The Three Month Vacation Podcast

So you're new. No one knows you from a bar of soap. And everything that needs to be said has already been said before. Whether you're in online marketing, health and fitness, or just about any small business, it's been done. Or has it? Why would customers continue to seek you out even if you're seemingly a nobody. It's because customers don't necessarily seek out just a name. Instead they seek out a voice; a system; and the way you explain that system. =======  Time Stamps:   00:00:20 Introduction 00:01:31 Table of Contents 00:01:57 Element 1: Your Voice Matters 00:06:39 Element 2: The System That You Follow 00:12:41 Element 3: Your Examples 00:16:40 Summary 00:19:52 Action Plan: The ONE Thing 00:20:42 Final Statements Including Info-Product Workshop in Washington D.C. + Goodies ======== Transcript Sean: One of the biggest things that we seem to battle with is our own minds. It doesn't matter how good we are or how good we get, there is always this battle in our own minds. We always wonder about the things that we are writing, about the audio that we're creating, of the video that we're creating because there is so much information out there isn't there?   You think, "Well, surely someone has done this before. Surely, someone has covered this before. Surely my work is just going to be irrelevant. No one's going to pay attention. No one will want this." You know something? You would think that this feeling goes away. It never goes away. Here are the three main reasons why you should persist nonetheless.   The three main reasons why you should continue to write, to create audio or video or a presentation is simply because people want to hear you. The three things that they want to hear are, your voice, your system, and the third is your examples. Let's go into a little detail about what these three things signify and why they are so important to your customer.   The first thing that we're going to cover is just the factor of your voice. When I write an article, people know that that article has come from PsychoTactics. When I draw a cartoon, you know that you can recognize my cartoon from everyone else's cartoon.    You know this for a fact because there are thousands or tens of thousands of cartoonists out there, probably even a few million considering the population of the world. Yet, when you see a cartoon from me, you know instantly this is Sean's cartoon or someone that is trying to copy the same style. If that were to apply to cartoons, that also applies to writing, to speaking, to video, to audio.   This audio for instance is constructed in a completely different voice. It's a different way, there is no hype on it. There is no fanciness. But there are clear tiny increments that you can implement, things that help you move forward. You will notice for instance that when I'm speaking, I don't bring up money. Now, there are no how to make six figures, how to make seven figures, even if that is the case, it never comes up. That's because I believe that it's crass, it's low class to talk about money that way. Talking about money and making other people feel miserable or feel uncomfortable because they don't have the same situation, I think it's crass to do that.   I also think that it's silly to have all these gaps. Today I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "OK you can build this product and all you have to do is just get one customer a day. The product costs $497 and you just have to have one customer a day." Wait a second, you don't even have to have one customer a day, you just have to have one customer every other day and you make all of this money and you gave her $191,000-something figure. He just managed to leave out, how are you supposed to have that [half 00:03:45] customer a day?   I think those things are crass. It doesn't come out in my voice. It doesn't come out in my podcast. It doesn't come out in me audio, or my video, or my presentations. For the most part, we will stay within how do you actually move your skill ahead. How do you get these skills? That's my voice. For the most part it stays consistent. I'm not saying that I've never brought it up before. I'm saying for the most part, it stays consistent.   This is what you've got to understand. That for the most part your voice is going to stay consistent and you're going to attract customers and clients that like that voice. It might be a voice that talks about money all the time. Yes, that's great because that attracts that kind of audience. Then yours might be about hard work. We talk about the article writing course, which is the toughest writing course in the world. Clients will write in and say, "You got me at that line." Why would I sign up for anything if it wasn't tough or if it weren't tough, that's right English.   They tell me that this is what they want from life. They want to work hard, they want to create magic, that is the voice that I'm sending out. That's the voice that your clients are responding to, that's the voice that my clients are responding to. Whenever you have that bully brain coming in saying, "oh no, this has been done before. Oh no you shouldn't be writing or speaking or doing whatever it is you're doing", then shut down that bully brain and say, "This is my voice. I have grown up. I have learned things. It is my duty and my privilege to pass it on."   Your voice will come out and your people will listen to you. I know this is sounding very religious or cult-like but I will listen to pretty much any music that Sting brings out because I like his voice. If someone else were to sing the exact song, I don't think it would matter to me as much. That's what you have to understand, that once you've created your voice you're going to have an audience that is willing to listen to you, that's the first thing. Your voice really matters.   Let's move on to the second thing which is the system that you follow. When I first wrote the Brain Audit, it was more about a factor of just writing something down on a piece of paper. Someone wanted the notes, I wrote the notes, it became a book and that became the Brain Audit. Today, that document has become like the Bible for us at PsychoTactics.com, for all our as well. What you've got to understand is just this, that when I wrote that book, I didn't have a system. I was trying to create a system. I was trying to create a system for myself because someone ask that question, I answer the question but now you have to put it together in a way that is consumable, that someone can use. That's what I did. I put it together in the system.   It not only became a system for me, but also for my clients. Maybe I should put it the other way. It not only became a system for my clients but also a system for me. This is true for everything that I do. When I did the info-product scores, it generated a system in my brain. When I wrote any of the products like, the about us page, or the homepage which is about website components, and you'll see this in our product section in PsychoTactics, all of those things I wrote because I wanted to write it because I've been doing things over the years and most of them are nice, they work. In retrospect, it's nice to look back and see how they work. But it's so much better to have that system, to have that checklist.  This is the kind of thing that people are looking for. Whenever they buy into your product or your service, they are looking for that system, not A system or B system or C system, they want your system. They like your voice, they like the way you operate, now, they want your system. If you don't give them that system, in a way, you're doing them a big disservice. You may think, "well, who am I to tell them how to do things?" But this isn't about how to thing, this is about a student in the 3rd grade teaching someone in the 2nd grade. If you know just a little more than the kid in the 3rd grade, you can help that kid.   If you know a little more about fraction, if you know a little more about spellings, you can help that kid in the 2nd grade. That's where you have to come from. The point is that you know your system is slightly different from any other system out there. That's all I'm interested in. I'm not really interested in the other systems. This becomes even more relevant in today's world where there are so many people who are totally hopeless of what they do but they are good at marketing. What they do is they'll do a lot of advertising, they'll do a lot of marketing, they'll do a lot of joint ventures, they'll do all that kind of stuff and people are buying into those products, sometimes the products are just $50, but sometimes they are $15,000.   It doesn't matter whether you spend $15 or $15,000, it's still a waste of your time and money. Those people are searching for someone who has a system. Those people are searching for someone who can put that system together in a cohesive way, and that is you. Put together that system and this is why you need to make sure that you get your information out there and you get it there sooner than later, that even if you get it 70% right, it's enough. You can go and fix it later.   Think of your system as software. Think of all the software you've used over the years. Think of how you've bought version 1, version 1.2, 2, 3, 4 and you don't feel bad about it do you? If you are such a perfectionist, which all of us claim to be, but of course, there is no such thing as perfection. Go back, just go back and fix it. Do version 1 then do version 1.2, 1.3, 1.7, go to 2. That's all we did. We did that with the Brain Audit. We sold version 1, we sold version 2, we sold version 3. The same people that bought version 1, also bought version 2 and they bought version 3 of a book.   It's not software, it's a book. You can do that as well. Believing your system, that's the second point. The first point that we covered was your voice. It needs to be your voice because want to listen to you. The second thing is just the system. Your system is totally different from everybody else's system.   The third thing are your examples and this very, very, critical. What is it about examples that make a difference? You can have a system, you can have a voice but somehow the examples that you use are going to be totally different from somebody else's examples. Maybe you'll give case studies that are totally different. Maybe you talk about stories that are your own personal stories or stories that you know from somewhere else. Maybe you'll use analogies that are different. People learn in different ways. When you give that specific analogy, when you give that specific story, the lights go off in the head and you felt this before haven't you? You feel this.   I was at a workshop once in Spain and there was this guy who is talking about values. Now, values are a system that you use in water colors top make your character stand out. I had read at least 50 books in water colors. I had gone to courses in water colors and I could never understand values. He came up with this system and these examples. The example was about how the values represent coffee and tea and milk and all that kind of stuff.   Of course it doesn't make any senses to you right now but the point was that that was my light bulb moment. That was the moment where I thought, "Wow this is so cool, I have never figured this one out before. I could go another 20 years and never figure this out." I figured it out at that point in time.   I'm sure that Spain helped. I'm sure my mindset helped. I'm sure that a lot of things helped. But the point is that you examples, your analogies, your case studies, they're going to be different. That's what you're going to take away from it. Just like I used the analogy of the Brain Audit. How we did version 1 and version 2 and version 3, you probably heard this whole thing about "Don't be a perfectionist". That story is going to stick in your head. I know it now. Even as I speak, I know that story is going to stick in your head. Every time you slow down, you're going to think of that story.   There you go, three things. Let's go over them quickly, shall we? The first thing that we covered was just your voice, people want to listen to your voice, it's very, very important. Whether that voice is a grumbly voice or a spammy voice or [inaudible 00:14:05] voice or whatever voice, that's the kind of client that is interested in your voice. It doesn't matter whether you consider it good or bad, your audience will be attracted to that. The second thing is just the factor of your system. Your system is going to be different. Even if you move just one peg away from the other peg, from somebody else's system, it's still your system and that's what I want to buy into. The third thing is your examples, your analogies, your case studies, your stories, one little thing in your book, in your audio, in your presentation could trigger off that magic. That's the magic that you want to bring to the table.   This is why you should never give up. This is why you should never consider yourself irrelevant. This is why you should push that bully brain far into the background and say, "you sit in a corner and when you're 35 years or up, you can come and bug me again." That's what you do.   Well, this is me Sean D'Souza. If you like this audio and you like this information, pass it on to a friend, pass it on to someone, so that they can benefit from it as well. Do write in and ask me the questions about info products or marketing or anything specific that you want to ask because you never know, I might run in it in an audio podcast, in fact I will do that. You know where to find me, it's at PsychoTactics.com. Go to PsychoTactics.com and we'll meet you there.     

When you're a small business, you have what seems like a terrible choice: tactics or strategy. But do you really have to choose? How do online or offline strategies differ from tactics? Can you get by on marketing tactics alone? There is a difference and this podcast shows you how to not just tell the difference, but profit from it. To get hidden goodies, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to: http://www.psychotactics.com ===== Time Stamps:   00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:44 The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics 00:06:59 Strategy Leads to More Stress 00:08:39 How to Execute Tactics and Strategy 00:12:27 Summary 00:13:33 Action Plan 00:14:51 Final Notes. ===== Transcript  Sean D.: Hi this is Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. It's the new year and most of us are already thinking of not making new year resolutions so why do we hate new year resolutions so much? We hate it because it doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because we're not doing it right. Today we're going to talk about strategy versus tactics. Your new year resolution so far has probably been a tactic, not a strategy.  Back in 2008, I decided I wanted to play badminton. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, but I also enjoy sport. You see, I don't really like to do any exercise, I don't like going to the gym, I can barely tolerate walking, I only do it because I'm listening to something and it helps me pass the time, but sport? You ask me to play some soccer, or as I call it, football, or cricket, or badminton, well that's more up my street. I go to play badminton every day at 9 o'clock and then by 12 o'clock I'd be back. Now I wasn't playing all the three hours, I was playing just a couple of hours, but as you can tell, that's quite a decent workout. What happened at the end of a couple of months?  I didn't lose any weight. How could that be the case? How can you run about like a crazy nut, for two hours, five days a week and not lose any weight? The problem was I was reading it as a tactic, not as a strategy. I'd go and play for those hours every day and then I'd get back and I'd eat a little of this and a little of that and pretty much I was consuming as many calories as I was burning and doing it every single day.  After several months, I was exactly where I started, but not only did I goof up on the food, I was also goofing up on how I approached the game. After three months, I had so many aches and pains because I wasn't doing stuff right and I gave up the game.  Now I still have my racket with me, I still have my shoes, I still have the badminton shuttle I was playing with when I went from C player to B player which was quite difficult by the way. That is what today's podcast is about. It's about the difference between strategies and tactics. You've probably figured out the difference between strategies and tactics anyway. Tactics are like a new year's resolution. You decide you want to stop smoking, you want to go on a diet, you want to do something and it's that instant moment of deciding that you want to do something and then you move in a different direction.  Tactics might seem like just that one moment and strategy might seem like a longer period of time, but there's more to strategy than just the period of time and that is that there are different elements that feed into that strategy. When you look at something like what we're doing right now in podcasting, when I did podcasting back in 2010, I had what you call a tactic. I recorded a podcast and I put it up and people came there and they listened to it and that was it. However, this time around it's a strategy, so it's not just a podcast, it has different elements involved.  There is the podcast, there is the cartoon that goes with the podcast, there are the transcripts, there are the pages that have to be created for the podcast. There is the music that has to be put in, the music has to be bought obviously, it has to be tailored, it takes a couple of hours to put in all the music and then in this age of distraction, we have to get people to go there, to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to download, to continue to listen to them on a regular basis. This is something that I plan to be doing for a long time and that's the difference between a strategy and a tactic.  You have to think about all of the elements that are going to make it work, just like in badminton. It didn't just involve me going there and playing for a couple of hours, it also involved what I was going to eat, how I would improve my game so I wasn't struggling all the time and also how to not injure myself, because I'm an expert at doing that. By simply showing up and playing badminton, that was a tactic. By this point, you're probably wondering, do tactics matter or does strategy matter? Which one is more important? That takes us to the second part of the podcast, where we figure out which one is more important.  The thing with tactics, is that it becomes a springboard. A lot of people think once they listen to the whole concept of strategy versus tactic, that tactics are not important. Tactics are very important, but they're important as the springboard, they're the thing that light your fire, that start everything going. Once that is going, you suddenly get into a state of complete chaos. That's what tactics often do, they lead to chaos. You figure out, "I have to do something. I have to maybe do more webinars, or I have to do more workshops or I have to get more clients" and immediately you're out of your comfort zone and you're wondering what should you do, how should I go about it? At that point, we enter into the new year resolution zone.  We decide we're going to do something and we don't have the strategy and the strategy becomes critical. Now that we have our tactic, now that we've decided we're going to go in a certain direct, we've changed paths, now we have to sit down and work out a strategy and one of the best ways to work out a strategy is to educate yourself. Let's say you've decided to write some books on kindle. The first thing that you have to do is to be able to write really well. A tactic would be to just sit down and start writing. Nice, but quite difficult because there's a lot of editing that you end up doing, you end up wasting a lot of time.  A strategy would be, how am I going to make this more fun and less stress and you know you're actually in the middle of a strategy when you end up with a little more stress. You'd have to probably do something like a story telling course or an article writing course or a fiction writing course because that's what you're ending up doing, right? You're physically [inaudible 00:07:38] a book, so you need to know how you're going to sell the book, how you're going to write the book and you're educating yourself. This is what you do with your kids. You wouldn't say, "Okay let's get some books and learn some stuff and then we're done." No, you have a long term strategy. You send them to school for a duration, you teach them stuff on field trips, you educate them all the time and that becomes a long term strategy and the parents that have a better strategy end up with smarter kids and the parents that don't have a strategy end up with kids that are always trouble and struggling all along the way.  There are many definitions for tactics versus strategy and one of the definitions is tactics is the how and strategy is the what. For me, the difference is just that tactics are quick, there's stuff that you have to do right now, and strategy is the long term journey. It's all the stuff that you have to do to get to that destination.  Both of them are equally important in their own way, but without the strategy it's unlikely that you're going to get there.  For the third part of this podcast, let's talk about real examples. Let's say you've got situations and they're not working out too well for you, how would you execute tactics and strategy? Many years ago, around 2004, I was at this internet conference and I was selling from the podium, I don't do a lot of that anymore, but that's what I was doing and I noticed that a lot of people were making these offers and there was a stampede to the back of the room. I didn't have a strategy for that day. I just showed up on the podium and I used a couple of tactics and it didn't work at all. In fact it failed miserably, so I had to come back to New Zealand and then work out what did I do wrong? How should I have gone about it?  I created a strategy. In 2008 we went to Chicago and when I spoke from the podium, there were 250 people in that audience and that day we earned 20,000 dollars. If you sat there in the audience, you would have thought, how did he do it? How did he sell more than all the other speakers? If you were just looking at that one piece, that pitch that was done at the end of the speech, you'd have thought that there was some magic in that pitch.  But it wasn't. A lot of the planning had gone into what we had done before the speech, before we even got to that podium, before I even started to say a single word. There was a whole strategy. There was the stuff that we sent in advance, there was the stuff that we gave at the event itself, including a handout that the participants got the previous night. There was the video when the presentation actually started and what the video was supposed to do, there were the breaks in the middle of the speech where I just took a break for five minutes and what I did on that break and this was all part of the strategy.  A tactic would be just to make that pitch, a strategy would be all of the points that were required for that pitch to work. This brings up a very important point and that is anticipation, anticipation of chaos. When we execute a tactic, we're just doing what the situation requires at that point in time. When we go through a strategy, we're anticipating that things will go wrong, and how do we fix it? How do we recover and how do we recover quickly?  Over the years at PsychoTactics, things have gone wrong and have gone badly wrong. Through most of 2013 and part of 2014, we had several hacker attacks on our website. I don't know why, maybe it's because it's quite popular. It's in the top 100,000 in the Alexa rating and maybe that's why, but nonetheless, we didn't have a strategy in place and so we had to put a strategy in place and that involved moving all the websites from one type of system which was [jumla 00:12:08] over to Wordpress and reinforcing everything. As part of our strategy, we now have to redesign the whole look because times have changed.  We also have to look at the text and whether it reflects who we are right now. Our tactic was to make sure we were no longer in the blacklist and that clients were not compromised in any way, but our strategy was longer term, our strategy would take several months, probably over a year to execute and that is the core difference between a strategy and a tactic. To come full circle, I am now walking every day. I don't go for badminton and maybe I will at some point in time, but I walk every day and I walk for an hour, hour and twenty minutes, every single day.  The strategy is very simple, I have all my audio whether it's music or podcasts or languages and then at the end of that walk I get rewarded with a coffee. Then I turn around and come back.  A part of that system is also to anticipate when things are wrong. Some days I don't feel like it or I have too much work to do in the morning and so I get my wife [Re-nu-kah 00:13:36] to call me at the office and disconnect the phone and so then I have to go back home and we go for a walk. You may not have a companion, you may not have a situation, you may not have this and that. The point is that you have to work out a strategy that is going to work for you without excuses.  This takes us to our action plan and you really have to do just one thing. You have to figure out what you're going to do in the new year. What are the three things you're going to do this year? What strategies are you going to follow? Is it just going to be another tactic where you go out there and find someone who says, "I can bring you 10,000 new customers," or you can get to the top of Google instantly? That's not the way to go. The way to go is to go step by step, implementing your strategy and that's how you meet with success. That is how you get to your three month vacation. As you can figure out, once you start taking long vacations, even that requires a strategy, or you just come back more tired than ever before.  Get your three points, what are you going to cover this year and then what are the strategies? Start with one, work out the strategy, move to the next and the next. Start executing your strategy and not giving up. With that, we come to the end of this episode. To get more information, go to psychotactics.com/podcast. You want to subscribe to that newsletter because we send it out only twice a month, but you get a notification when we have any goodies and we do have goodies. You also get notifications of the new podcast, just in case you haven't been following it for a while, or something's happened.  Go right now to htttp://www.psychotactics.com/podcast and subscribe to the newsletter just on email. It would also be really nice if you could pass on this podcast to others, others in business or other people in your life. That would be really nice, thank you again for listening and remember this podcast has been brought to you by the three month vacation and Psychotactics.com. Bye, bye.

What's the secret to getting results? Amazingly it's not some online marketing trick or strategy. It's just plain old follow up. But how do you follow up? And how can you have a marketing strategy—especially for your small business? In this episode of the Three Month Vacation from Psychotactics, you learn exactly how to follow up to get results. To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps 00:00:00 Introduction-My Story With Compaq 00:03:07 Table of Contents 00:04:09 Topic 1: Education and Sales to Follow Up 00:09:04 Topic 2: How Often Should You Follow Up 00:13:16 Topic 3: How Do Amazon and Apple Follow Up? 00:16:21 Summary 00:17:48 Final Details ====  Transcript Sean D'Souza:I've not always lived in New Zealand. I lived in Mumbai, India for a long time and back then, I used to be a cartoonist. I wasn't so much into marketing or not into marketing at all. Even as I say that, somehow it seems odd and the reason for that is because even without realizing it, I was using the concepts of marketing, so let me tell you this story. Even though I grew up in Mumbai, I mostly drew for newspapers and magazines and places like that.    The pay is terrible there because all of the syndicates like Universal feature syndicate and all these syndicates that send out cartoons, they just mass dump the cartoons into other countries, including India.   It's so cheap that a newspaper or a magazine can just bring dozens of them. If you look at the cartoon pages, they are there every single day, a whole page of cartoons. There I was competing against this absolutely dirt cheap, probably 20 cents a cartoon scenario and of course I couldn't make a living doing that, so I started looking out for companies because companies do presentations and within presentations, you can use cartoons. At one point I picked on this computer company called Compaq.   They showed some initial interest in the cartoons, but then they went quiet. Now as I said, I wasn't doing any marketing back then, but I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and followed up. One day, their manager called up and he said, "Can you come over?" He took me to their boardroom and there I was in front of fifteen or twenty people sitting there and he said, "Tell them what you did." I'm completely confused now. It's like, "What did I do?"    He says, "Tell them when you started communicating with me," and so I did and he says, "Tell them how many times you communicated with me," and of course I followed his instruction. I did want the job after all. Then he turned to the entire group which happened to be in sales and marketing and he said, "This is the difference.    This is why he is standing here. This is why he's going to get the job. It not because of his skill, it's not because of pretty much anything I know about him, it's because he followed up and because he was persistent, that's why he's standing here and that is a lesson for you in sales and marketing."   Yes, it was a lesson for me in sales and marketing too because when you're a small business especially, you don't know whether you should follow up. If you're a big business, you can just buy ads and flood them in the marketplace and repeat them ten thousand times and maybe they'll do the job and maybe they won't, but you have those deep pockets, but if you're a small business, what do you do? You follow up, but how do you follow up without becoming a pest?   The first thing we're going to cover today is how do you follow up without becoming a pest. The second thing is how often do you follow up and then we'll look at some real life situations from Amazon and also from our site at Psychotactics and how it has made a difference to our business. When I say a difference, this has been the difference between a client buying nothing and ending up buying twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars worth of product and services over time.   Let's start with the first topic which is what are the tools that you use to follow up? What are the systems that you're going to use to follow up? There are actually two tools that probably encompass everything that you need to do with follow up and that is to educate and the second one is to sell.    Now both of them are incredibly important. You might think that the education is more important than the sales, but it's not. Both of them are very, very important, so when I first started out as a cartoonist and I just moved to New Zealand, I was not only a small business, but a small business with no clients and with no understanding of what people in New Zealand were buying and where to go. In short, it was like just being born in a business. It was brand new.   Of course, you do what most businesses do. You get in touch with clients and this is a consulting business, a business that's not online. You get in touch with them, you go to some meetings and then you get a name of someone and that's what I did. I got some names of some art directors and I started sending them a calendar. Not just a calendar once a year, but a calendar every month. Now it would have been cheaper to send it once a year, but they got a reminder from me every single month and it was a useful calendar. It had space to write down things and yes, it was just photocopied on color paper and it did the job.   That is a kind of educational followup. If you're online, your followup tends to be with articles, with PDFs, with reports, with some sort of giveaway and as we know, this is increasingly getting harder every minute because of the fragmentation of media. It used to be easy before or easier, but it's getting much harder, so you've got to consider that you are going to follow up both offline and online and we do this ourselves. We get clients and then we send them a bar of chocolate. We send them postcards.   Now consider that our business has been online since 2002, so we've got a reputation. We've got clients that love our work and yet, we're still using that age-old system of offline marketing. We're still following up bit by bit. We still keep in touch with clients through email, just sending them a note saying how are you doing, what's happening and yes, it's all taking time. We're all super busy, but the point is that once you have a client, once you have a contact, your job is to keep following up.   Now you can follow up with educational material like articles or reports or podcasts or webinars or anything, but as long as they are on a regular basis. Now what you might not realize is that following up and selling your product is just as important. Notice what you do when you buy a book. Say you buy a book by an author. Say it's James Patterson. What happens next? You want to buy another book by the same author and then a third book by the same author, so in effect, when you don't have a product and you don't follow up with selling a product, you are preventing the client from coming back.   At least a fifth or a fourth of your communication with clients needs to be one of sales. There's education or there's entertainment or whatever you're sending out for the three-fourth, but one-fourth needs to be some kind of offer, some kind of sales, some kind of incentive so that they can then decide I want to buy this product or service. This might not seem very intuitive at the start, but it's what holds the business together. It generates the income and it enables you to then follow up or to get resources who will then follow up for you. With that, we end the first part, which is follow up with both information as well as something that the customer is going to buy.   This of course takes us to the second part which is how often should you follow up? When we send out something and we expect a response, we usually get a blank and that's not because people don't want to buy, it's just that you're selling at the wrong time. What do I mean by wrong time? Well, when you want to sell something, that's not the exact time that people want to buy something, so you've got to prepare them for that moment. If you want the six secrets to following up, well, the first secret is follow up. The second one is follow up. The third one, follow up. Fourth one, follow up. The fifth one, follow up and you know the sixth one, which is to follow up again.   Even if you're not sending out a newsletter, even if you're not doing anything that most people do in terms of marketing, if you're going to spend the time initiating a meeting with someone, then you want to make sure that you follow up at least six times. Take for example this podcast.  Now, admittedly, we've been online for ages and you would think well, you just send out an email blast and everyone's going to go to the page and put in the reviews and subscribe and do what you expect and they don't and so I had an online Google Docs document and I put in the list of the people that I was contacting and I was contacting twenty-five people a day, every day, so guess what happens?   You're looking at the number of people that you have communicated with over the past five years or ten years. I looked at my sent box and there were twenty-two thousand emails that had gone out. Now even if two hundred of them responded and did what I was expecting, that would mean two hundred into six interactions which would be twelve hundred interactions.   Luckily for me, some people respond quickly. Some people don't, but you've got to have that system in place because you spent all that time creating the podcast, putting the music together, putting it up, getting all the software; there's an enormous amount of effort that goes into setting up something, creating something and then we get dejected when people don't respond the first time. You can't do that. You have to keep following up repeatedly over and over again.   The point is that if you follow up with some sort of incentive, some sort of information, some sort of curiosity, it becomes less of a painful experience. When it came to my cartoon career, I was sending out those little calendars. When it came to Psychotactics, we used to send out newsletters. We gave away free products. We sold some products. When it came to the podcast, I was just following up with the people I knew, just through email; no incentive, but a certain amount of curiosity of what we were covering in the podcast, but there was a strategy for follow up and that's the message I want to get across to you today.   What was the result of this follow up? After about ten days of following up, we got thirty-five reviews on iTunes. That was enough. That got us into the new and newsworthy section of iTunes, so we debuted at 55 on iTunes, which is good. I mean, you've spend all that time, you're getting a result. The next time when you're feeling nice and dejected that no one is responding to your stuff, remember, all of us have to do the groundwork. All of us have to follow up. If you don't have a follow up strategy in place, it's not going to work.    But what if you were a big company like Amazon.com? Would you then do this followup? If you're on Amazon or you bought anything off Amazon, you know immediately what I'm talking about and that is that they follow up incessantly. They follow up in different ways.    This morning, for instance, I wasn't interested in buying any books; however, I had bought a book in the past and they sent me an email saying which other books would you recommend to readers who've read this book? Well, that was a different question. I mean, it wasn't about leaving a testimonial. It wasn't about rating anything, it was about which other book would you like to recommend. They also put a link there about here are some other books that readers recommend and so I got curious. I went to see which books others recommended and of course, I ended up buying two books.   Now, the point isn't that you don't have the power of Amazon and you don't have the data base and you don't have this and you don't have that. You have to remember that you have obstacles and the obstacle becomes the way because there is no other way but to go through the obstacle, around the obstacle or over the obstacle.   Amazon, with all its resources, with all of its money, is still following up. We have a strategy at Psychotactics which involves attraction, conversion and consumption. Attraction is the followups that you have to do before someone buys a product and so you send them all of these newsletters or these reports or the podcasts or webinars or whatever content you're creating or sometimes even paid products that you just give away at that point in time.   Once they buy something; let's say they go and buy The Brain Audit, we then have a post followup, which is a consumption followup which is getting the customer to consume what they bought. While this also takes a lot of time, you have to put in a whole bunch of auto-responders together; the point is that we want customers to consume the products.    We don't want them to just buy it, we want them to use it.   It's when you follow up and when you use technology to follow up and when you just follow up using old grind method, that's when you get clients that stay with you and that is one of the secrets of why we can take so much time off every year. That's why we can take our three month vacation. We don't have to go out there and get new clients all the time. We can just follow up with existing clients and they help us in meeting our goals.   Let's summarize what we learned today. The first point we covered was how do you follow up without being a pest and you do this with education, which is good; not just your average stuff, but really good stuff. You do this with sales as well. You want to sell them a great product. You want to sell them a great service. You want to get that through because the moment they buy something from you, there is greater investment in your system, in your methodology, but how often do you follow up?    Well, you follow up before they buy, six, seven, eight times; at least six times and then after they buy, you follow up as well, helping them to consume the product. It's called consumption. Finally, remember that even the giants like Apple and Amazon with all their budgets, they're constantly following up and while it's easy for us to say we don't have that kind of money or infrastructure, we do have systems and all we have to do is work out a strategy to follow up.    It's not going to happen today or tomorrow, but over time, that strategy gets to be better. If you've received a chocolate from us or if you've received a postcard or you've received an email, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. What's the one thing that you can do today?   When I went to Compaq, I just didn't have any strategy. When I launched this podcast, despite being as busy as you know I am, I had to follow up, over and over again, but I had a strategy and I had an Excel spreadsheet. For those of you who know how much I love Excel, well, I had an Excel spreadsheet, so that's how keen I was on followup and that's how keen you should be on followup. Any followup strategy is going to be better than no followup strategy. It gives you a much clearer idea of what you're going to do in the weeks, months and years to follow, but even so, for the next few months, have some sort of strategy, any strategy will do. It's still better.   That brings us to the end of this episode. If you haven't already subscribed, you know what to do. Go to iTunes, subscribe, give us a rating, help us along. We need the help. This is the tenth episode and we're into double figures and that's me, Sean D'Souza saying bye for now. This has been brought to you by The Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com. Once you subscribe, make sure you go to Psychotactics and subscribe to the newsletter as well.    Bye bye.  

The bikini concept or bikini principle works on a simple idea. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor is just as strong, if not twice as strong. And yes, what the bikini didn't reveal, was the part the audience most want, and was the part they were willing to pay for. The same applies to your information products, webinars, workshops and yes, presentations.  To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ----------------------- Time Stamp 00:00:20 Introduction: Bikini Principle 00:05:33 How The Brain Audit Workshop Helped 00:07:57 What You Can Give Away And What You Can Sell 00:09:20 Summary 00:11:04 Action Plan   --------------- Transcript   It's hard to think of a bikini when you are in a classroom and you're giving a speech and then someone asks you a question, but that's exactly what happened and how we came upon what we call the bikini principle. This bikini principle became one of the most read, most ever. The reason why it became so popular is probably because of the bikini, but also because it underlines a concept that's so obvious, and we probably are too scared to admit that it works.   What is this bikini principle?    To understand the bikini principle I have to go back in time. I have to go back all the way the Pittsburgh. Now Pittsburgh is a city in the United States; it's on the east coast. I had been invited to speak at an event. As it happened, we had just started Psychotactics.com a couple of years before that and I had written this book called The Brain Audit. The way I'd go about my speeches is I would cover only three things. I still do that; I still cover only three elements even in this podcast.   The point was that in The Brain Audit the book consists of seven bags or seven elements. When I covered those three elements, of course everyone would be very interested in the elements and then they would ask the inevitable question. The question was: If you've told us about the three red bags, and there are seven red bags in The Brain Audit, what are the remaining red bags about?   I was always un-eager, as it were, to answer this question. I was very reluctant because somehow I felt I was giving away the plot. I was giving away everything and then there would be no reason for the customers to buy anything. I was giving away all the seven red bags now, but if I gave away just three then maybe, just maybe, they would buy the book because that way they would have to find out what the rest of the red bags were.   Now one of the people at this event was quite adamant. He was like "But surely you can tell us what the four red bags are about." Very reluctantly, I did. I put it up on the board and I explained what they were. I told them the seven red bags are the problem, the solution, the target profile, the objections, the risk reversal, the testimonials, and uniqueness. I laid it out for them and I thought that's it. I'm going back; I'm not going to sell anything; I've told them everything I know.   Incredibly, we had the best sales ever. Of course we've gone on to sell a lot more since then but back then we were just starting out. It stunned me how many products we sold on that day. When I got back to New Zealand I wrote about it. I called it the bikini principle. It's not very hard to understand where that idea comes from. The bikini hides just a few parts, but what it reveals is enormous, and yet it's just the few hidden parts that make it so sexy. In effect, revealing a lot more wasn't causing customers to buy less.   Instead, they were buying more. That totally took me by surprise. I just didn't expect it.   Over the years I've realized that the people who end up buying stuff from us are people who get more information about a product or a service - and this is not just on the sales page, but when you look at, say, Amazon.com and you read the first chapter, what that does is it reveals a lot of the stuff in that first chapter or second chapter and then you get locked in.   Earlier this year we sold the pre-sale course and then we took it off the shelves. In that short period we gave away one-fourth of the course. Now I know what you're thinking: One-fourth is not a bikini, but you get the idea. The idea is once you give away a substantial amount of your information, instead of the customer leaving and going elsewhere saying "Oh, I got all the information I need," they come back. This went to a completely different level when I did the first Brain Audit workshop.   Now imagine this. Supposing you have a book and you wrote the book and everyone's read the book. Would they come to a workshop? Well, you're going to say yes, right? That's what we do. We buy a book, then we go to the workshop. But as a creator, as the writer, as the person who's running the business, that's not how we think.   We think that if they've got everything, why would they bother to come to the workshop. There I am in Washington D.C. looking around the room, and guess what? Everyone in the room has already brought The Brain Audit, has not just bought The Brain Audit, but because we have it in version we've sold a version of it, version 1.1, 2, version 3, and then finally it was version 3.2. everyone in the room has not just read The Brain Audit but some of them have read various versions.   It then struck me how powerful this concept of revealing stuff is. It's like an epiphany. It's almost too hard to believe that people would continue to buy from you once they've already read your stuff. Now just for the the record this is not for you to go and give away all your stuff hoping that people will come back and read all of it. There is a limit to how much you can give. That's why it's called the bikini principle.    You can give away a lot of the stuff. Whether you choose to give away 90% or 80% or 70% or 30%, that's totally up to you. The point is that customers come back once they are completely hooked with your information. I would like to say that the more information you give the more hooked they are but that's not entirely true. The more information you give that allows them to make changes in their lives, that empowers them, that's the kind of information that they will come back for. That's the information where you can give away 90%, hold back just 10%, and they will keep coming back.   You don't have to give away everything, and even if you decide to be very generous, remember that customers will come back for other formats. What do I mean by other formats? If you happen to give away something absolutely free, and maybe you give away 90%, 95%, maybe even 100%, and then you change the format or the packaging, then customers will come back for that very same something.    Let's say this podcast, this podcast is absolutely free, and yet if I were to just put all of the pricing podcasts together, all of the storytelling podcasts together, and then sell it as a separate product, customers would buy. They would pay a price for something that was absolutely free simply because of the way it was packaged.   Or let's say I took it and I put it in a PDF or an epub, and you had an epub just of storytelling articles or an epub just of pricing articles. Then customers would be willing to pay for that as well. Just giving away stuff free is not going to ruin you completely. I'm not suggesting that you go around giving stuff free all the time. However, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you clob things together that seem to be all over the place, then customers are willing to pay for it.   That is what the bikini principle is all about. You can give away stuff, and a lot of stuff, and customers will still want more. The second thing is that the very customers who buy your product or consume all of your product will then come back for workshops and consulting and training and all kinds of things like that. Finally, when you change the packaging, when you change the format, when you club things together, then customers come back to consume those other formats.   That's why the bikini principle is so powerful and that's why so many people wanted to read it, because that's not our natural instinct. Our natural instinct is we should not give it away. We should not share. We should not be so open, so overexposed. Yet time and again the bikini principle just proves us wrong. It proves that we can indeed create attraction with that bikini principle.   That brings us to the end of this podcast. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review on iTunes. If you've already done that, well, thank you very much. Also, you want to go back and listen to the podcast on the three-prong system.    That's podcast number two and it helps you understand how you can structure your three-month vacation. Before we go, let's look at an action plan for today's show. What are we going to do? Even if you're just a little bit shy about giving away all your stuff, at least give away some bit of it. Maybe a chapter or a free one hour session, which is a live session, a workshop or a seminar.    You will find that it's very powerful. If you're not in a position to do that, take some of the free stuff that you've given away and convert it into audio or into some other format, and that will get you going because people will want that other format even if they've got free stuff from you in the past. That's your action plan for today, and it's time for me to go now. This podcast has been brought to you by Psychotactics, Psychotactics.com, and The Three Month Vacation.    Bye for now.  

How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough". ========== Some goodies To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ========= Time Stamp 00:00:20 Calvin and Hobbes Story 00:02:04 Keeping Up With The Joneses 00:03:37 Psychotactics: Our Definition of Enough 00:06:53 How Can You Overdo A Vacation? 0:09:25 Summary 00:10:40 Coming Up Next ======== Transcript: Power of Enough Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long.   Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?"   Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich?   One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit?   When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day.   So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept.   The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough.   If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people.   At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all based on a factor of enough, of a limit, a fuel tank and we're not going to overfill that tank. You might say that well, it's easy for you because you are already established. You've been in this business for over twelve years. What about me who's just starting out? The point is that our workshops, our courses, our membership site, they had these limits right at the start. It wasn't something we figured out along the way and while we did really well at work stuff, we didn't really figure out our vacation bit.   When we started, we figure nine months of work and three months of vacation seems like a fair deal, but we didn't understand what the concept of the three months vacation was all about. We overdid it. Now, you'd say how can you overdo a vacation? But you can. The first year we took a vacation was in 2004. We had just started out business towards the end of 2002, so within a year of starting up, we just decided that's it. We're going to take a three month vacation and we took three months off and it drove us crazy. We weren't enjoying that time that we were supposed to spend because it seemed endless. It seemed like we had to fill in those days.   Then of course when you come back from the vacation, there's this big void. You've not been working for so long, you don't feel like working anymore or for a very long time, so we had to juggle it a bit. We had to go okay, let's try six weeks and we tried six weeks and six weeks was too long. Then we tried four weeks and that was too long. Three weeks seemed just right, so three weeks plus a week of going back and forth to whichever place, so we never go directly to a place, we'd stop over for a couple of days. On the way back, we'd stop over a couple of days, so we're away one month at a time. We realize what is enough: Three weeks plus a week of travel and that is enough.   But it's really crazy to have a running tally that continues to increase. You're continuing to add holidays or money or whatever to where you're just putting in more and more fuel into that tank. For what reason? While I'm an information junkie - I just love information. I'm learning in design and Photoshop and my camera, which is the X100, that's a Fuji film. At the same point, I'll be tackling lettering and studying some stuff on learning, etc., but even that has that point of enough.   Often when I'm talking about how I go for a walk with my iPhone loaded with audio books and podcasts and stuff and people think well, you must be doing that all the time; you're completely crazy. Yes, of course, a person like that would be completely crazy, but today I was listening to Billy Joel and all of this summer, I will be listening to Andrea Bocelli, so you have to understand what is enough.   This brings us full circle to Calvin and Hobbes. Sometimes, we just slip into the Calvin mode. We overdo stuff. We are built to overdo stuff. We want to be part of the human race where we're always going to just push our comfort zone quite a bit actually, so we always have to get into the Calvin mode and then decide I want to be like Hobbes sometimes. In fact, I want to be like Hobbes a lot. I want a tuna sandwich.   So what's your action plan? It's simple, really. Think about it. How many customers do you want? How many people do you want at your workshop? How much money do you want to make from now to whenever, just a finite amount. Maybe even how much silence do you need? Everything with definition becomes a fuel tank and you fill it and you're happy and you have enough.   Coming up next week, we have the bikini principle. Interesting topic, isn't it? It's appropriate because it's summer here in New Zealand. I know it's freezing in other parts of the world, but it's appropriate here. We're going to find out exactly what is this bikini principle and how does it apply to stuff that's not related to the beach at all?   We learned a very good lesson when we were selling the brain audit about this bikini principle and it has stayed with me. It was one of the most read posts when we first had the consumption blog which no longer exists because there were too many blogs to manage, but it was one of the most read posts ever.   If you've been a subscriber, then you know that you automatically get the downloads on your phone or on your computer if you subscribe to iTunes. You can also get our podcast on Stitcher and hopefully soon on SoundCloud and finally, if you don't have any of the above, then you can get the RSS feed, so go to Psychotactics.com/podcast and you can find the RSS feed there.   Oh and before I go, be sure to leave a review for us because it's really important. It really helps me look at the review, look at E-comments and I feel much happier and you want to keep me happy, don't you? If you have any feedback, you also want to write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. Anything you'd like to see or listen to anything you don't like, just write to me at Sean@psychotactics.com. I actually implement the feedback. We've come to almost twelve minutes of this podcast, so that's enough so I'll say bye for now. Bye bye.   This episode has been brought to you by the Three Month Vacation which is at Psychotactics.com.  

Should stories be dramatic? Incredibly, the answer is NO. Drama comes from the 90% principle. And this means that your audience needs to know 90% of your story in advance. And that's one of the elements that make storytelling incredibly powerful. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com   ==== Transcript: Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I'm his evil twin. Sean D'Souza:And you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Some people are considered to be natural born storytellers and that's all of us by the way. When you were five years old, you came back from school and you told a whole bunch of stories and you did it perfectly well. You put in the drama, you put in the suspense, you changed your tone, you did everything powerfully and wonderfully. Then as you grow up, you get a little more judgmental about your stories and you think that other people are better storytellers than you and it's true. Storytelling is a craft. When you're five years old, everyone listens to you because it's true, but as you grow up, you have to craft it.  We'll take a little trip and find out what's involved in storytelling. Now this is just a little bit of the entire series that I've written on storytelling but it will give you a good gist of what to expect from that book, that series, and because these questions were put to me off-the-cuff, I am probably going to answer things that you probably won't find in those books or that series. It's a win-win situation and I think you should get the series from Psychotactics but for now listen in and let's get on this storytelling rollercoaster, shall we? In this series, we're going to cover a lot of topics, probably 10 in all but we'll start off with the main topic and that is what makes a good storyteller. There are clear attributes to be found in good storytelling. One of the attributes of a storyteller is they should know when to tell a story and when not to tell a story. You can't always tell a story just about anywhere.  One of the good places to tell story is when you are starting up something. If I started off this thing with a story, you'll say let me tell you about the time we were in London. Immediately that gets your attention. The other place when you need to tell stories is once you have given some information. Stories almost act like an example, like a case study and so they help the listener understand, comprehend what you just said. A storyteller needs to know this. They need to know that it's not just about telling story after story after story. Instead they need to know where to tell the story, when to tell the story, how long that story needs to be. That's what makes a good storyteller. This takes us to our second point. What can you do to improve your storytelling? Let's find out. There's an amazing series on Africa and the narrator of that series, which is a BBC series, is David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough talks about the resurrection plant and he talks about how the resurrection plant is out there in the desert and how it starts to roll and roll, and then it could be like that, rolling for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 100 years. Then at some point in time, it runs into a puddle of water and that's when the resurrection plant comes to life. Immediately, in a couple of hours, it starts to grow. It's almost like watching something on video in fast motion. Then the resurrection plant is not done. It has to wait for the second phenomenon which is the rain has to come, and the rain has to then hit the petals. The petals have to drop on the floor and new resurrection plants come up. Within a few days, all of them dry up. They shrivel up and then they become these little balls of resurrection plants that may go for another 50 or 100 years. What makes that story interesting? What makes that story interesting is simply that it has three elements. The first element being sequence; the second being suspense; and the third being a rollercoaster.  A good storyteller needs to know these three things. If you want to improve your storytelling, you need to understand that there needs to be a sequence. It needs to unfold one step at a time. This happens and that happens, then that happens.  The second thing is that there has to be a factor of suspense, so maybe the resurrection plant gets to the water but at that point in time, nothing is happening. It's growing but the petals don't fall off. How are the petals going to fall off? How is that momentous occasion going to come about? Then the rain comes along. Then you've created this ups-and-downs, this suspense, and that brings us to the third part which is rollercoaster. Now, what is a rollercoaster? A rollercoaster is just the ups-and-downs. The resurrection plant has no rain, then it has the puddle, that's good, but that's not good enough. It needs the rain to come and drop the petals to the floor and then just when everything's going good again, the sun comes up and dries it. We have that rollercoaster, that up-and-down. If you want to improve your storytelling, you have to focus on these three elements: the sequence, the suspense and the rollercoaster. Now that we know about sequence, suspense and rollercoaster, we have to also figure out how do stories help in business. When is storytelling important in business? Well, the problem with business, it's full of data, full of information, full of stuff that puts us to sleep. The moment you start off with something like let me tell you about the time or you give a case study, immediately your attention switches. Immediately the audience's attention switches to you.  If you were to stand up in a crowded room and talk about a case study, immediately it doesn't matter what they are doing. It doesn't matter if they are looking at their phones, whatever they are doing, thinking about whatever they're thinking about, at that point in time the attention goes right to you. The power of the story is that capacity to hold or snap an audience out of whatever it's supposed to be doing. Today people are so captured or captivated by what they are doing that you need to snap them out very very quickly. That's what a story does really well. There's a second reason why it's important business. When we understand a concept when we have explained a concept to someone, it's not like they can figure out what's happening. They need a layer. The first time you hear something, you think, well, how does it apply to my business? When you have that story, when you have that case study, that's when people understand exactly how it applies to their business. The thing is that storytelling is very useful when you're trying to differentiate your product or your service from someone else. To give you an example, we have a product called the Brain Audit. Now the Brain Audit is a marketing book. It shows you why customers why and why they don't.  I bet if you go to Amazon, there are 1,000 or 10,000 books on marketing. When someone arrives there, how are they going to decide that this is the book that they want. They look at the story, and the story talks about the seven red bags, how you put seven red bags on a flight and then you get off at your destination and you're waiting at the conveyor belt, the carousel, you're waiting for the bags, and then there's one red bag, and then the second red bag, and the third red bag, and then an orange bag, and a green bag, and fourth red bag, and the fifth red bag, and the sixth red bag.  When does the customer leave the airport? When they have all the seven red bags, right? What's happening there is the story's explaining why this book is different. What are those seven red bags? Why are they needed? Stories snap people out of whatever they're doing. It gets their attention. It explains a point. It allows people to absorb stuff. Third, it allows you to differentiate yourself from other products and services, so they're very very useful. Let's take a little break, a little summary. What we've done so far is we've looked at the attributes of storytelling. We've looked at how you can improve your storytelling and then we looked at how stories help in business. This takes us to the fourth section which is about how less is more in information product. What is it that you're doing wrong and how can you fix it?  Imagine you've invited someone to dinner and you want to impress them, of course, but you go out there and you have 20 dishes and each dish has its own taste and its own style and its own look and its own variation and its own subtle flavor. The guest is completely flabbergasted, very impressed but completely lost because as human beings, we're unable to consume that amount of stuff. We've tried it before. We've gone to a buffet and tried to eat 20 dishes. We eat a little of this, a little of that, and we can't cope with it.  This is how information products are created. Information products are chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter on chapter, and suddenly you have 20 chapters and 200 pages and each of those chapters have their own concept and subconcept. Suddenly you're floating with information. With information products, less is more, but how much is less in the first place? Usually you can start off with three main topics. If you have three main topics, you can cover three main things. If you listen to some of these audios in this series, you'll find that, say I'm talking about storytelling. I'll say storytelling consists of sequence, it consists of suspense, and it consists of a rollercoaster. Now I can spend a lot of time talking about sequence. I can spend a lot of time talking about suspense and a lot of time talking about rollercoaster, and that's when you get the depth. You get that felling of that feel that you've consumed, that you've understood, that you can even recreate ... but 20 dishes? That becomes too much. This is why we're struggling so much in today's world. We have too much information and there is this rabbit hole of information going deeper and deeper and deeper. Instead, have just three main topics and then dig deep. One inch wide, one mile deep. Just a little bit of information, lots of depth in it. That's when you create expertise.  The next time you're thinking of putting together a document or an audio or a book or anything, think about how much you're inflecting on the customer or the reader. How much you're overfeeding them and then give them some expertise instead.  OK, let's not overdo it here because we have covered three or four points and now we go to the fifth point, which is the best way to start writing a story. Then we'll finish off this segment and then we'll do it in the second part so that you're fresh and you can tackle that second part. When you start to sell, you know that you have a weapon and that is the power of storytelling. When people know that storytelling really engages the audience, engages their customers, they are keen to use that weapon. How do you use that weapon? Well, you have to remember that storytelling is not just something that you rattle out. It's not a bedtime story. It is a specific story hinging on one phrase or one word. Let's take the example of the Brain Audit. The Brain Audit is a book and it talks about how you put on seven red bags on a flight and then when you get off at the other end, you have six red bags. The question is, when do you leave the airport? What we have there is a situation of hesitation. You have seven red bags. You had six red bags. Now there's hesitation. We can now take this concept of hesitation and apply it to selling so now we can say, in the same way when you're trying to sell something, you might remove all the bags off the customer's brain and leave just one red bag missing, and then they don't buy. They hesitate.  They want to ask their uncle, their brother, their sister ... they don't want to make a decision. What's really the key between the story and whatever it is you're selling? That is that key word hesitation. That's what we really have to drill into. We have to figure out what are we really saying because it's only when you know what you're saying that you can bring about this whole story line and create a story for that sales pitch. Now, you don't have to use hesitation in terms of just the bags at the airport. That's been taken by the Brain Audit. You can use different forms of hesitation and you'll know different situations where companies hesitated, so there will be case studies, or you can talk about personal stories where you hesitated. The point is once you get to that key word or key phrase, then you build a story, then you link the story to whatever it is you are selling. That's when a story becomes very powerful and not just a bedtime story. OK, it's time for some summary now. Let's see what we've covered so far. The first thing we did was the attributes of the storyteller and we found out that you can start a story with drama and that would get the attention. Also, once you're going in through a lot of information, you want to bring in the story of that [inaudible 00:16:04] because that enables the listener, the reader to absorb that information, to run that case study, that story in their head. That's the first thing that you need to know when to bring in the story and then how to bring in that story. The second thing we learned was how to improve storytelling and we found that it was about suspense, sequence and rollercoaster. You'll remember that story of that resurrection plant. That had suspense and sequence and rollercoaster. Go back and listen to that bit because it's really useful. Put these three elements and you make great stories. The third thing we covered was about storytelling in business. Information is full of data and information, and more information and more information is really boring. Storytelling helps you clarify what you're saying. It also helps you to stand out. We did that with the Brain Audit. With all those marketing books, the Brain Audit stands out because of that story, not because of anything else. Later on you get to the contents of the book and you find it's great and wonderful, etc. The point is that it starts of with the story. It really helps you stand out. If nothing else, it helps you stand out. Less is always more, and you can have a topic which is one inch wide and one mile deep. Now, on average, you want to cover three things. This series, this audio has five. They are short. They are manageable. You don't want it to be a rule but you definitely want it to be a guideline. When you have a ton of stuff, people can't consumer. Always remember go inch wide and one mile deep, and that's really what you want to do. Finally, if you want to write really good stories, you need to distill it down to one phrase or one word, just like the Brain Audit is about hesitation. Until you get that one word, and it's not as hard as you think. You just want to say too many things. Instead, just stick to one word, one phrase, and then you'll get many scenarios, many case studies, many stories that you can build from that one word.  This brings us to the end of the first part in this storytelling saga. Saga? Is it a saga? It's not a saga. It's just a little bit, just a little bit, and I do hope you enjoy it. If you have been, I would suggest you get the storytelling series. You can get it at psychotactics.com. It's in the Products Section and it's the products under $50, so have a look there. You'll find it quite easily or use the search bar.  That's me, Sean D'Souza, saying bye for now and you know what? If you want to share this with a friend, with several friends, or even send it out in your newsletter, feel free to do so. Yes, tune in for the second part in this series because we're going to have a blast there as well.  

Storytelling isn't an art. It's a science. Every kid knows how to tell stories. And it's cute to be a storyteller when you're a kid. But when you put structure to writing and storytelling you take it from science to art. Find out how this works with story. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com   Transcript: Sean D'Souza:Hi.  This is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. And you are listening to the three month vacation podcast.  This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.  Most stories start up with once upon a time, well at least the stories that we learned when we were kids. Well, imagine if Goldilocks and the Three Bears started right in the middle.  That's what we're going to cover in this section.  We're going to start off with stories that start right in the middle.  How to keep stories fresh and engaging?   We're going to look at the 90% principle and we will repeat that several times in this series in different ways, but you'll learn the 90% principle.  Then, there's counterflow.  What is counterflow?  Flow and counterflow, but what does counterflow involve?  Finally, the pivotal moment, how to turn the story on a dime?   Let's get into story telling.  Let's start off with, how to keep your stories fresh and engaging?  If you ask a photographer to take a picture of say a glass.  Well most of us will just stand up, take our phones out and take a picture from wherever we are standing.  We don’t go close to the glass.  We don’t bother to see the angle of the glass, we don’t bother about anything.  We just rip out the phone, rip out the camera, take a picture and we are done.   That is not interesting.  From a photographers point of view it is well you want me to take a picture of this glass, what kind of lighting, which angle.  When you look at the glass there are about a million permutations, the type of light, the type of color, the type of angle.  All these things come into play when a photographer is taking a picture of a single glass just an ordinary glass, and this is how you have to approach your content. When you are talking just about anything you have to understand what I am really going at.     What angle am I going at?  Why kind of lighting am I portraying?  With story telling you have to know what is it that you are talking about?  If you are talking about something that is immutable, insurmountable, well you have things like the Himalayas, and you have these mountains that cannot be moved.   You also have other problems, other things that personal stories that talk about things that you could not move, that wouldn’t budge, so you have case study where maybe a recording company didn’t budge and the Beetles just had to find another way.  Once you have got that kind of understanding of well, what I am really saying here.  What is that word?  What is that phrase?   No you can keep your content fresh and engaging.  You can tell the same story, that same glass and look at it at different angles and different light and different ways and you can approach that same story a million different ways and customers never get fed up.  However, you also have to understand that we the storytellers get tired of our stories long before customers do.   You look at someone like say Frank Sinatra, and he is saying, say ‘New York, New York’ and every time he went out people were happy to listen to the new songs, but they wanted New York, New York.  They wanted him to sing that song or they wanted him to sing ‘My Way.’     They wanted those things that they could attach themselves to understand, and so yes there are million ways to represent a story or a million ways to represent a sales pitch but also remember that people love the way that you have always done it, so don’t just change for the sake of changing.   In summary, there are different ways to approach the story, just know what you’re talking about and secondly once you have that run it.  You don’t have to keep changing it.  This takes us to the second part which is how do we make the story more dramatic.  Where do we start?   When we are growing up we are accustomed to listen to stories that start off with once upon a time and the problem with stories that start off with once upon a time, it takes too much time to get to the main gist of the story.  Let’s think of a story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you know how that story runs.  It starts out with once upon time there was Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc.   You don’t really want to start there.  That is fine for a kid.  That is fine for someone that is just falling off to sleep.  Your audience is not falling off to sleep.  You want to wake them up remember.  Where does your story start?  It starts right in the middle.  The drama is right in the middle of the story.  Goldilocks is there on the bed.  She is looking up and suddenly there are three bears looking at her.   That part is far more dramatic than once upon a time there was Goldilocks and she went into this forest or she went to see these three bears.  You got to work out that the story is more powerful at the center and so you write your story or your figure out your story or you figure out your case study and go right to the center and go which is the dramatic part and pull that part out, and put it right at the start.   That is what the movies do.  Very rarely will you get a movie that starts to build up slowly.  A movie will start smack in the middle and then they will go to the start somewhere along the line and then build up the story right to the middle again.  That is what you have to do?  You have to go right into the core of the story, pull out the drama, put it right at the middle, and then bring out the beginning.  It is middle, beginning, back to middle and end of story.   That’s what makes a good story.  That is the mistake that a lot of people make.  They don’t start off in the middle.  Then in the end or right to the middle by which time the audience was fallen asleep.  You don’t want them to fall asleep.  This is not a kid story.  This is a wake them up story.  This is a story that they will remember.  We have looked at two ways, the first is start in the middle and the way to keep your stories fresh and engaging.  Let’s move to the third thing which is very important.  It is called the 90% principle.   Whenever you are telling stories, one of the things that people tend to do is put too much information in the story.  Let’s say you telling a story about Jack and then Mary comes in and then Charlotte and then Anita, and now you have got too many elements that the person has to deal with.  People often tend to make up stories by putting all of these elements and you don’t want to have that.   You want to have 90% of your story in place, so when a person is listening to your story, they don’t have to make up 90%.  It is only 10% of that story that they need to figure out.  When we look at a story in the brain audit which is the book, you are talking about putting bags on a flight and then standing at a conveyer belt or the carousel and getting those bags off the flight.   What has happened there is that 90% of the story is in place.  You have been on a flight.  You know that you have to put them on.  You have to take them off and the thing that has changed, the elements that have changed are just the factor of the seven red bags, and that one bag goes missing.  When you listen to that story on the brain audit, what we have here is 90% of the information is already in place.   Let’s take another example.  Let’s say you were trying to get into a car and you are fiddling with the key and it is not opening and you know it looks like your car and it is still not opening.  We have tried to do something like that.  We have tried to get into a wrong hotel room or try to get into a wrong car, 90% of that story is in place, 10% has changed and that 10% is what makes it personal, what makes it your own.   This is not the case when you are talking about case studies.  Case studies unfold in ways that are completely different from personal stories.  The personal stories are get the audience on your side.  Case studies are something that someone else did.  I would always recommend, ‘A’ that you have personal stories and ‘B’ that 90% of that story is already in the customer’s brain and you are just tweaking 10%.  Now that we know what the 90% is all about let’s move to counterflow.   When we write a story or when we recount a story what we tend to think is that the only way to get a story going is go forward.  You think of a sequence, but there is also anti-sequence, or what I would call counterflow.  There is flow and there is counterflow.  It is almost like someone is headed towards success and then there is a barrier and that slows down the story, takes it in a different flow as it were.   When you look at the seven red bag story or when you listen to the seven red bag story it seems like everything is going fine.  One red bag is coming off the carousel so you put all these bags in the flight and then one came off and the second came off and the third came off and now there is counterflow.  There is the green bag, orange bag and a polka dot bag and then of course there is flow again which is the fourth bag comes out and the fifth bag and then the six bag.   Now there is flow again but then the seventh bag is missing and that’s counterflow again.  That keeps the interest.  When you are looking at any kind of story, you have to look intricate and go is there is a flow and counterflow.  Is it going in favor and then slightly off, disfavor.  That is what makes great stories.  You don’t want to always have the sequence.  You also want to have this flow and counterflow.  This takes us to the last one which is the pivotal moment.  There is a moment where you can turn the story around.  Lets’ find out how.   A lot of writers are worried about writing something that is boring and you have to remember that there is no such thing as boring.  Let me explain.  Let me give you an example.  Let’s say I am giving you the story.  I remember the night we were driving home on June 21st.  It was dark, rainy.  Even slightly foggy and then I saw it.  In the middle of the freeway it looked like someone had stopped their car, and so I swerved violently to the right and the next moment to my horror a car zoomed right past me.  The car was hurtling down the wrong side of the freeway with no headlights.  Moments later we heard the sickening crush of metal behind us.   Did that paragraph get your attention?  It did, didn’t it, because it is dramatic.  The car was on the wrong side of the freeway.  Yes the driver the drunk, and yes he would have hit us head on at about 70-80 miles an hour if I hadn’t swerved.  Stories such as this one make for enormous heart pounding drama but what if your story is less dramatic.  For example, let’s say you went to the post office today and there is a parcel waiting for you.   Now there are five different scenarios that could pop up just from the post office.  You could be waiting for this parcel for a long time and it excites you now and you could be not expecting any parcel and then finding a parcel just brightens up your day.  You could be expecting a parcel and get someone else’s parcel which leads to disappointment or you could be expecting a parcel, get the parcel, but it is the start to a series of events that you could not have predicted, or you could be expecting a parcels but the contents are broken, and this leads to some other events.   This is just a parcel stuff and you probably got bored with all the variations but the point is just very simple.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring event.  What is boring is the way in which we put it forward, because if you are a Hollywood director you would see drama in everything because any incident leads to another incident which leads to the third, fourth, fifth incident.   Any incident can start off being perfectly good and then turn horribly bad, or any incident could be terrible to begin with and then turn out to be amazingly fabulous.  What we are really talking about is a pivotal moment and that pivotal movement is simply a moment which spins in some direction, either it gets better or worse.  Any moment can be a pivotal moment.   You have a story from your life and you say well that is really mundane.  I woke up today and then something happened.  What is that moment?  Let’s take a dramatic moment.  Let’s say a bully is beating you up at one moment but then what happens next?  Do you stumble?  Does the bully hit his head on the table and knock himself out [inaudible 00:14:34].  Does someone come to your rescue or do you get beaten up black and blue? The point is that you could be doing anything like eating a spaghetti, a bowl of spaghetti, and the next moment something changes.  One movement you are driving down the road and something changes.  One movement you are getting drenched in the downpour and then somethings changes.  Every situation can go from good to bad, bad to good and then keep bouncing back.   All you have to decide is what is the pivotal movement what is that movement that the story goes off in a tangent?  When you have that movement what you do is you keep the story going ahead.  There is no such thing as a boring story.  There is a boring way in which to put the story.  If you have a pivotal moment?  If you have things happening along the way then suddenly things happened.   Well, that sounds crazy doesn’t it, but that’s exactly what happens.  What is your pivotal moment?  That is what you have got to decide and once you decide that you don’t have the problem of being boring any more.   Speaker 2:Okay, we have had enough, now let’s get to the summary.  Can we now get to the summary?  Summary, summary, summary, summary.   Sean D'Souza:Okay, let’s get to the summary.  We have talked about how to make stories memorable and really we will talk about it again, but the point is that if you don’t have that idea, that one word in your mind, it is very difficulty.  That is what really makes it memorable from there you get your case studies, from there you get your personal stories, and from there you get your analogies.  That was the first thing.   The second thing was starting in the middle.  You want to start a story in the middle.  It is nice to start a story at once upon a time but starting in the middle that is where it rocks.  The third thing was the 90% principle and the 90% principle is very simple.  Your story is not ordinary.  It’s a great story.  You just have to tweak 10% of it.  Make it your own and 90% principle works.   The fourth thing we did was counterflow.  The story is going in one direction.  Hold it back.  Turn it around.  Make that whole story jiggle a bit, and that is what causes counterflow, and finally we looked at the pivotal movement.  Something is happening and this is similar to counterflow in a way.  Something is happening and then something else happens.  What is that something else.  Turn it around.  The point is that there is no such thing as a boring story.  There is no such thing as I am only going into the post office and something is happening.  Be the story teller.  Tell that story.   If you enjoyed this podcast then pass it over to your friends and also let them know that they can get podcast just like this full of solid information at ‘The Three Month Vacation’ on Itunes and you can get yours too.  Go to Itunes and look for ‘The Three Month Vacation.’  While you are there please give me a review as well so that this podcast can be seen by other people.  Your reviews really matter.   Speaker 2:He wants a five star.  He wants a five star.  He wants a five star. Sean D'Souza:It is time to take Snippy for a coffee I guess.  Bye for now.  

Storytelling is a craft that small business owners need to improve their marketing. Without stories, a marketing strategy is like a boat without a rudder. Fact, figures and data can only go so far. Learn how stories help to create powerful marketing, in a completely non-threatening manner. Oh, and go to http://www.psychotactics.com—it's really cool.    

When you're in marketing, one of the big "marketing strategies" is to appear bigger than you are. Every one in the marketing field or in business is always talking about "six figure" incomes and "how to get thousands of customers". And so you and I get pulled along with this crazy tsunami. We stop being who we truly are, and start behaving like someone else. How can we be true to ourselves? How can we be our crazy selves and still succeed online? For more of the good, crazy stuff, go to http://www.psychotactics.com TimeStamps 00:00:20 Marsha's Confusion 00:04:10 How to Find Your True Personality 00:07:22 Why Personality is Important 00:09:08 Copying Someone Else 00:13:21 Summary 00:14:37 Getting Started-Action Plan

It's not easy to save time. We all know that. Yet, time management isn't just a factor of getting a fancy to-do list. Sometimes it involves some pretty odd things that you have to do. At Psychotactics, I didn't always have time. Now my workload has more than doubled, but I have a lot of time. How did that happen?  More at http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:02:54 | Tip 1: Keep Stuff Open At All Times 00:08:22 | Tip 2: Leave the Office?And Plan Obsessively?And Weekly! 00:13:22 | Tip 3: Spend Two Hours To Save 5 Minutes 00:17:07 | Summary 00:18:40 Transcript Sean:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I am his evil twin.  Sean:And you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time.  I want to start today with just a little boast. I write several courses every year, like 200 pages and then we do the course where we have sometimes 20 or 30,000 posts on a single course. I'll write articles, I'll do workshops. Not lots them, maybe once a year, but it takes a lot of planning. Then I'll be in 5000bc.com which is our membership site. Yes, there's lots of other work-related activities but I also mentor my niece, which means that I stop work at about 12:00 every afternoon. I'll take a break, often take a nap, and I'll explain that in another show and why it's so important. Then I will work with my niece until 7:30 that evening.  The point is that I was boasting there. The other point is that it's all true. Now granted, I do wake up at 4 AM but I also take three months off every year. Where do I find the time to do all this stuff? There are certain things that I've learned over the years, and when I go back to who I was back in 1990 or in the year 2000 or 2005, I was not the same person. I was always battling for time and always struggling with stuff. I had to figure out what am I going to do. How is this going to change? Why is it that I'm always battling with this factor of time? I realized that some people do things slightly differently. On today's show I'm going to talk about three things that would seem radical in a way. I would ask you to try it, because it works really well.  The first thing that we're going to talk about is just the factor of keeping things ready. We'll find out what this is all about. The second thing we're going to cover in the show is just to leave the office, which sounds really odd. The third thing is to spend about an hour or two hours so that you can save five minutes. As you can see, this is pretty radical stuff, but it will save you enormous amounts of time during the year. Let's get on with the show, shall we? Back in 2010 I started watercolors. I went to a watercolor course nearby. In fact, it was my third or fourth watercolor course. I had never succeeded in painting and so I decided I'm going to get this done. But it was the guy who was conducting the watercolor course that made a difference to me. His name was Ted and he said "Sean, why don't you get a diary and why don't you just put your stuff in there everyday? Just draw what happened to you." I thought that's a good idea. I thought wow, that's a good idea. I could do that. I could just take something that happened to me that day and put it in the book, in the diary. Now the good thing was that I already had a whole bunch of Moleskine diaries that I'd put earlier a couple of years ago, never used them. Now I could use them. I started to use them, but soon enough chaos reigned. I would forget the diary somewhere and I would sometimes have to diary and not the pens. Then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting anything done was I didn't have all my stuff with me open at all times. Now this sounds really odd but if you don't have your stuff open and ready to go, you simply lose momentum. If I we're to go into my bag, even if I had my drawing, and then get it out of the bag and then open the book and get to the right page, and then open the pencil box, and then sharpen the pencils, it's five or seven minutes or eight minutes - if I get everything right. What I started doing was I started keeping everything open. I started keeping all my watercolors there ready to go. I started keeping all my paints ready to go. As a result I have now done a watercolor almost every single day for four years. That's, wow, 365, but I end up doing a little more so maybe about 1,200, 1,500 watercolors that I wouldn't have done, had never done before. Where do you get this kind of time? Just the fact that you have to open stuff takes up a lot of time. I have Scrivener on my computer and when I do my courses, what I do is I keep Scrivener open all the time. I know this sounds crazy for people who want to close everything and keep it neat, but having to open Scrivener, find the file, put in all that assignments that I've written for the course, all of that takes just five minutes. There's five minutes here and five minutes there and five minutes everywhere. Yes, it adds up to an hour but what's more debilitating is that it actually ends up with a couple of hours, because the energy required to do this mindless exercise is fascinating.  What I tend to do is I keep everything ready. When I go for my walk everyday, and I go for my walk everyday because if I don't go for my walk everyday I'm not just fit but I don't listen to the podcast. I don't listen. I don't educate myself. I don't listen to audiobooks. I don't do a lot of stuff. All the podcasts, all the audiobooks, all of the information that I need for my trip, I'm learning languages - all of that is there on my iPhone. When I'm on the walk it's there. I switch on the iPhone as I leave the house. I speak to my wife a little while and then we start listening at a specific point.  The first point I'm trying to say to you is if you're writing a sales letter or you're writing a article, or you're doing whatever you're doing, you have to keep the stuff ready. You have to keep it ready to go. If it's the previous night or the previous day or on your computer or on your desk, keep it ready to go. That saves an enormous amount of time. That sounds like a really simple tip but it's very powerful. The momentum - that's what you're really battling with. The fact that you have to go and you have to put on your shoes to go for a walk. If your shoes are already halfway out of the door, you might as well just put them on and then when you do that you go for a walk. When you go for a walk you listen to the podcast. When you listen to the podcast you get smarter. When you get smarter you're able to implement stuff.  Really that is what it's about. Preparation makes a huge difference. The people who succeed consistently are people who are prepared long before the opportunity arrives. The people who struggle all the time because they're opening their books while somethings going to happen. They're opening their program while something's happening. The prepared ones, they're already there. That's the first tip: just keep stuff open. Keep it ready to go. Keep it there the previous night or whenever. Keep it ready.  The second thing that has been of enormous use to me in saving time has been to leave the office. Now this sounds totally counterproductive. Why would you leave the office? Office is where your computer is. You get a lot of stuff done. Why would you leave the office? For one, because the office is your execution place. It is not your thought place. It is not your learning place. When you leave the office you will find that all of your great ideas, all of your fabulous money-making schemes, they all happen in the car or when you're going for a walk, or you're doing whatever you're doing. My wife and I, we sometimes go to the café. Not sometimes, we actually go to the café a lot. The trip there and back is the most productive part of our day. At the café we probably read something or draw or plan. I'm getting to that shortly.  The point is that the office is the least productive place.  Speaker 2:To be fair, he doesn't get very good coffee in the office anyway.  Sean:The office is where you execute, not where you think. In fact, if I'm doing presentations I will take a pencil and a paper and go out. I'm really good at doing everything on the computer but I will still go outside and do it all. It's the thinking, it's the planning that makes a big difference. That takes me to this whole concept of planning. We make elaborate plans. We plan monthly, weekly, yearly. Every Friday we have a couple of hours of just planning. We just go to the café and we plan. You think well, I keep planning as well but nothing comes of those plans. You'd be surprised that if you just keep at this exercise of planning on the same day every week you will find that you are moving ahead at a far brisker rate than if you didn't plan at all. You have to do this almost methodically. You have to do this on a regular basis. You have to say Wednesday 3:00 to 4:00, that's all I'm going to do. I'm going to plan. You go "I don't have enough time to do stuff," but planning is what clears your mind. When I did one of the planning sessions I realized that I was just going nuts.  Now Pscyhotactics has been around since 2002. We've got lots of articles. We've got courses. We've got products. We've got all that stuff. Then suddenly it occurred to me that I could do podcasts. Suddenly I wanted to write some books for Kindle. Then I wanted to do this and do that. When I sat down at that planning session I realized that I was stupid, that I could never get all of that stuff done. I had been spinning for a couple of weeks just trying to get stuff done, hoping I could get it, and in the process getting absolutely nothing done.  The plan revealed my weaknesses. That's what I say to people. I say this to clients, I say this to my friends, I say this to everyone. Keep on planning, because planning is priceless and plans are useless. But the person who has the planning, you have to fulfill this goal of yours. If you don't have that goal and that goal is not reviewed on a regular basis ... This is not a to-do list. It's a plan. It's where I'm going. Leave the office. Get all your ideas in the car. Go for a walk. Get fit. Yes, spend time planning. You'll say why is that such a time-saving device? Because it gets rid of all the million things that you plan to do and you couldn't fit in. Now you can do the things that you could do or you want to do.  The planning really clears your mind. It focuses your in the right direction. That is a huge time-saving device. When I leave the office I often try to find a café that doesn't have an internet connection. Sometimes it's a real pain because I really want to check stuff and I want to see stuff, but not having that internet connection is really cool. If you can find a café like that, that would be really good. Leave the office and plan obsessively. This takes us to the third idea of time management, really. That is that you often have to spend two hours to save five minutes. Now that might sound really crazy but let me give you an example. I have a program called Text Expander. Now Text Expander is a tool where if I just type in a couple of letters it can expand into a whole paragraph. For instance, if you asked me "What is your address?", then I would type addx and it would spill out the entire address, my postal address, my home address. Say you had a problem downloading something from our website. Now a lot of people have issues, especially with Internet Explorer. There's a browser issue. In this case it's not downloading. Often you just change the browser and it downloads the product. There's nothing wrong with the product or the server. It's just a browser issue. I have to then go to this browser, do this. It's a whole couple of paragraphs, maybe three paragraphs. These are just instructions. All I have to type is “browx", which is what I've set up obviously. The point is it spills out all of the information and now that person gets the information, they're able to download that product. But it took me three seconds. It took me half an hour or 45 minutes or one hour to learn how to use that program effectively. Because a lot of programs are very effective and we learn 1/10 or 1/100 of that program and it can do a lot of stuff. That's what we don't realize. I type a lot in forums when we have our courses, like the article writing course or copywriting course. There is formatting to be done. The top subhead has to be in bold and red and italics. Then you go around formatting all of that and you've gone and done five clicks. I can do it in one second.  The reason is had to spend a couple of hours going through a tutorial learning all the stuff so I could save three or four minutes in a day. But what happens is then those three and four minutes expand everyday. Suddenly you wasted hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours every year. But it's not just a concept of hundreds of hours. It's also wasting a hundred or more hours just getting tired. All of that typing and retyping - and you can say "Okay, I can cut and paste," but you're learning Photoshop, you're learning programs. You need to spend a couple of hours that you don't have right now to save those five minutes. You will realize how much faster you are.  This is true especially for the technology that you have on your computer, that you use three, four times a day. I would really suggest this. In design I use Photoshop, I use a whole bunch of programs. Every time I educate myself on it it has saved me enormous amounts of hours in the day. I hit myself on the wall. Speaker 2:He doesn't really do that. That would be an amusing sight, wouldn't it? Sean:I think why didn't I do this earlier? Why didn't I actually spend some more time learning how these programs work? Every time I do it saves me time. That's my recommend to you. Spend two hours and save five minutes.  Let's summarize. The first thing that we did was just to keep stuff ready, keep stuff open, keep it open all the time. It's really cool. Don't keep too many things open. You don't have to have 25 tabs open, but the stuff that you really need, the programs, keep it open. Keep your books open and it saves you an enormous amount of time. I know it's a crazy suggestion. Try it.  The second things is leave the office. The office is just a place where you execute. You waste a lot of time at the office. Go out there, get your plans together. Planning saves enormous amounts of time. It tells you what not to do. Your stop-doing list, it comes out in planning.  Third and very important is to make sure that you learn the technology that you use everyday, whatever programs that you use everyday. Take a tutorial on it. Spend time on it. Don't do all your programs. Just do the ones that are most critical, things like Text Expander or Scrivener or programs like that which you're going to use on a regular basis. You will save enormous amounts of time.  This brings us to the end of the third podcast. We have reached podcast number three. If you haven't got the first two podcasts go to iTunes and download them. Be sure to leave us a review as well. It helps me stay focused and get this job done well. Thanks again for listening, and this is brought to you by Psychotactics.com and the Three Month Vacation. You can't have a vacation if you don't have time, so might as well start saving time now. Bye bye.  You're still listening. Well, if you have any suggestions or any feedback, send it to me at sean@pscyhotactics.com. I will be paying attention to it for sure.