouldn't open. I'm looking at the car. I parked it right there and it wouldn't open, and I'm going crazy. Some of the people came up from the yoga class, said, "Why don't you try to get in from the boot?" I tried that and almost twisted the key. I couldn't get in. Just as I was trying to get in, from the corner of my eye I saw another car that looked identical to the one I was trying to get in. The car, the identical one, that was my car, or rather, my wife's car.                                     I was stuck because I was trying to get into the wrong car. That makes an interesting analogy. Personal stories make for better analogies because they have this natural flow of something happening, then something else happening, and then something else happening. You can encapsulate all of the something else in either a couple of paragraphs ... Well, you don't want to do more than a couple of paragraphs when you're writing an article, but if you're doing a podcast, it could go on for two, three minutes and people would still follow along because there is this sequence. This makes an analogy interesting, instead of the house on sand vs. the house on rock.                                     I want you to notice something even as you're listening to this podcast or probably reading the transcript. The stories are getting you interested. Your brain is trying to wrap around how am I going to do this analogy bit. But even as you're listening, the story is helping you relax a bit and it's also giving you an example of possibly how you could attack this problem.                                     Analogies are not the only way to go, obviously. You can also have case studies. How do you handle case studies, and what are good case studies, and what are bad case studies? The thing about case studies is they're called case studies because they have a before and after, and usually they have an in between as well, so they make for a great story rollout. In the book that I recently wrote, called Dartboard Pricing, it started out with a few case studies. One of the case studies was about this guy called Iggy Ignatius, and how he started up an Indian village in the middle of Florida and called it ShantiNiketan, which really means a peaceful place. You can see how he went about generating revenue and then how he built ShantiNiketan. Then just as he was about to sell ShantiNiketan, the real estate market just died.                                     All the stuff that was selling on his side was more expensive than across the road, and he was destroyed. He didn't know what to do. What happens to this case study? You want to know, don't you? Well, as it turned out, he was oversubscribed. All of the people who bought his condominiums, they were excited to be there. They were willing to spend more to have less just so that they could experience the whole lifestyle of ShantiNiketan.                                     This is a case study. The case study started out with someone with a plan, rolled out that plan, got stuck along the way, and then came out a winner. This is a beautiful case study. When you look at businesses, you look at Apple for instance ... I hate to say Apple again, but Apple did really well in 1984. Then by the year 2000 they were ready to die. Nothing was working for them. Then they rose from those ashes like a Phoenix, and today they're the most valuable company in the world.                                     This is a case study. You don't have to take Apple, and that's why I said I don't want to bring up Apple, because everyone knows this case study. But there are thousands of case studies online, and the only factor that you have to consider is one of contrast. Supposing Apple was winning, then they were losing, then they were winning. Or they were losing, then they were winning, but then they lost. Eventually, there has to be that contrast. That makes for a great case study.                                     Now you can go from the company was losing out and then they won, or the company was winning, then they lost. But that in between, that contrast, that little bounce, that makes a huge difference. When you want to create that example, that entertainment, you want to look for that little bounce, or at least create that little bounce. Then you have a great case study.                                     What we've covered so far is the analogy and the case study. Let's look at history lessons. History lessons sound really boring, don't that they? It's not necessarily boring. History doesn't have to go back thousands of years, anyway. A couple of episodes ago I talked about the Stockdale paradox, about how James Stockdale was at the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam and how he was tortured. The topic was about anti-fragility, so the Stockdale paradox fit completely into anti-fragility.                                     You don't have to stick to war games. You can go to the Olympics or you can go to carrot land. Did you know what happened in 1942 with carrots in Great Britain? Should I tell you? Of course I will. In 1942 there was a carrot surplus. There was 10,000 tons of carrots. They were no onions and no potatoes and no meat, and there were lots of shortages, but carrots? There were lots of carrots.                                     A guy who called himself Dr. Carrot, he reinforced the belief that carrots help you to see in the dark and that the RAF fighter pilots, they also had greater night vision simply because they ate carrots. As you've realized, that story is not true. The reason why the pilots got so good with their accuracy is because of airborne radar. The British government was very keen that the Nazis don't find out about this airborne radar.                                     What happened to the carrots? The carrot consumption increased dramatically. Even so, people drew the line at carrot flan or carrot jam or carrot fudge or [carolade 13:30]. They were a lot of carrot drinks and carrot food, and carrots were everywhere. You see how that history lesson could be so instructive, so interesting? It doesn't have to be boring.                                     Yet, you see speaker after speaker stand up on stage and give you this boring information and more information and more stats and more information. You think, why doesn't he eat carrots? The question is where do you get all these stories and case studies and analogies from? They're all around you. As you're reading a book, as I'm reading a book, what I do is I'll take a snapshot on my iPad, or if it's out in a newspaper I'll take a photograph with the phone. Then I'll store it in Evernote. We'll cover this about Evernote and how magnificent it is in another episode, but I'll keep all this and I'll file this as stories.                                     Then I'll probably put in a little tag as well so that I know what the story's about, but I don't have to. Then later when I'm doing my presentation, or my podcast, or writing an article, there it is. The story is waiting for me and I just have to put it in, and it becomes infotainmnent.                                     Today you got information. You got the fact that analogies help. You got a good analogy, a bad analogy. You got case studies, good case study, bad case study. Then we went onto this whole carrot thing with a history lesson. What happened was you were entertained the whole way. That makes you more eager to listen to future podcasts or read more articles or come to the next presentation. Boredom is a terrible thing, and information can be extremely boring. It can be as if you're being forced to eat carrot fudge.                                     On that repetitive carrot note, let's move to the summary. What did we cover today? We covered analogies, we covered case studies, and we covered stories from history. What we found was that it was important to have this little bounce. You can have a before and after, but the in-between bounce, that's really interesting. Most of all, we found that we can't always get these stories at the last minute so we've got to file them away in places like Evernote. As I said, we'll cover that in a future episode.                                     By the way, that's your action plan as well. You're going to read several stories, case studies. You're going to talk about how something happened to you, and it's going to happen today. It's going to happen tomorrow. It's going to happen the day after. Get Evernote. Start saving the stories. That's what you can do today. I do it every day; so should you.                                     If you want to get more on storytelling, at Psychotactics we have a series on storytelling. You might want to pick that up. There is also the information products course. Now this is more expensive; it's over $1,000. But the reason you should consider it is because it shows you how to construct an information product like a presentation or a book or a booklet. It's very easy to just stack information together and not realize that there are different elements that help the reader to learn as well as get entertained. The information products, over $1,000, worth your money.                                     Finally, the Dartboard Pricing book, you want to check that out if you want to increase your prices and not lose customers. Even Starbucks increases prices every two or three years, and they've increased their prices about 13 times in the last 20 years. When was the last time you increased your prices? Read Dartboard Pricing, and yes, increase your prices, and don't lose customers. I'm on Twitter at Sean D'Souza. I'm on Facebook at Sean D'Souza and at email at sean@psychotactics.com. If you don't want to type so much, it's sean@5000bc.com. All of the resources for this episode can be found at psychotactics.com/39. By the time this episode gets to you, I'll be in Sardinia, Italy, eating, drinking, and having a great time. No work. Bye for now.  

We ask for testimonials and we get them, but are they any good? Or are they the usual sugary stuff that no one really reads. How do you get testimonials that are "journeys" and weigh in at 800-1000 words? Find out in this episode on "how to plan—and yes—get outstanding testimonials.   Oh, and I'm at sean@psychotactics.com. --------------------   Useful Resources Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/       This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's August 13, 2008. The time? It's 9:56 AM. Olympic champion Michael Phelps is standing behind his starting block. He bounces. He bounces lightly on his toes. Then the announcer calls his name and he steps onto the block. Michael always waves his hands thrice; he's done that since he was a kid. He then steps on the block again. He gets his position, and then the gun goes off and he jumps into the pool.                                     The moment he's in the water he realizes something is wrong. He doesn't know what is wrong but the moisture seems to fill up the goggles. By the second turn, everything's blurry. By the third lap, his goggles are full of water. But Michael is no longer in Beijing; he's back in Michigan. The pool is a familiar practice pool, not Olympic pool. There's no roar of the crowd. It's just Bob Bowman, his coach. Bob has turned off all the lights off in the Michigan pool just so Michael can learn to swim blind, just in case something like this were to happen, something's that's happening right now at the Olympic finals.                                     Winners always plan, and this is the difference between winners and those that struggle. The ones that struggle don't seem to have a plan in place. For something as minor as a testimonial you might think well, I don't really have to do that much planning. After all, the testimonial is about the client, isn't it? You just ask them the questions or you ask for a testimonial and they give you the testimonial.                                     That's not true. The greatest testimonial is not some sugary-coated "I like your stuff. Your stuff is so great." The really good testimonial is a journey. It's a journey of how the customer bought your product or service, the trials and tribulations they went through, and finally, how they came out at the end. It's more like a movie than just a little Twitter feed.                                     As you'd expect, there are three steps to get there, and we will take those itty bitty steps and we'll get there, and then we'll have our action plan, just one thing you can do, as always. What are the three things that you have to do to ensure that your testimonial is really good? This doesn't matter whether you're doing a course or you're a consultant or you have a product like a book or anything other product. You have to go through these three steps. These three steps don't work in every single instance, but in most instances you'll find that it's very, very useful.                                     What are the three steps? Step number one is to make an appointment. What is an appointment? Let's find out. The second thing is not having examples. Why do examples matter in the first place? The third, and probably the most important, is not having the requisite questions. What are the questions? What questions do we need to ask and how do we get the answers out of the client?                                     This is what a journey is all about. It's about planning. It's about storyboarding. It's not just about showing up for your testimonial and then hoping that the client will give you a great testimonial. We'll take this journey and we'll figure out how we get this great testimonial. When you finish this journey, go back to episode number 37. At 37 you learn the specific points where you can ask for testimonials and get those testimonials long before your project is completed. Not after the project, but before the project is completed. Now we're on episode number 39, and let's find out the three steps that you have to take to make sure that you get these amazing journey-like testimonials.                                     What's the first step that you have to take? The first step that you have to take is making the appointment. Most of us make the appointment at the wrong spot. The spot is usually after the job is done. The appointment needs to be made before the job is done. I explained to you in episode number 37 how we do this in our workshops. On day one there are people that give testimonials, on day two there are people that give testimonials, and day three there are people that give testimonials. What we're doing is we're making appointments. Renuka will go ahead of time, meet these people, make sure that they're ready at a specific point in time. They're seated somewhere. We have the equipment ready. It is an appointment.                                     The same thing applies to your business. Even if you're a consultant, or you're selling a product, you want to make an appointment with a client. You have to be there most of the time. Even if you can't physically be there, you have to make an appointment with the client so that they know this testimonial is coming up. It's not something you just spring on them. They know exactly on this week at this time there's going to be a testimonial. We do this on our courses as well. Before the course ends, as part of the course, clients are asked for their testimonial. They're also asked for their feedback, and we get feedback before testimonials because it helps them get everything out of their system before they give a testimonial. But there is an appointment.                                     This is the part of the planning that a lot of people miss out on. They just send an email to someone expecting that the someone, that client, is going to respond whenever you feel like it, but the client is not going to respond. They need an appointment. It's best to get a testimonial by video because obviously you can get the video and the audio and the transcript. But even an audio testimonial, get on the phone, speak to the client, record the call, and that's an appointment. If you are live at an event, you've got the video, but even if you've got a course and you've got 20 or 30 or even 100 people in your course, you can allocate a certain section of the course where they come in, they know that that's testimonial time. That's an appointment. It's fixed. Then you get your testimonial. The first thing you got to realize is I've got to make an appointment and I've got to stick to that appointment.                                     The second part of the planning process is where a lot of stuff goes wrong. You may do everything right. You may fix the appointment, ask the right questions, but you won't get a testimonial like you expected. That's because you haven't recreated that actual moment. You know the point when Michael Phelps jumped into that pool and was kind of blind? He'd already lived that moment. It was something he could call upon on demand. He was just going back to Michigan, not swimming in that pool in Beijing. To get your clients back to Michigan, what you have to understand is that they have to have something, some form that they can see, something they can refer to so they can give you something that looks exactly the same or very similar.                                     This is not what most of us do. Most of us just show up and ask a bunch of questions. The client needs to see great testimonials in the first instance. When we're doing a course, what we do is we get them to look at examples of two or three testimonial in advance, the testimonials that we've thought are good testimonials. We get them to read it, and they read it because they want to do a good job. They want to give you a good testimonial so they read the earlier testimonial.                                     Now some of our existing testimonials, in fact, a lot of our existing testimonials, are between 800 hundreds to 1,500 words long. When you look at a template like that, when you look at a situation like that, what are you're going to do? The answer is very simple. You're going to try and match that as far as possible. When you don't give the client the example, they don't what to shoot for, but having read that 1,200 word testimonial, they know what to shoot for. That's why we don't get one-line answers. Because once you get one-line answers to your testimonials, say you ask ten questions and you get ten lines as answers, technically it's not a journey. It's a terrible testimonial. You can't really use it. You have to trash it the moment you get it. There's nothing there. You have to have the journey, and the journey consists of 600, 800, 1,200 words. Clients will write that out.                                     Now, not all clients will sit down and write it out, so that's where the phone comes in or the video comes in. We speak at three words a second, so how many words do you get in a minute? Yep, that's 180 words, which means that in ten minutes you can get 1,800 words. That's a pretty big testimonial, isn't it? But the client needs to see the testimonial, and when they do, they get a good feel for it and they give you an equally good testimonial.                                     In a live situation you think, how am I going to do this? What we do is we take a client who has already been through the testimonial process before and we get them to answer the questions. We get the rest of the audience to look at us asking the questions and look at the response that we're getting from the client. Of course they follow through. They follow exactly what the previous client has done, so we get video testimonials that are just as long - five, ten minutes long. Then you have a wealth of information and you have a journey, and you don't have this crappy testimonial that you have to throw out right away.                                     This takes us to the third part, which is asking the right questions. When many of us ask for a testimonial we usually say something like "Can you give me a testimonial?" Then you wait and you wait, and you wait. You don't exactly get a testimonial because the other person doesn't know what to answer. In The Brain Audit we have six questions. You can find them on the internet, or email if you like. I can send you those six questions.                                     However, in courses like the article course we have 17 questions, and that is to get a much richer experience out of the clients. Every situation is going to require a different set of questions, and you're going to have to play with those questions a little bit, not too much. You don't want to really get that creative with your questions. What you're really trying to achieve is a journey. You're trying to achieve a situation which is a before, a midway point, and then the final. What has been the result?                                     We've put together some really cool templates, but The Brain Audit is a very good start. The six questions in The Brain Audit, you get an amazing testimonial from those questions alone. If you've done any of our courses, or if you want the questions, just email me at sean@psychotactics.com, and I will send the questions to you. That's just a thank you for listening to this podcast.                                     Anyway, to get back, the point is very simple. You have to ask the right questions if you're going to get the right answers. Let's just summarize what we've learned so far. The three things that we covered today were first, we need to make an appointment. We can't just send something to someone and hope that something happens. We want to get the journey. We want to get the story. We want the details. We want the starting, the middle, the end. So an appointment is necessary.                                     The second is we have to have examples. If a client doesn't see those examples, they don't know what to shoot for, they don't know what length to shoot for, but mostly they are not motivated to give you more detail. They'll give you one-line answers and then you think that was pretty useless.                                     The third thing is not having the questions. As I said, just the six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, they're amazing. However, if you want more questions then you have to ask me for it. The only point about the additional questions is that a client has to go through a journey for a while with you, because otherwise those questions become too much. The six questions, they're pretty good for most stuff. The 16 or 17 questions that we ask, that's when a client goes through a three-day workshop with us or a three-month course with us. That's when they're ready to answer a lot more questions. It depends where you're going to ask those questions. Don't just throw all the questions at everybody.                                     Are you still going to get bad testimonials? Are you still going to get one-liners? Of course. Some people will give you a single line. They won't give you a paragraph; they won't give you two paragraphs; they're not going to give you 800-word testimonials. These testimonials are pretty useless. A single-line testimonial; five, six, seven line testimonials: they don't really give you a sense of the journey. The other kind of testimonial that you really don't want is this rambling testimonial where someone goes on and on and on and on and editing the whole process becomes a nightmare. You need to make sure that these kind of testimonials, the very short ones and the rambling ones, they're out of the system. Unfortunately, but it's true. The client needs to understand that those two types of testimonials are completely worthless. It's a waste of their time and your time. Still, you take your chances, and 95% of the time you get great testimonials.                                     This brings us to the end of this episode, but what's the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to make sure that you get examples. You want to get a great testimonial in the first place. Of course you have to have the questions for this so get those six questions from The Brain Audit. Get on the phone with the client, especially someone who's a good client, and ask them the questions. Get the testimonial, and when you have that example, that's when you can pass it on to the next client and the next client. You can see what's happening here, right? It's self-replicating. A great testimonial is getting another great testimonial is getting another great testimonial. If you get a crappy one, just drop it. Don't put that in. Don't be tempted.                                     Yes, we've come to the end of episode number 38, but remember, episode number 36 is about your three points, the points where you can get those testimonials. You want to go back to that episode and listen to it several times, and then take action. It's 5:09 PM here in Oakland and it's very hot. It's already autumn but it's pretty hot here. It's not usually the time that I record a testimonial. What am I saying? Not usually the time I record a podcast. It's usually 4:00 in the morning or some other ridiculous time when I wake up. However, this is a busy week. We're headed to the US and we're going to do the info products workshop in Washington D.C.. You probably missed that, and you should get us on the next time, but we do workshops so infrequently that the next time we announce a workshop, or an online course, you should jump for it. Because we do them infrequently.                                     After that, we get on the flight, go to Denver. We're speaking at the Opera House at the Copyblogger Conference. Finally, we get to Sardinia, Italy, where we eat, drink, and sleep. Some of you have asked me if I check email or I do any work while on vacation. No, that's the whole point about vacations. You're supposed to do nothing, as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G. I am looking forward to that.                                     You can find this episode on iTunes. You can find it on Stitcher. You can find it on the website at psychotactics.com/38. You can find all the other resources there as well, so go to psychotactics.com/38. iTunes is probably the best if you have an iPhone or any Apple device because it automatically downloads it for you, so you can access it and listen to it later when you're going for a walk. You're walking, right? Not taking the car everywhere, right? You want your heart to be in good condition, right? Go for a walk. Listen to the podcast. I'll speak to you soon. This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm saying bye for now. Bye bye.    

You've told yourself you shouldn't be a perfectionist. Yet time and time again we head back to getting things done—perfectly. And in the process we get nothing done. I get into that trap a lot, and the only way out of the trap is to use a combination of three methods: external deadlines, internal deadlines and the "version system". Interestingly, one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal is a timer. Find out how to use these methods—and yes—the timer. --------------------   Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: The Great White: The Ultimate Predator? / 00:05:19 Table of Contents / 00:06:00 Part 1: External Deadlines / 00:11:34 Part 2: Internal Deadlines / 00:14:11 Part 3: Versions / 00:16:49 Summary / 00:18:06 Actiion Plan: The ONE Thing / 00:18:28 Final Wrap Up /    This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When you think of the greatest killer in the ocean, one thought comes to mind, and that is the great white shark. Until quite recently, the great white shark was considered to be the ultimate predator. They grow up to a length of 15 feet and they weigh about 5,000 pounds, which is about 2,500 kilos. We consider the great white shark to be the ocean's ultimate predator.                                     But in fact, the ocean's ultimate predator is not a fish at all, it's a dolphin. Well, it belongs to the dolphin family and it's called the orca. Orca are known as killer whales, but that's wrong because they're not whales at all. They belong to the dolphin family. The reason why they're probably called killer whales is because at some point in time they were called whale killers, and somewhere along the line it got inverted and now they're called killer whales. The greatest predator in the ocean, that's it: the orca, the whale killer.                                     It's called a whale killer because they routinely gang up on whales, especially baby whales. Yes, that's breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes. But no one had ever seen an orca attack a great white until it happened. Then in October of 1997 there was this whale watching tour. They were out on a routine whale watching mission and they got this call that there was some activity. They rushed to the scene and what they saw had never been seen before. They saw an orca attacking a great white.                                     There they are, this whale watching tour, off the Farrallon Islands, which is just off San Francisco. There's complete quiet, complete silence in the water for about 15 minutes. No one knows what is happening. They know that the orca and the great white are out there but no one knows what is happening.                                     Then out bursts the orca with the great white between its teeth. Now a great white, as fearsome as it is, is about half the size of an orca. It's about 15 feet, whereas an orca grows up to be about 32 feet. The weight is different as well: about 5,000 pounds for the great white and 22,000 pound for the orca. Still, they'd never seen an orca attack a great white before.                                     Why was it so quiet for 15 minutes? What kind of attack would involve quiet? What they found out later was how the orca attacks. Sharks, as it appears, are only fearsome right side up. If you flip them over they go into a state of almost being unconscious. It's called a state of tonic immobility. What this orca did was it attacked the shark and flipped it over. For all those 15 minutes it held it in a state of tonic immobility.                                     Now a shark that is held in that position, it cannot breathe. After a while it just drowns. That's what the orca knew. Somehow they had figured out that if you held the shark in a state of tonic immobility, they would not move again. They would be stuck forever. This is how it feels like when we're trying to deal with perfection. So many of us call ourselves perfectionists, but we're in this state of tonic immobility. We're struggling to get things done. How do we get out of this state of always wanting to do things perfectly? How do we get out of this state of tonic immobility?                                     As usual, we're going to cover three things and then you're going to get an action plan. You know something? I think I forgot to give an action plan in the last podcast. That was podcast number 35, I think. Anyway, we'll have that action plan this time around. The three things that we're going to cover are first, the external deadline. The second is the concept of a timer, which is an internal deadline, and finally, the understanding of how versions work.                                     Let's start off with the first one, which is the external deadline. In October of 2014 I decided that I wanted to write a book on pricing. I put it down and got everyone to look at it and did a plan. Then November came along and then December came long, and then Jan and then Feb. Then around the middle of February we sold it, as in pre-sold it. We did an offer. I didn't do a sales page, just did a trust the chef offer, which by the way, I picked up from restaurants, because I'm always eating.                                     We did a trust the chef without the sales page. That's when I started writing. Before that I was just playing perfectionist. I was sitting there trying to get the whole system together, doing mind map after mind map, writing notes, talking about all kinds of things but getting the job done.                                     The moment we had our sale and the moment the first person bought the product, the game was on. I couldn't afford to be a perfectionist anymore. We said we were going to release it on April the 13th. It needed to be ready on April the 13th. Now you might think that a lot of planning went into that date. No, it got plucked out of thin air. We just said it's going to take three or four weeks. Let's go for it. That's how you pick an external deadline. There is no precise something that you need to figure out. There is no alignment of planets before you can work out the exact external deadline.                                     I've wanted to do a bunch of stock cartoons, not the usual stock cartoons that you get but just lavish cartoons. More so in the pricing book because I've got better over the years, but in every single book that you get from Psychotactics there are 40, 50, maybe even 100 cartons. They're very lavish, and I wanted to do a series of stock cartoons, maybe 100 or 200, that people could use in their marketing, in their books, on their covers.                                     I first had this idea back in 2010. We were in California and I wanted to do it. I'm being the perfectionist. I've done all the planning. I've done the sales page. I've interviewed the customers. Like a plane that's circling the airport, I go round and round and round and nothing gets done. How do I resolve this perfectionist issue?                                     When we get back from Sardinia in June, I'll just sell it. We'll have an external deadline. Then the job gets done. It's that simple. I'm saying it's simple but there is never anything in life that's simple. You will run into a bunch of obstacles, late nights, early mornings, all kinds of problems. Eventually you get there. It's almost like the Olympics. When the Olympics is supposed to start on a specific date, it's not like they can push back the date. They just have to start on that day. That's the day of the opening ceremony and everyone has to be there. Everything has to work the best it can possibly work. That is the power of an external deadline.                                     What we have, however, is a backup system. For instance, when I wrote the pricing book they were three separate books. I get into my perfectionist tendency and I wanted to do even finer cartoons so it took a little more time than I expected. I wanted to do some graphics. I went hunting for some fonts and other stuff. That all took a little time, so on the date what did we do?                                     We gave two of the books and then four days later the third book. We have this backup system. If you're running the Olympics there's no backup system. You have to be ready on the date. You as a business owner, you always have a backup system. If you can deliver most of the goods on the day, then the external deadline works. This is very important for us because we feel this pressure. All of us feel this pressure. If all your information is not ready, if you're writing a book that is, you can send in an update later. If you missed out some of the slides in your presentation, you can send the information later. If you're in a consulting program, same thing. Everything can be done three-fourths or four-fifths and the remaining can be sent later.                                     The external deadline really helps us get rid of that perfection, because otherwise we're just going round and round and round and we're constantly stuck. The external deadline is one thing. There are situations where we don't have such a big project and we just have to write an article or maybe we just have to do a cartoon, or maybe we just have to do one little thing. For this we need the power of the internal deadline, or rather, a timer.                                     In the second part we'll look at the timer, just a plain, ordinary timer. Whenever we've trained people to write articles or draw cartoons or do just about anything, what we see time and time again is they spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to perfect their work. Let's say you're writing a book and you have to write a chapter. Now, even if you're writing the introduction that might take you an hour or two hours. What people do is they start editing and cleaning it up and then it takes three, three and a half hours.                                     The question is: By adding 30% or 40% more, did it become 40% better? The answer is it never does. It has never been 40% better. Whenever I look at the work of other people, whether they're writing or drawing or dancing or cooking, the extra time doesn't add up. The only way you can solve this problem is to use a timer. You have to figure out how long you're going to take to finish a project. How much time do you have to finish your project? Let's say you've got two hours. Well, set a timer for two hours. Because if you sit down to write something or draw something or cook something, invariably you will take more than two hours. When you take more than two hours you're getting tired all the time and your work is actually getting a lot worse. Spend the two hours, and when the timer goes, it's done.                                     Now we may think that we're improving it. This happens when you're editing an article or you're improving your cartoon or doing a watercolor. In most instances it actually gets worse. If you've ever tried to overcook something or paint a watercolor, it gets worse every single time. It seems to get better. You try to make it better, but the overwork doesn't really help. You're getting more and more exhausted. At the point that you're trying to fix it, you're at your weakest. You're exhausted. You're just unable to do whatever you think you're doing. Having the timer just allows you to rest, to go away from it. Then if you want to come back to it later, that's fine, but don't overwork it. Get the timer in place before you start a project. That's it.                                     With that ding, we go to the next part, which is treating everything as a version. Now there is an external deadline, there is an internal deadline, but what about a version? Most people when they're doing big projects, they have to follow this method where they do version one, which is a draft. Then we do a second draft. Then we do a third draft. All the time you're getting rid of the perfectionist system. You're still working towards that external deadline but you're treating it as a draft.                                     We're now on episode number 37 of this podcast, and if you go back to, say, number 3 or number 6, or number 10 for that matter, you will find that there is a huge difference. There is a huge difference in delivery and confidence and style and everything. How can that happen in just 36 episodes? If you go back all the way back into, say, 2010, which is when I first attempted podcasts and gave up, it's terrible. Even though there is so much content out there, I don't need to put that out anymore.                                     The point is that we're always improving. If you just treat your stuff as if it were a version, then it really helps with big projects because then it becomes a draft, and the second draft, and the third draft. Then finally, on your external deadline, it's ready. For smaller projects your work is going to be better tomorrow. No matter what you do today, no matter how much you work at it today, it's going to be better tomorrow and the day after and the day after. It's much better than just sitting there and hoping that it will get better, that it will get perfect. Do the job. Call it version 1. Then move along and then fix it later.                                     Now a lot of people say, "Well, but I am a perfectionist." The truth is that all of us are perfectionists. Every single one of us are perfectionists, but we could not live in a perfectionist world. Think of going through school. Did you always score 100%? Think of your driving lesson. Would you be able to drive a car if they expected 100% from you? Think of all the things that happen in today's world and you'll notice one thing consistently: there is no such thing as perfectionism. It's a complete myth. It is in your head, and the only way to get it out of your head is to have these three things. Let's just summarize what these three things are.                                     The first things is an external deadline. You cannot get out of an external deadline. You can push it like we have, just a little bit, but you cannot get out of it. That's really good. It's pressure-building but it's really good. The second thing is the factor of an internal deadline. No one can control you except that timer and that little ding sound that shows up. Finally, it's the version. No matter what you do today, it's going to be crappy tomorrow, so you might as well get used to it, and you will get better tomorrow if you continue going.                                     This podcast sounds good. I think it sounds really good, but it's going to be better next time, and it's going to be better in episode number 40, and 45, and 50. Your project, your artwork, all of your stuff, it can be the best in the world but it doesn't matter. From the depths of the water comes an orca and poof, it gets you. The moment it gets you, you go into tonic immobility. That's what perfection is. It's tonic immobility. You're stuck. You can't move ahead. So use one thing. What's the one thing that you can do today? Drafts are a good thing and external deadlines, well, you might get down to that, but a timer: all of us have a timer. All of us have a clock, a phone, something on the computer that will go ding. Use the ding to your advantage.                                     That brings us to the end of this episode. Now if you want to go through these steps, one of the books that really helps people is outlining. This is especially when you're writing books or writing articles. We have a book on outlining. Another book that really helps is the factor of storytelling. How do you build that story? Look up outlining and storytelling on the Psychotactics site. About this podcast, if you want all the links and all the information, the transcripts, it's all at psychotactics.com/37. You can find this for any episode except for 18. 18 is the great mystery. We cannot put in psychotactics.com/18. Anyone wants to help us on that, you're welcome to try. Finally, if you want to contact me I'm at psychotactics.com, sean@psychotactics.com, or twitter Sean D'Souza, and then also on Facebook at Sean D'Souza. If you haven't told your friends about the Three Month Vacation podcast, do so today. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye.  

Most of us wait until a job is completed to ask for testimonials. Admittedly that's a good time, but it's also much harder to get a testimonial from a client at that stage. Then we have to get all needy when asking for the testimonial. There are three points when you can get testimonials, and get them long before the client has finished with your product or service? Where are these points located? And can all of us get testimonials at these points? Find out in this episode?and get to the points sooner than later. What I'm listening to on audio books Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb The Brain's Way of Healing by Norman Doidge Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter: seandsouza / Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / Time Stamps 00:00:20 Start / 00:02:41 Table of Contents / 00:03:18 Bear Point No.1: Getting Agreement In Advance / 00:05:45 Bear Point No.2: In Progress Testimonial / 00:09:58 Bear Point No.3: Tail End of Project / 00:12:09 Summary / 00:15:36 Links, Resources and Goodies   Sean D'Souza:            This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. As spring arrives in British Columbia and Alaska, something amazing happens. The grizzly bear comes out of its hibernation. All through the winter it has been high up in the mountains where there's lots of snow, and it's relatively easy to hibernate in the snow. Now it's time to feed, but there's no food up here so it has to make its way down to the coast. It's all about timing. It's all about planning. It has to get there just in time for the salmon run.                                     It might seem to us that the bear just shows up, but usually a mother bear will have some cubs with her as she makes her way down the mountain, so it's not just a matter of showing up but also making sure that the cubs make it, because the cub mortality rate is very high. Over half of the cubs die every year. The bear has to wake up from its hibernation, makes its way down the mountain, make sure the cubs are all fine, or at least as fine as they could be, and then get in position for the salmon run which will happen at a speak time, provided the rains come.                                     All of this requires an enormous amount of time and anticipation, and we have to do exactly the same thing. We have to act like bears when we want to get our testimonials, because if we don't anticipate and we don't plan, then nothing happens. It's all about timing. It's all about being there at the right time, at the right moment. Or is it?                                     Most of us think that testimonials are only available for us once the project is complete. It doesn't have to be like that. The project can be very incomplete before you starting to get testimonials. Let's just explore these elements of where you can get testimonials. The first point of getting a testimonials, or getting an agreement for a testimonial, is before the project even begins. The second point is the in-progress testimonial. Finally, you can get a testimonial right on the tail end of the project. In all three instances, the project hasn't been completed and you're getting a testimonial, or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Let's explore all three of them one by one.                                     In one of my first jobs as a consultant I didn't have any testimonials, so I had to get the testimonial in advance, or at least get the agreement for the testimonial. Here's what I did. When we sat down to work out the project, we worked out the scope of the project, and then at the tail end of the discussion I turned to the person and said, "If this project works out exactly as you planned, as we planned, can I get a really good testimonial?" Of course the client is anticipating the fact that the job will be done really well, and so they will give you a really good testimonial.                                     Just by asking this little question at the starting point, it makes a huge difference to how you get the testimonial at the end. When someone has already agreed to something, there is more of a likelihood of them giving a testimonial. When they have not agreed to something, and at the end you in and say, "Can I have a testimonial?" the chances are diminished. The first instance is always to look at where can I get an agreement. At first it seems like this is only consulting-based, but it works just as well if you're doing a workshop, just as well if you're writing a book.                                     Say for instance you're writing a book and you have these graphs. The client or the prospect client can look at those graphs and agree to a testimonial in advance. Same things applies to the workshop. What you're really doing is setting the whole benchmark. You're getting the client ready and prepared. Not every client is ready when you just finished the project, but if you've put it in right at the start as part of the agreement, the chances are much higher. You're like that bear sitting there not on some river any place on the planet, but specifically in British Columbia. You're waiting for the salmon, so you're setting it up in advance. You're setting up your position in advance. This is a very critical step, especially when you're starting out and you don't have much of a reputation.                                     This takes us to the second point, which is the in-progress testimonial. Often when I'm writing a book or creating a course, I don't have testimonials for the product in advance. Now, I still have to write the sales letter. I still have to send out some kind of testimonials. What do you do? You have the in-progress testimonial. In this case, the customer doesn't look at the complete picture but looks at the part of the picture.                                     Let's take an example of the book that I just wrote, which is on Dartboard Pricing. It consists of three different sections. Say I finished the section on sequential pricing, which shows you how prices go up and they go down. The customer doesn't really need to read the entire book. They could just read about sequential pricing, and then they could give you a testimonial that went into a lot of detail about sequential pricing.                                     Now surprisingly, this kind of testimonial is often better than a testimonial that just talks about the entire project. This is the kind of testimonial that focuses on one aspect, and it gets the prospective reader or the prospective client to then get excited or interested in that one aspect. Instead of the entire project, now you're starting to get interested in just how does this sequential pricing work. How does it relate to [kuh-rah-day 06:39]? Why do prices go up and come down, and do we do that for all our products, all our services, all of our training? How do you use all the three different aspects of sequential pricing simultaneously? What is a doorway? Even right now as I'm speaking to you, you're getting interested because what we're covering are elements of that section of sequential pricing.                                     It's often easier for a customer to tackle a small section and talk about why that section works than the complete experience. By the time you're finished with the complete experience it almost becomes abstract in a way. There's so much stuff to consider, so much stuff to implement. When you deal with a smaller sequence, you're able to explain that in greater detail.                                     This is the in-progress kind of testimonial that you can get. A customer doesn't need to go through a whole year of your consulting practice. They don't have to go through your entire book and they don't have to go through the entire course. In fact, when you come to a Psychotactics workshop you will see that on day one there are some people who are giving a testimonial, on day two another batch, and on day three a third batch.                                     Now, not only is this smart in terms of planning, because you can't do all of them back to back. It's too tiring for you in the first instance. More importantly, you can get the customers to talk about that specific moment, that specific section, that specific segment. You can do this for a book or a workshop or consulting. This is the second type of testimonial, which is the in-progress testimonial. Notice we haven't reached the end of the course. We haven't reached the end of the book. We haven't reached the end of the consulting program, and yet, you're getting testimonials that are better in some respects than the testimonials you get right at the end. As we're progressing through this testimonial bit, right at the start we could get the testimonial or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Then the in-progress testimonial. This is very powerful, so pay attention to it and use it.                                     This takes us to the third part of today's episode, which is how to get a testimonial right at the end of a project, not after the project, but right at the end. How do you get a testimonial right at the end of the project? In every Psychotactics course I have an entire week where the customers will give feedback, and this is brutal feedback, believe me. They also give a testimonial. They're finished with their feedback. They've got it out of their system and now they move to giving the testimonial. This is part of the assignment. We're not done.                                     Now the mistake that you can make, and I've made this mistake, is to treat it as part of the whole system. Supposing this is a 12-week course and you say in week number 12 you're going to give your feedback and testimonial. Obviously that won't go down too well. If it's a 12-week course, people expect 12 weeks of instructions and then the 13th week to be one of testimonial or whatever you want them to do.                                     We did this in our eBooks as well. We put in a little email link in the last chapter and people write to us from the chapter. The pricing book has been out barely a few days and customers have already started writing in. Even as I'm doing this podcast, it's like how do I put this testimonial thing as part of the agreement. How do I put it in-progress and then how do I put it at the end of the book instead of sending an email after?                                     Now be aware that we send the email anyway. If your customers are part of a list and you have them on the list, then you should send them an auto-responder that asks them specifically for their testimonial. In effect, we have four spots where we can ask them for the testimonial, but what are the three main spots that we covered today? Let's just summarize.                                     The first instance where you can bring up the testimonial is at the starting point when you're sitting down with the client, when they're buying into your consulting or your training, and you can ask them whether they would give a testimonial at the end. This agreement makes a big difference. The second point is the in-progress testimonial, which I think is the most powerful of all, because it focuses on a specific bit. Finally, we have the testimonial you get at the end, not after, but at the end, where you tag on a little assignment that the customer can do or should do as part of their whole exercise. Most customers agree to this. There's no problem getting this. It's the waiting after the project that's a problem.                                     Yes, you can send an email or you can request for a testimonial after the project is over, but that's the harder testimonial to get. That's the kind of testimonial that most of us try for. You're like this bear sitting there waiting for the salmon after the season is over. Well, good luck to you but it's much harder to do that. You want to be there getting those salmon, those testimonials, as they leap up through that salmon run, not after.                                     Now let's say you have a product and you already have a few testimonials. Should you go through this exercise every time with all your customers? The answer is yes. There are two reasons why. The first is, a customer is explaining their mindset in the testimonial, so if the testimonial is done right, you will get an insight into your product, a completely different insight from all of those other customers. This is very powerful for you. It's very enabling but it also shows you what customers are looking for and what they're not looking for, because then you can go and fix it. All of our products, all of our services, they're all versions, at least at Psychotactics. When you go to the next workshop, when you go to do the next course, when you read the next version of the book, it's always better, and it's because of these testimonials. It's because of the feedback that we get.                                     That's the first thing, that it enables you to look into the customer's mind from a completely different perspective. The second thing is that when a customer goes through a good experience they actually want to say thank you, and they want to say thank you in a meaningful way. The testimonial is a meaningful way. It is their way of saying thank you for all the trouble you've taken. The testimonial is a way of saying thank you. It also ratifies that they have made a good decision by investing in you. You definitely want to have that testimonial in even if you've got a million other testimonials.                                     This brings us to the end of this episode. What's coming up next? We're looking at the mistakes that you make in not planning to get these testimonials. Yes, we are the bear that's waiting there at the river, but things can go wrong. What are those things that can go wrong? We'll explore that in the next podcast. Now you can get all the links and resources at Psychotactics as well. This is podcast number 36 so you go to psychotactics.com/36. The second thing is, if you want to learn more about testimonials, there is a cool book. It's called The Secret Life of Testimonials. When I started writing this book I thought I'd write about 25 pages, because I'd already covered it in The Brain Audit. There's already a chapter in The Brain Audit about testimonials. That's about 25 pages, so I thought maybe I'll add another 20 pages or so.                                     As I started writing, the book ballooned to over a hundred pages. You'd never think that testimonials had so much depth, but there are questions and the problems you run into. It's really cool to get into this secret life of testimonials. As you're listening to this podcast, if you scroll down a bit you'll find the information section, and there is the link for the testimonial book. Have a look at that. There's also the Dartboard Pricing. If you haven't already got it, it's really good. Two of these books: testimonials and pricing. You know you need them. Go for it.                                     It's almost time to go for my walk. I go up the hill, down the hill, all the way to the beach, past the beach, then to the café, and then all the way back. What am I going to listen to today? I've got some podcasts lined up and some audiobooks, and of course my languages. What I do is I listen to podcasts because they provide me with stories, they provide me with tactics. The audiobooks, they are more about strategy. The languages? I just speak better Italian. If you want to find out more about what I'm listening to or reading, it's all down in this information section, so as I said, scroll down a bit and it's all there, all the links. Enjoy yourself. If you want to get straight to the site, it's www.psychotactics.com/36. If you'd like to get in touch with me, I'm at Twitter, so that's Sean D'Souza, and on Facebook, Sean D'Souza, and at sean@psychotactics.com. This is the Three Month Vacation, and I'm saying by for now. Arrivederci.  

-------------------- It's easy to just want praise, but that's not how nature works. Nature roots out the fragile and keep only that which is anti-fragile. So is anti-fragility just a factor of "resilience"? No it isn't. There's a big difference between being resilient and anti-fragile. And the key to anti-fragility is to be like a "hydra". Find out more about how you can root out the namby-pamby factor and become anti-fragile.   Useful Resources   Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/   -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Anti-Fragile / 00:00:33 The Trip To New Zealand / 00:02:26 The Stockdale Paradox: Good To Great / 00:05:43 Table of Contents / 00:06:15 Part 1: Chaos / 00:09:33 Part 2: Twice as Strong / 00:13:37 Part 3: Brutal Feedback / 00:20:06 Summary / 00:21:03 The One Thing You Can Do / 00:21:41 What's Happening Next? / 00:23:10   ====== Sean:            This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. In the year 2000 we had moved to New Zealand from India. When we moved to New Zealand we didn't really know anyone here. We'd never been to New Zealand. We just chose to come here, and then in 2001 we decided we were going to stay here, so we had to get on a flight and go back and sell our apartment and sell all the stuff that we had there and just close up everything in India.                         While I was on the flight I had a book with me. It was called Good to Great. It's a book by Jim Collins. I'm not sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was the title. As I was reading that book on the flight, something happened to me that changed my mindset. What was my mindset at that point in time? It was a complete jumble of facts. We'd got to New Zealand. We'd bought a house within three months of getting here. I'd got a job; I last at the job for six months and then I was made redundant.                         The question is were we feeling fragile. That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about this concept of anti-fragility. Anti-fragility is just not being fragile, it is the opposite of fragile. I used to drink rum and Coke back then, and while I'm at 35,000 feet I'm drinking my rum and Coke and chomping my peanuts, and reading about the Stockdale paradox.                         This is about a guy called James Stockdale. He was in prison in the Vietnam War and he was the highest ranking officer at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, which was a prisoner of war camp. From 1965 to 1973 he was tortured over 20 times. On page 85 of the book there is this conversation between the author, Jim Collins, and Stockdale. Jim Collins is asking Stockdale who didn't make it out of the prison camp. Stockdale says, "Oh, that's easy. The optimists didn't make it."                         That causes Jim Collins to be completely confused. He says, "I don't understand. Why the optimists?" Stockdale says, "The optimists always thought that things would get better, so they would say we'd be out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say we'd be out by Easter, and then Easter would come and Easter would go. Then they would say we'll be out by Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving would come and suddenly it would be Christmas again. Eventually they died of a broken heart."                         Optimism, it seems, can be very fragile. In his book, Nassim Taleb talks about this concept of anti-fragility. The book, by the way, is called Antifragile. Fragile is something like glass. It drops to the floor and it breaks into a thousand pieces. Then you have something which is resilient and that is a piece of metal. That doesn't break, but nothing changes it. As soon as something hits it, it falls to the floor, nothing changes it. It remains exactly the same.                         Then there is something in between. That in between thing, that is anti-fragile. That's someone like James Stockdale where you get battered and hit and punished and pushed around. Everything comes at you, good times, bad times, and you change but you become stronger. I always thought that being resilient was powerful, but resilient, as Nassim Taleb describes it, is being like that block of steel. Nothing happens to it. It doesn't change, and you want to change. You want to improve. You want to get better.                         What makes anti-fragility so important? We'll cover three topics as we always do, and then we'll have a clear action plan, just one thing that you can do. In today's episode we're going to talk about chaos and how it becomes part of our life. The second thing that we're going to talk about, how anti-fragility makes us twice as strong, and third, how all of this prepares us for the unknown.                         Let's start out with the first one, which is battling chaos. Whenever you run into people you're always finding that they're struggling. They're always talking about how difficult things are. What they're really doing is they're battling chaos. When you're fragile, every single thing that comes your way causes you to fall and break into a thousand pieces. Then you have to stick yourself together again, and that's very difficult.                         On the other hand, you have people who are like steel objects and nothing changes them. You want to be somewhere in the middle. You want to understand that chaos is your best friend, that every single day of your life, it doesn't matter where you live or what you do, there is going to be an element of chaos. The people who are antifragile make a friend out of chaos. They go, "Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to run into chaos and it's going to take up an hour, two hours, three hours of my day, so I'm going to make an appointment with chaos. I'm going to keep three hours separate."                         The people who are fragile, they don't understand this. They think somehow that they will get through the day without that factor of chaos hitting them. Then when chaos hits them they don't know how to react so they fall to pieces.                         One of the main factors that you have to understand when you battle chaos is that it exists. It exists every single day, every single week, every single month of your life. Chaos is going to exist. If you don't plan for it, if you don't make an appointment with chaos, then nothing happens, or rather, the worst happens. You get hit by chaos. You're not prepared for it, and you fall to pieces.                         The people who are antifragile, they accept chaos for what it is. Let me give you an example. Let's say we're getting on a flight, say a week from now. When do we pack our bags? The fragile people, they're packing their bags until the very last minute. Then chaos hits you. If you're antifragile you're prepared for that chaos. You're prepared for something to go wrong so you've decided that the flight is going to leave four or five days earlier. You've got all your stuff, all your bags packed five days earlier as if you're going to go to the airport right now. Then if chaos hits you you don't care because you're prepared for it. The core of fragility comes from this factor of chaos, this factor of pretending that Christmas will come and Easter will come and Thanksgiving will come and things will be better. But things are what they are. Chaos is what it is and you just have to make friends with chaos, make an appointment. That's your first step towards anti-fragility.                         This takes us to the second step, which is how it makes you twice as strong. When we go back to the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, he talks about this ancient Greek mythological creature. It's called a hydra. The hydra is a serpent-like creature, and you have to battle this creature. Of course you go there with your sword and then you try to chop off its head but it's got many heads. You think I'll just cut off the heads. You chop off one head and two heads grow in its place. Then you cut off the other head and two more heads grow in its place.                         Suddenly you see this is a crazy battle. You cannot win this battle. When we put ourselves back in that Vietnam War and we see Stockdale's captors and they're trying to get him to do stuff or not do stuff ... At one point in time they wanted to present him as a well treated prisoner so he took a razor and he disfigured himself so that he could not be represented as a well treated prisoner.                         Exchanged secret intelligence information in letters to his wife. He knew that if they found out, and when they found out, there would be more torture. This is the point of people who are antifragile. They understand this concept of becoming twice as strong. It's not just about falling to pieces. It's you get at me and I will become twice as strong. I will be the hydra.                         Getting to New Zealand was an adventure. It was an amazing adventure. It was something that couldn't be foreseen, because as I said, we'd never been here before. Yet all of these things hit us together: the loss of a job, the mortgage, everything altogether. Those who are fragile, they want this certainty. They want this map in advance. We're going to do this on this day and this person's going to show up on that day and this is how your life is going to unfold. They may not admit it but that's exactly what they want. They want things mapped out for them. That's why when things hit them they get rattled and fall apart.                         Nassim Taleb talks about the whole economic crisis and why everything falls apart. It is because everything is being shielded. The banks are too big to fail. The economy will fall apart if we get rid of these people. That's the problem. When we make things fragile, when we make our kids fragile, when we make ourselves fragile, when we expect that everything will go according to today's schedule, then we can't be the hydra. We can't grow two heads every time someone cuts off one head. That's the critical part. Anti-fragility enables you to become twice as strong.                         There is a third part to anti-fragility, and that is to prepare yourself for the unknown. I know that I'm saying that this is the third part, but when you think of the first part and you think of the second part, which is the chaos and twice as strong, you're going to be prepared for the unknown. The reason why you're prepared for the unknown is because you're not expecting life to unfold just as you wrote it down. You have this saying: planning is priceless but plans are useless. You go through with the plan and you plan for chaos, and chaos will show up.                         Let me give you an example. One of the courses that we conduct at Psychotactics is called the article-writing course. We're in the last stages of the article-writing course. There are a few things that I get the participants to do before they finish the course. The first thing that I get them to do is to give me feedback. Feedback may sound like testimonials but feedback is not a testimonial. Feedback is that screeching sound you hear when two mics come into the range of each other. That's feedback. They have to tell me everything that is wrong with the course, everything that is wrong with my teaching, everything that is wrong with anything to do with what they've just gone through.                         I want you to be the trainer in this case and I want you to step back and think of the chaos that's going to hit you. You are actually asking people to tell you what is wrong. What are they going to do? They do, they tell you what is wrong. So far we have got 25 recommendations in the last 24 hours, 25 new things, new structures that we have to put in place. This is for a course that has been running since 2006. You know what happened the last time we had this course? They probably made 25 recommendations as well, and the time before that they made 25 recommendations as well.                         Chaos has to be my friend, right? I have to make an appointment with chaos. There is this course that people absolutely love, this course that people are willing to sign up six months, eight months in advice, that when we release it it fills up in less than an hour yet, 25 recommendations, 25 fixes, 25 structural jigsaws to put together? That's what you have to do. You have to be antifragile. You have to put yourself out on there. Of course you will get recommendations.                         Now when you are the student making the recommendation, you are simply giving your feedback. You're being as constructive as possible, but for you, the teacher, the trainer, the book author, it's like someone attacking your baby and saying there are 25 things wrong with your baby, and wait a second, we're not done yet. There are still more to come. If you don't make chaos your best friend, you don't make an appointment with this chaos and these 25 changes that you have to make, then chaos will come along. Clients will leave. They'll be upset. They won't tell you anything. If you confront chaos, then you become antifragile. You don't become that piece of steel and you don't become that piece of glass. You become the in between, the hydra. You step into the battle and the sword is coming straight for your head, and you better be prepared for it.                         When that sword comes and chops off your head, it makes you twice as strong. All of those 25 amendments and the structural changes and all that stuff, it's going to take a month, maybe two months of extremely hard work on top of everything else that has to be done on a daily basis. That's going to make us twice as strong. Then next year when we do the course, again it's the same thing all over again. There are going to be 25 amendments or changes or recommendations.                         How do we know this to be true? Because look at your phone, look at your software. The moment a new phone comes along, everyone is all excited and then you find all the glitches with that phone, all the things that could be better. All these glitches go back into that system, and the company that decides we're going to fix it, we're going to make a bigger screen, we're going to make a sharper screen, we're going to do this and do that, they're the ones that are expecting the chaos. They're the one that know that the feedback, brutal as it is, is going to make them twice as strong, that the next version is going to be a better version.                         It's this concept of antifragile that makes them ready for the unknown, because we don't what's around the corner. Whether you are manufacturing phones, doing a course, writing a book, you don't know what's around the corner. Being prepared for it in this way by being antifragile is what makes a difference.                         The biggest problem with people who are fragile is they don't see themselves as fragile. They see other people as fragile but they don't see themselves as fragile. How do you become antifragile? The only way to become antifragile is to ask for brutal feedback. I know that some of you listening to this podcast say it's feet forward or something else, but eventually it's feedback. It's terrible. It feels miserable. It's not like I went through the last 48 hours feeling like I was the king of the world. You feel like you put in so much work and it almost seems like why do I do this to myself.                         Stockdale would have that answer for you, because for Stockdale it was the end game that mattered, how you became twice as strong with all the beatings and all the imprisonment and all of the stuff that affected you, you became stronger. That change, that brutal change, it makes you stronger, not weaker. The weak, they seek plans and lack of chaos, and certainty. That's not how life pans out, and that's when you get brittle and you fall apart.                         Let's just summarize what we've covered today. We talked about the three factors. The first one was battling chaos, the whole concept of making an appointment with chaos and then expecting that it's going to show up. That's what makes you antifragile in the first instance. When you go out there and you expose yourself and ask for feedback, brutal feedback ... I don't like any other word but brutal feedback because it feels brutal. That makes you twice as strong. What it does on a third level is it prepares you for the unknown. That unknown is coming whether you like it or not. Clients are going to leave whether you like it or not. When you know about it, when they give you their feedback, you can take corrective action and you can make it better. That's really what anti-fragility, in my world at least, is all about.                         What's the one thing that you can do? Ask for brutal feedback. Don't sugarcoat it. You are going to get brutal feedback. When you get brutal feedback, you expect that you're going to feel miserable for the next two, three days, a week, however long it takes you to recover. When you recover, you come back like that hydra: stronger than ever before.                         That brings us to the end of this episode, a longer episode, almost 20 minutes and still edging forward. What's happening next? In about ten days we're headed to the US. We're doing the workshop on information products, on how to structure your information products. If you haven't already got the workshop, you might want to get the home study version. It's not as great as the workshop. The workshop if a lot of fun. There's Elmo; there are soft toys; there's food; there's stuff that you don't find at other workshops. If you haven't got to this workshop you will get to another Psychotactics workshop in the future.                         We then head over to Denver. I'm speaking at the Denver Opera House on pricing, talking about pricing. The book on pricing, the prices have gone up, as you'll expect but it's still at a reasonable price. Go to psychotactics.com. You will find the search bar on the right hand side and you won't find a sales page on the pricing book, but if you type in "trust the chef" you will be taken to the page, and yes, there is not a lot there but the book is really good. That's trust the chef. Find it in the search bar at psychotactics.com. If you want to get in touch, sean@psychotactics.com or I'm at Twitter @Sean D'Souza and on Facebook at Sean D'Souza as well. This has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation, and we're headed for one of those months shortly, and psychotactics.com. If you're not already a subscriber, here's your cue. Bye for now.  

When we're writing a book, creating a workshop or giving a presentation, we go hurtling down the path of HOW-TO. Except it seems that HOW-To is only part of the picture. We're missing out on a crucial element, which is why our clients get confused. Learn how to use the HOW-NOT-To in your online and offline marketing and training. --------------------   Useful Resources Dartboard Pricing Excerpt: http://www.psychotactics.com/prx Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/   --------------------   Time Stamps / / 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:03:34 Table of Contents / 00:04:01 Part 1: How To / 00:06:41 Part 2: Why HOW NOT to Works / 00:08:03 Part 3: Bringing in HOW NOT to. / 00:14:09 Summary / 00:18:27   ==== Sean D'Souza:            This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. Today I was at the café as usual. As I'm paying the bill, the guy, he knows I'm writing the book on pricing and he says, "Well, why is it taking you so long." I said, "Well, it's because I'm not just writing how to, but I'm writing how not to." He lifts his eyebrows like people often do when they don't really want to ask you a question but the question is on their mind, so I feel compelled to answer the question.                                     That's what we're going to cover in today's episode. We're going to see how how to is more an intellectual thing and how not to is more instructional, and why both of them combined make such a potent weapon when you're teaching something, and also when you're learning it.                                     I don't know if you've ever heard of the water test. Now the water test is a test that you do to figure out if the frying pan is at the right temperature. Often when we're cooking, what we'll do is we'll take a frying pan and we'll put some oil on it. Then the oil will start to heat up and then we'll put some chicken in it. The chicken or the fish, it sticks to the pan. Now that only happens because the pan is not at the right temperature or the oil is not at the right temperature.                                     I was watching this video online and they were showing me how to figure out the right temperature. What you have to do is you take a little water and you drop it on the pan. If it goes vsshhhhhh, then the pan is not hot enough. Of course you go through many of these, until at one point it's magic. The water droplet just rolls in the pan as if it were a blob of mercury. At that precise moment you put the oil in the pan and then immediately after that the chicken or the fish, and it doesn't stick.                                     Here's what I did. I took the pan, I followed the instructions, and no matter how many times I tried to get that water test to work, and it just wouldn't work for me. I'm pretty persistent. I went at it quite a while and the pan was in danger of getting burnt, but I still wasn't having any success with it. This doesn't make any sense, because when you think about it, I had the instructions. I should have been able to get it right but I wasn't getting it right.                                     In this episode we'll cover three things as always. The first thing is the importance of how not to vs. just how to. The second is why how not to works. The third is when to bring it in. What's the right time to bring it in? Let's start off with the first topic, which is how not to. What is it and why is it so important?                                     Let's go back to my frying pan. There I was with the frying pan trying to get the water test to work, but it wouldn't work. The reason why it wasn't working was because in the video they had a stainless steel frying pan and I had a non-stick. Now you might think that makes perfect sense. You're such an idiot. You should have seen it was a stainless steel one. They would have even mentioned take a stainless steel frying pan.                                     But when you're encountering something it's like learning a new language. You're just struggling at so many levels that it's easy to have this blind spot, to have many blind spots in fact. You're so focused on trying to get it right, not to goof up, that eventually you do goof up. That's because how to is an intellectual process. It might seem like how to are the steps. You're doing one step, the second step, the third step.                                     But if you've ever sat in an audience when a presenter is talking about, say, search engine optimization, or they're talking about pricing, or they're talking about something that you're not that familiar with, you get it. I remember the time I was at this water color class in Spain. The artist was showing us how to get these reflections of light on a rainy day. When he showed us he went through the steps. This is step one. This is step two. This is step three. I got it.                                     Then I went to my easel and I got the paint out, and then it all falls apart. Of course the reason why it falls apart is not because of the how to, the how to is already in place, but the how not to. That is the beauty of learning. Most of us are so focused on giving our clients how to. Whether we're consultants or we're teachers or we're training or writing books, we're so focused on giving them the how to that we don't realize that they go off-track on the how not to.                                     This takes us to the second part, which is why does the how not to work so well. Don't get me wrong, the how to works exceedingly well, but it works at an intellectual level. If you really want the client to practically use whatever you've showed them, then you've got to get to a how not to level.                                     Essentially what you're doing is you're highlighting the mistakes that people will make. Let's say you're drawing a cartoon and you place a character on one side of the page and another character on the other side of the page. What happens at that point in time? There is nothing wrong with the cartoon. You've drawn a great cartoon, because if you go and speak to 20 people they will say, "Wow, that looks really good," but from a composition point of view, that is terrible.                                     As a consultant you need to be able to tell your clients what to do and where they can go wrong. As a writer, you've got to do the same thing. You've got to tell them what to do, how to do something, and where it can go wrong. We have this responsibility with our clients to show them how things go wrong, and of course, the how to, which is how to get it right.                                     Which of course takes us to our third part, which is where do we bring in this factor of how not to. When a client starts reading an article or reading a book, or doing anything with you, they essentially want to hear how to do something. They don't want to know how not to do something. It just drives them crazy to have to listen to all the mistakes.                                     Once they figure out what steps they have to take, then at that point in time it's a very good idea to bring in the how not to. One of the really good ways of bringing in a how not to is to have an example. The example could be a story; it could be a case study; it could be something from history. Now the moment you bring in an example, two things happen.                                     The first is the attention spikes. The how to has been driving them crazy. Well, it's been driving their brain crazy, because the more you get in terms of information, the more your brain gets tired. The how not to takes the opposite stance, and the fact that you're using an example or a case study makes it even better. It makes it better because now you're taking the opposite stance. When you take an opposite stance you create contrast. When you create contrast you create attention.                                     The how to has its role. It creates attention, but as you go through the how to, the brain gets more and more tired because it has to juggle with all these facts. Then you get to the how not to, and again, you've got the audience's attention, but now you're doing it with a story. Shall we go to some stories and examples? We should, shouldn't we? Here is example number one.                                     I recently wrote a book on pricing. It's called Dartboard Pricing, and it shows you how to set your prices, how to do sequential pricing, how to increase your prices without losing customers. There right in the middle of the book is a table, and the table only has four elements. Now how much can you get wrong with four elements? Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. Over the years this table, called the yes and yes table, has helped people increase their prices by 10%, 15%. But they still get it wrong.                                     How do they get it wrong? I go through several pages of showing them the how not to, showing them all the tables that went wrong, and people just love this. They love to see how someone else got it wrong. They look at those case studies, the attention goes up, but the lesson goes home. Now they know how to because of the how not to.                                     You might think that this applies just to business but it applies to everything in life. For instance, I mentor my niece Marsha. We have to do spellings. Now sometimes Marsha will go off-tangent and no matter how much I try to get the spelling across she will still spell it incorrectly. What do you do? You go to the how not to stage. You show her how not to spell the word.                                     What I do is I make her spell the word as she's spelling it and say that's the wrong way to spell it. Then I give her the right way to spell it, at which point in time I tell her now spell it wrong. You know what happens to the brain? It's not able to cope with spelling something wrong. She has two options. She can spell it right or spell it wrong, but now that she knows how it's spelled wrong, her brain switches back to spelling it right. I tell her spell it wrong; she spells it right. I say spell it wrong; she spells it right. Wrong, still right.                                     This is the power of how not to. When you expose the concept of how not to, you get to people at a very practical level. When you give them how to, you go to them at an intellectual level. Both of them are needed. The intellectual stimulates, gets tiring. Go to how not to and then you can implement it.                                     At this point in time we run into an even bigger problem. When you have a how to, the steps are usually limited. If you have to put something together, you have maybe step number one to step number 17, but when we consider the realm of how not to, we're looking at an enormous number of things that people could do wrong. What are you supposed to do? The how not to exposes how much you're confusing your audience. The best advice I can give you on this is to get them step by step, to bring out the step, to take them through the how to, to take them through the how not to, and then move to the next step. You're tackling one thing at a time, and that's the way the audience really gets it.                                     The second thing that you have to consider is the medium. Now in a presentation, probably an hour-long presentation, you have more time to go into the how to and how not to. In a book you definitely have more time. You have more space. In an audio or a video you don't have that much space. You probably didn't realize it, but I just ran two how not to's by you. In audio or video you need to keep the how not to's short, a couple of them and then move along. In a book, in a presentation, you have a little more space, a little more leeway.                                     With that, we finish how to and how not to. Let's summarize. What are the three things that we covered? The first thing that we covered was the how to. We started off with the concept of how to and how not to, and that how to is an intellectual process and how not to is very powerful because it allows you to implement things. The second thing that we covered was how not to. How does it work? We saw how it gets the attention of the customer. It gets the attention of the reader simply because it shows you what you shouldn't be doing but it also is very useful for you as a creator of audio or video or a book or a consulting, because it spikes that attention just after all of those how to's have tired the person out. Now you've got this situation where you are creating attention yet again.                                     You do this with a case study. You do this with a story. You do this with an example. I gave you the example of the yes and yes in the pricing book and how people get it wrong, and also how I work with my niece Marsha, with her spellings. If you've got kids around, you should try this. Finally, we talked about where to use it. Usually the how not to comes right at the end. Just when all that attention is going down the gurgler, that's when you want to pick it up with the how not to.                                     What's the one thing that you could do today? You want to start documenting the mistakes. You want to start documenting where people go off-tangent. Let's say I'm doing a course right now on article writing. What I do is I document where they go off-course. Then that becomes part of the documentation. The next time I give some kind of instruction on what to do this week, I also put in the how not to. That makes a huge difference. If you're writing an article, write the how to. Write a bit of how not to. You're writing a book? How to, how not to. Presentation? How to, how not to. Work out the how not to's. That's all you really have to do.                                     It's almost time for me to go for my coffee and to the beach, so that brings us to the end of this episode. Now I've been going on and on about the pricing book and Dartboard Pricing. Pricing affects us all. There's not a single one of us that really knows what is happening with pricing, so how do you get better prices? This book has some fascinating examples and pretty much a lot of how to, but one of the things that is very powerful in the book is book number three, which tackles sequential pricing, where instead of your prices going up all the time, they actually go up and then they go down.                                     Why would you want your prices to go down, and how do you create this strategy? That's what sequential pricing is all about. If you want excerpt of the book you can get it at psychotactics.com/prx. If you still want the book, it might still be on Trust The Chef. If you are lucky and you get to it before we raise the prices, get it. Go to psychotactics.com. Search for Trust The Chef and get your copy of Dartboard Pricing.                                     About iTunes, if you haven't already left a review on iTunes, please do so. We're off to the United States in a couple weeks. We're headed to the Copyblogger Conference. I'm also doing my own workshop on information products, and then we're going to Sardinia, Italy for the rest of the time. We won't be back until mid-June. No work, just play, which is why this podcast is called the Three Month Vacation. Our three months of work are up and now it's time to take a break. This podcast has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. If you haven't already subscribed, go and press that subscribe button. All the links and the resources are below this podcast, so if you scroll down you'll see all the information right down, and there are links out there. That's it for me from Auckland, New Zealand. Bye for now.  

When you have a product or course online it seems it's easy for competitors to copy it. Yet, being in online marketing isn't the only place things can be copied. The fashion industry, for one has people that can copy. Competitors can copy whatever they feel like, because there's no law that prevents them from doing so. So whether you have an offline business or online, you'll want to stay ahead of the competition. But how do you do so?   --------------------   Useful Resources Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic   Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver   For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ --------------------   Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:35 Table of Contents 00:02:50 Method 1: Updates 00:07:04 Method 2: Branding 00:11:20 Method 3: Personality 00:16:11 Summary 00:19:43 Final Announcements ----------   Ever since I was a kid, I always liked to draw. I'd sit in the corner and I'd draw. I wouldn't speak much to people, but I'd draw. As you can imagine, I got very, very good at drawing, but I wouldn't sign my work. I wouldn't put my name on the work, and my mother would always tell me, "Sean, you have to sign your work. People will copy it. They'll copy it and they'll claim it as their work." Now when I was 10, I didn't see the irony of it, that the reason that I could draw in the first place was because I was copying stuff. As human beings, that's what we do. We learn to copy; we learn to trace. The more we can copy and the more we can trace, the better we become at any skill. The problem arises when we grow up and we start to write books and we start to do other things like paintings and then other people start to copy us. Suddenly, when you look out there in the marketplace, there seem to be people there ripping you off and you don't know how to stop it, but there is a way to stop it. The wrong way to stop it is to go after them. The wrong way to stop it is to get so upset, so angry that you want to destroy that competitor. This takes up all your energy. All that frustration comes to the fore and it's completely useless because the other person will continue to copy. How do we stop them? We stop them with our own ingenuity. There are 3 ways that you can actually slow down your competition. How do you slow them down? You can never stop them. You slow them down with updates, with branding, and finally with personality. It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this, so how do we go about it? Let's start off with the first one, which is updates. Yesterday, while I was on my walk I was listening to a TED talk, and this TED talk was by Johanna Blakley. She was talking about the fashion industry and how in the fashion industry it is routine to just copy other people's stuff. You don't even have to think about it; you just copy it. She talked about a shoe designer, and this shoe designer's name is Stu Weitzman. He was very frustrated because he would design these amazing shoes and people would go out there and copy it, and there were no laws to stop them from copying it. Johanna goes on; she went on to describe how Stu upped his game. What he started to do was create these Bowden-Wedged shoes. It was very difficult to copy them because they were made of titanium, and if you didn't' make them of titanium, they would crack. What he did was create an update that was almost too difficult to copy. You're probably not making shoes. You probably have a consulting service. Maybe you have a book or a product, you sell information and there your competitors are copying you. How do we deal with this? Let me tell you the issues that we have at Psychotactics. You can have copying where someone just copies your stuff, kind of similar, and then there are other issues like where they rip off your stuff. If you look at several courses that we have, we have the article writing course, the copywriting course, the uniqueness course. We've been going since 2002. I guess we're reasonably popular on the Internet because if you look at some of the sites where they pirate stuff, where they resell other people's stuff, well, that's exactly what's happening to us. There are these pirates that take our stuff just like they do with Microsoft Word and Photoshop and then they resell it and they make money off it. We can get angry; we can start chasing them down. There are websites that do just this, and it's a complete waste of time. The way to beat this system is to create updates. When we do an article writing course, we change about 20% of the course. If you did an article writing course live with us, not through some pirate, you would find that it has changed 20% since last time. It has got more efficient, it has got better. If you bought the course off some pirate, you're probably struggling 20% or 40% or 60% more. Yes, you're getting the information probably cheaper, but the problem is that the updates are so powerful that it is very, very difficult for them to keep up. Now they may buy the original product, but as long as we keep updating it, as long as we keep refining it, it becomes extremely difficult to copy. If you look at our book The Brain Audit, it started out at Brain Audit Version 1 and then went to Version 2 and Version 3 and Version 3.2, and it has stayed there. Now what if your book just stays there? What you've got are updates. What we've done is we've had updates on target profile and we've had updates on uniqueness. The book is changing about 10 to 20%, but internally. If you're on our list and if you bought it from us, that's where you get all the information from, but if you don't, you don't. This is how you stay ahead of both your competitors and your pirates. You keep updating. Change 15%, change 20%, and they'll never, ever catch up. Now this takes us to the second part, which is the concept of branding. Now branding might just seem like this big multilevel exercise that you have to do that costs a lot of money, and you don't have to do anything like that. At the very core, branding is naming something in a way that makes it difficult to copy. For instance, in The Brain Audit we have something called reverse testimonials. Now you've heard of testimonials, but you've probably not heard of reverse testimonials. That is branding. When a person reads that and they go out there and they learn about reverse testimonials, immediately they think of you. Branding makes it extremely difficult to copy. I'm writing a book right now. I could have called it Pricing; I did start to call it Pricing. It's very difficult to hang onto a brand name like Pricing, so I changed it. The concept was about pricing being this crazy thing, so we called it Dartboard Pricing. Now immediately, it gets your curiosity as a customer, but it also brands it. It brands it in a way that makes it extremely difficult to copy. When you think of branding, you probably just think of the name of the product or the service and you know it's top level. What you can do is you can also create branding at many sublevels. Dartboard Pricing, that's the top level; that's the name of the book. Within Dartboard Pricing there are already other terms; there are other forms of branding. For instance, we have a method called a Yes-and-Yes system. Now the Yes-and-Yes system is a way to increase your prices and not lose customers. It shows you a systematic way of going about this whole pricing exercise. What's interesting is the brand name. Once I have the Yes-and-Yes system, whenever someone else sees it, it becomes difficult for them to copy it. What they can do is refer back to you. When you look at, say, someone like Jim Collins and he wrote his book Good to Great, and in that he talked about the Hedgehog Principle, but he doesn't just talk about the Hedgehog Principle. He also talks about Level 5 leadership. As you keep reading that book, you run into other concepts like the Flywheel and the Doom Loop. This is what you've got to do. You've got to have this top level, which is probably the name of your product or your service. Then within that, you've got to have multilevel branding, names that you come up with that only make sense to you and to your customers, but they follow a pattern, they follow a system, and then it becomes very, very difficult. If you have generic names like, okay, we're going to deal with target audience, well, that's great, but it doesn't become yours, it doesn't become your own. Then it becomes very, very easy to copy. How do you come up with these names? As you are creating your product or your service, you are describing it. You're probably describing it in words or you're describing it as someone else or they're describing it back to you. You want to pay attention, because sometimes they will use a word, they will use a term, or you will use a word or a term, and that's when it comes about. When I write a book or I create a system or a seminar or a workshop, that's what I'm looking for. I'm always looking for that moment when I can create a term that no one else can copy. I'm not doing that consciously, but just by having that term, it sticks in someone's head and it also makes it very difficult to copy. This takes us to the third element, which is personality. Now all of us have a personality. Some of us are very quiet and some of us are louder and some of us are bubblier. Developing this personality makes it very, very difficult to copy. If you listen to the podcast that I did back in 2009, I was a different person. I was more loud, I would say. I was more energetic. I was trying to get my point across like this, but now I don't. This is the kind of personality that people tune into. When you're writing your book, you have a certain style that develops over time, and when you're speaking on a podcast, there is a certain style that develops over time. Your job is, ironically, to copy. How do you develop this style, this personality? Most people think that the personality is inbuilt. Your personality is inbuilt. When you grow up as a kid, you have a certain personality and that is inbuilt. Your style, your drawing style, your writing style, your creation style, that comes from copying. To develop that style, you have to copy many people. Let's say you want to become a great watercolorist. You could copy 1 watercolorist, and after awhile what happens is you become a replica of that person. You start doing the houses the same way, the people the same way, the colors the same way, and when people look at your stuff, that's what they say. That's what they said about me. When I started out, I started copying a cartoonist called Mario Miranda. Mario was a very, very, very good cartoonist back in India, and his work is still outstanding. I was copying his stuff so much as I was growing up that when I drew a bunch of cartoons and we put them on coffee mugs … These coffee mugs were sold; there were hundreds of thousands being sold. People used to call them the Mario mugs. Now, obviously, Mario was infuriated and so was I because that's not the way I wanted to represent my stuff. You have to understand that today my work is completely different from Mario's work. The reason for that is I went on to look at other styles and copied those styles. Then over time, you just get your own style, and that style doesn't stay still; it changes. Just like in this podcast, the style that I had I 2009 is totally different from this year. It's the same thing with drawing and writing and everything else. When someone tries to copy you, you don't need to be infuriated because that's exactly what you've been doing. If you are any good at what you do today, it's because you have been copying, but not copying from one person but from many people. This goes on and on and on until you stop doing whatever it is you're doing. To become great, you have to get influenced by other people, and invariably, that leads to copying. Whether you like it or not, your brain is taking snapshots. Ironically, that is personality. Ironically, that is what people call your drawing personality, your writing personality, your speaking personality. It comes from copying all of these people. The funny thing is it also becomes a uniqueness; it becomes you completely different from everybody else. If you constantly dive into this pool of influence, of influences of different people and different style and different cultures and different everything, then you become extremely unique, extremely different from everybody else. I know I use the word irony, but the irony just sits there, that you have to become great by copying, and it's copying that infuriates us the most. Let's summarize what we've just covered, 3 things that we covered. The first thing was the update. When you have updates in your system, it becomes very, very difficult for someone else to copy you. As I said, with the article writing course, with the uniqueness course, with all our courses, with all our workshops, things change. You want to do this because it excites you. Imagine giving the same course over and over again. Imagine having the same book that you wrote 10 years ago and you haven't made any updates. This is a challenge for you; this is interesting for you. Making those updates keeps you ahead of the competition, but it also keeps you ahead of those pirates. If someone were to go out there and buy your stuff from a pirate, they would be worse off. That's what you need to know. That would make you very happy, wouldn't it? The second element is one of branding. When you start to give terms to anything … You'll find this right through the Psychotactics system where we have the Bikini Principle, the Yes-and-Yes system, the target profile, all of these things that are not common out there. Now that you're aware of that, you can create your own. When you have a book on pricing, well, you can't call it Dartboard Pricing anymore, can you? Which takes us to the third factor, which is the personality, and this is the personality of writing, of drawing, of creating stuff. While we are born with our own personality and that personality develops, all of it is about copying, but not copying 1 person because otherwise we become a replica. It's about copying several people. When you copy several people, you develop a style, and the irony sits on you and you think, "Goodness, what a trip." How is all of this relevant to the Three Month Vacation? It's relevant because you want to get better prices. You want customers to come to you, and the way to do that is to stand out from the competition. If you were just me-too in your branding, in your personality, and you have no updates, you become exactly like the competition. You become someone who doesn't really change anything. When you do that, it becomes more difficult to get better customers and better-paying customers. As a result, you have to work longer and harder and there's no vacation in sight. This is very critical to creating that uniqueness factor so that people can't copy. What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing can be to look at your branding. For instance, we have a course like the article writing course, it's very generic, it's boring. I should go back and I should look at it and say, "How can I make this like the pricing book? Instead of just calling it Pricing, how do I call it Dartboard Pricing?" You and I, we both have to go back and we have to look at our existing product or existing services and say, "How can we brand this in a way that is interesting?" Not just at the top level, but at all other levels as well. When you do that, automatically it's going to stand out. That's what we both have to do. This brings us to the end of this episode. It's 4:35 a.m. here in Auckland City, quiet. Right after recording this episode, I'm going to be sitting down to complete my book on pricing. That's due out on the 13th of April, so if you get it by then, you get it at a better price and then the prices go up. They always go up at Psychotactics, so get your copy. Go to psychotactics.com and search for Trust the Chef. When you get that Trust the Chef, that's the Trust the Chef offer. Go and get it today. In a few weeks from now, we're headed to Washington, D.C., to the Information Product Workshop. If you're joining us there, you're going to have a blast. Then we're going to Denver to speak at the Copyblogger Conference, and then it's one of those months of vacation. We'll be back and then we're going to be doing the headline course and the brain audit trainer, where you actually learn to become very, very good at reading your customers' minds. More about that later. To get all the details on this podcast, just go to psychotactics.com/33. That's the episode; this is episode number 33. You can get all the episodes except episode 18. For some reason, we can't do 18, so you can never find psychotactics.com/18, but you can find all the rest of them from 1 to right now, which is 33. That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now. Bye-bye.