Podcast appearances and mentions of sean d souza

It's time to stop losing customers and start understanding them. Sean D’Souza, author of The Brain Audit, founder of Psychotactics, and host of The Three Month Vacation Podcast, is a Marketing Strategist and expert on consumer psychology. He’s one of the most articulate and well-spoken people I’ve met in the field of marketing and he’s here to help you figure out why you aren’t selling as much as you should. In this episode, Sean sets the record straight on the number one reason your customers back out of a purchase. We also dive into how to ease your customer’s fears, the importance of having a uniqueness factor, and how to start understanding your customers in a deeper way so you can stop losing customers. Sean is giving a training inside of the Coalition on May 11th called, “Buy Your Life Back: How to Raise Prices and Not Lose Customers”. Apply to join the Coalition today so you don’t miss out. Episode Highlights: 4:23 Why Sean D'Souza created "psychotactics" 6:41 What stops people from taking a 3-month vacation 10:57 The best way to stop losing customers 19:30 Why your business needs to have a uniqueness factor 25:12 How to come up with your uniqueness factor 32:15 Unpacking the misconception around sales 37:07 Tiger Woods' iconic shot and what it has to do with your customers 40:58 How to start understanding your customer in a deeper way 45:04 Learn more about Sean D'Souza 47:08 Sean’s top recommendation for a vacation destination Links and Resources: Sean D’Souza’s Website The Three Month Vacation Podcast The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't) The Coalition @a_brawn on Twitter Review or subscribe on iTunes

This week I speak with Sean D'Souza, host of the Three Week Vacation podcast. Sean shares his journey from successful cartoonist to building an online business helping businesses succeed at marketing.   [Disclaimer]

Welcome to the Conscious Millionaire Show for entrepreneurs who want to build a high-profit business that makes an impact! Make Your First Million, with your Host, JV Crum III…  Sean D'Souza: The Science of Why People Buy Sean D'Souza has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Like this Podcast? Get every episode delivered to you free!  Subscribe in iTunes And, download your free gift today... Get the High Performer Formula to Make Millions – Click Here! Please help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other entrepreneurs and business owners find our podcast… grow a high-profit business that makes an impact. Help your friends Become a Conscious Millionaire! They will thank you for it. Conscious Millionaire Network has over 2,000 episodes and 12 Million Listeners in 190 countries. Our original Conscious Millionaire Podcast was named in Inc Magazine as one of the Top 13 Business Podcasts!  

Welcome to the Conscious Millionaire Show for entrepreneurs who want to build a high-profit business that makes an impact! Make Your First Million, with your Host, JV Crum III…  Sean D'Souza: The Science of Why People Buy Sean D'Souza has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Like this Podcast? Get every episode delivered to you free!  Subscribe in iTunes And, download your free gift today... Get the High Performer Formula to Make Millions – Click Here! Please help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other entrepreneurs and business owners find our podcast… grow a high-profit business that makes an impact. Help your friends Become a Conscious Millionaire! They will thank you for it. Conscious Millionaire Network has over 2,000 episodes and 12 Million Listeners in 190 countries. Our original Conscious Millionaire Podcast was named in Inc Magazine as one of the Top 13 Business Podcasts!  

Worstel jij ook zo met de positionering van je merk? Dan ben je niet alleen. De meeste ondernemers en marketeers worstelen langdurig met de juiste positionering van hun merk. De oplossing komt echter vaak uit een volkomen onverwachte hoek: een ogenschijnlijke zwakte blijkt juist jouw kracht. Hoe dat werkt? Sean D'Souza van Psychotactics schreef er een ijzersterk artikel over en dit is onze vertaling, inclusief Nederlandse voorbeelden. Blijf dus zeker luisteren tot het einde, want deze tips zijn goud waard. Lees je liever? De voorbeelden bekijken? Of makkelijk doorklikken naar de genoemde voorbeelden? Check de blog op: https://mediaweb.nl/blog/positionering Interesse in het aanbod van CopyRobin? https://copyrobin.nl

Utilizing concepts and business models from other brands may seem like you’re cheating. However, upon looking at some of the biggest names out there you may come to realise that their achievements come exclusively from the teachings of others.  Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about ... Read More The post 286. Rebroadcast: Sean D’Souza on Using Feedback, Why Business Uniqueness Shouldn’t Be Priority and Learning From Other’s Mistakes appeared first on Amplify Agency.

Utilizing concepts and business models from other brands may seem like you’re cheating. However, upon looking at some of the biggest names out there you may come to realise that their achievements come exclusively from the teachings of others.  Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about ... Read More The post 286. Rebroadcast: Sean D’Souza on Using Feedback, Why Business Uniqueness Shouldn’t Be Priority and Learning From Other’s Mistakes appeared first on Bond Appetit Personal Chef Services.

When you hear a great interview there is something magical about them, the way they flow as if by random to amazing insights and discoveries. The truth is great interviews are always led by exceptional interviewers, masters of conversation. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about ... Read More The post 285. Rebroadcast: Capturing Your Audio, Interview Prep Technique and Developing a Conversation Structure with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Amplify Agency.

When you hear a great interview there is something magical about them, the way they flow as if by random to amazing insights and discoveries. The truth is great interviews are always led by exceptional interviewers, masters of conversation. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about ... Read More The post 285. Rebroadcast: Capturing Your Audio, Interview Prep Technique and Developing a Conversation Structure with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Bond Appetit Personal Chef Services.

Starting an entrepreneurial venture can be a true adventure. And like any adventure, the help of a map and a compass when starting out can really help avoid going down a lot of wrong turns. Sean D’Souza points the way. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain ... Read More The post 263. Three Top Considerations When Starting a New Business and More Podcasting Gold with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Must Amplify.

Starting an entrepreneurial venture can be a true adventure. And like any adventure, the help of a map and a compass when starting out can really help avoid going down a lot of wrong turns. Sean D’Souza points the way. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain ... Read More The post 263. Three Top Considerations When Starting a New Business and More Podcasting Gold with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Amplify Agency.

Starting an entrepreneurial venture can be a true adventure. And like any adventure, the help of a map and a compass when starting out can really help avoid going down a lot of wrong turns. Sean D’Souza points the way. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain ... Read More The post 263. Three Top Considerations When Starting a New Business and More Podcasting Gold with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Bond Appetit Personal Chef Services.

Mastering the art of interviewing is something that takes time, dedication and a little know how. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about doing what they love, navigating the challenges and anxieties of a self-made business and how to think outside the box. If you’ve ever ... Read More The post 262. Pre-Interview Preparation, Developing a Conversation Structure and Keeping it Concise, with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Bond Appetit Personal Chef Services.

Mastering the art of interviewing is something that takes time, dedication and a little know how. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about doing what they love, navigating the challenges and anxieties of a self-made business and how to think outside the box. If you’ve ever ... Read More The post 262. Pre-Interview Preparation, Developing a Conversation Structure and Keeping it Concise, with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Amplify Agency.

Mastering the art of interviewing is something that takes time, dedication and a little know how. Join Ronsley Vaz as he talks with some of the most forward-thinking entrepreneurs around the world, and picks their brain about doing what they love, navigating the challenges and anxieties of a self-made business and how to think outside the box. If you’ve ever ... Read More The post 262. Pre-Interview Preparation, Developing a Conversation Structure and Keeping it Concise, with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Must Amplify.

In this episode Adam talks to Paul Jarvis about defining your own version of success and why you might not need to build a big business to achieve it. Topics include: Why "success" shouldn't mean the same thing to everyone How to stay small without doing all the work you don't want to do yourself Why it's important to define what "enough" is for your business instead of always feeling the need to do better than you did last year Questions to ask yourself to figure out what "success" would be for you How knowing your "enough" can help you build better products for the people you want to serve Why you should ignore the people who don't like what you're doing and double down on the people who love it Sponsors: Oh Dear!, sign up with the coupon code "FULLSTACKRADIO" to get 50% off your first month Rollbar, sign up at https://rollbar.com/fullstackradio and install Rollbar in your app to receive a $100 gift card for Open Collective Links: Paul's website Company of One, Paul's upcoming book "Enough already", from Paul's blog "1,000 True Fans", by Kevin Kelly "Find your rat people", from Paul's blog "Sean D'Souza doesn't want to grow his company!"

“A well written article can be transformational for your readers”, says Sean D’Souza, the founder of Psychotactics. “It has the power to educate, inform and entertain and with a good structure at your fingertips, you can overcome the myth of writers block, the myth of it’s all been said before and the myth that it’s a difficult skill to master and create impactful articles that connect you, your ideas your business and your clients”.

Some of us are rich, but are we wealthy? For Sean D’Souza, founder of marketing strategy company Psychotactics, wealth is having enough time on your hands to do what you want — whether that’s travelling, cooking, spending time with your family or anything else. By all means, Sean is wealthy. He takes three months holiday […] The post 18. Sean D’Souza on the Power of Time, True Wealth and What’s Really Important appeared first on Bushy Martin.

Lance Scoular Show Notes Lance Scoular, AKA The Savvy Navigator, has been involved in International Trade and Transport for 50 years; In 2008, Lance started receiving invitations from students in his classes to connect with them on both Facebook and LinkedIn. Over the last nine years, he has developed and expanded his social media networks exponentially (especially LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, and beBee) and those of a select group of clients in a variety of sectors, both locally and globally. The results have been significant. Lance is now in the process of doing a 180-degree business pivot, refocussing away from Social Media Consulting, back to what he does best, International Trade and Transport Training. He is soon to launch an online course “Import Export Made Easy” in video and audio as well as the “Import Export Made Easy” Podcast. Lance’s career I started my business back in the early 1970s as a shipping supervisor in what is now known as Baxter International, a fortune 500 company. In 1976, I completed my studies at TAFE, which is the Technical And Further Education College in Australia, and I passed the exams of the Australian customs services. I took two weeks holiday from the company I was working in to door-knock local businesses in my area to see if I could find people who were dealing with exporting and importing that are interested in my services. I gained a few clients and resigned from the company. Most of my marketing was door knocking, and I used direct mail, and telemarketing with the Australian Yellow Pages. Import-Export is a very big deal in Australia. Most passionate about Today, I’m pivoting. Back in 2009, I got very involved in social media. I was running an Import Export course, and I was getting invitations from my students to connect with them on Facebook and LinkedIn. In the beginning, I didn’t understand what they wanted from me, but once I Googled it, I got very interested in the business potential of these social networks. As we mentioned before, Australia was very isolated from the rest of the world, the Internet and social media, in particular, have changed that. In 2009, I decided to start helping people to use social media with no connection to import or export. (I still taught the import and export courses, but the number of courses dropped during those years.) And today, I’m pivoting since I just recently realized that I could help many businesses all over the world with my knowledge and expertise in Import and Export, so I’m about to launch my first online Import-Export course. The exciting thing is that I’m going to use my wide network of social media connections that I built over the last nine years to promote my course. Lance’s best advice about approaching customers The definition of a customer back in the 70s was someone who buys goods or services. I came across a marketing strategist, Sean D’Souza who wrote a book called, The Brain Audit, about why customers buy, and in that book, he talked about his concept of a client. He relates to Webster Dictionary which says, ‘If you are a service provider, the client is someone you should care for, someone who comes under your protection, and someone you should guide.’ I believe in the concept of care, protection, and guidance for your clients. Biggest failure with a customer Well, I’ve had failures… like most of the guests in your show. It’s a learning situation. Back in 2007 and 2008, I was running my own course, but I was also asked to be a guest presenter at the Sydney Community College, two courses for young entrepreneurs. One for young people that were thinking of becoming entrepreneurs and another one for those who are already entrepreneurs. On one night, I was asked by the course’s facilitator to share one of my business stories with the entrepreneurs. Some of the entrepreneurs were doing great things, and I didn’t want to...

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D'souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for part two interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D'souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for part two interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

This week, Michael is joined by Matt Alderman to interview Will Lin, Principal and Founding Investor at Trident Capital Security! In the Security News, Apptio raised $4.6M in Equity, Morphisec raised $12M in Series B, & Dover Microsystems raised $6M "Seed" Round! Last but not least, part two of our second feature interview with Sean D'Souza, author of The Brain Audit! All that and more, on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes!

This week, Michael is joined by Matt Alderman to interview Will Lin, Principal and Founding Investor at Trident Capital Security! In the Security News, Apptio raised $4.6M in Equity, Morphisec raised $12M in Series B, & Dover Microsystems raised $6M "Seed" Round! Last but not least, part two of our second feature interview with Sean D'Souza, author of The Brain Audit! All that and more, on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode75   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D’souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for an interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

Author of "The Brain Audit", Sean D’souza runs Psychotactics.com. It's a site which explores why customers buy (and why they don't). He joins Michael and Paul for an interview on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74 Visit http://securityweekly.com/category/ssw for all the latest episodes!

This week, Michael and Paul interview Joe Kay, Founder & CEO of Enswarm! In the Tracking Security Information segment, IdentityMind Global rasied $10M, DataVisor raised $40M, & Infocyte raised $5.2M! Last but not least, our second feature interview with Sean D'Souza, author of The Brain Audit! All that and more, on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes!

This week, Michael and Paul interview Joe Kay, Founder & CEO of Enswarm! In the Tracking Security Information segment, IdentityMind Global rasied $10M, DataVisor raised $40M, & Infocyte raised $5.2M! Last but not least, our second feature interview with Sean D'Souza, author of The Brain Audit! All that and more, on this episode of Business Security Weekly! Full Show Notes: https://wiki.securityweekly.com/BSWEpisode74   Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes!

What makes you click? Whether it’s a blog, email, or sales page, you’ve got about 2 seconds to convince your potential customer to read what you have to say. That’s why your headline may be the most important few words in any piece of content. Sean D’Souza is a veteran copywriter, and an expert in […] The post MBA923 Guest Teacher: Sean D’Souza- 3 Ways to Write Intensely Curious Headlines appeared first on The $100 MBA.

On this episode of Build Your Network, Host Travis Chappell interviews Sean D’Souza, founder of Psychotactics about energy and leveraging your past for the future of your business. Here’s what Travis and Sean discuss in this episode: About Sean D’Souza Sean started in India with limited internet accessibility. Read the book by Harvey McKai “Drinking… The post Build Your Network (http://www.buildyournetwork.co). For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy (https://www.acast.com/privacy)

This week's episode was recorded live from We Are Podcast 2017, in Brisbane. This annual event is in its third year and the line up is AMAZING! Included in the incredible smorgasbord of speakers, is the sensational duo, John Lee Dumas and Kate Erickson from Entrepreneurs on Fire, the podcast which ignited my passion for podcasting!! So off course, I made it my mission to speak with them to get some value bombs from them, to share with you! There is a host of other incredible guests and I managed to interview four of them to share some of their top insights with you. In this episode, you'll hear from Sean D'Souza host of The 3 month vacation, Nicole Baldinu from $100 MBA, Jordan Harbinger from the wildly popular podcast, The Art of Charm as well as Kate Erickson from Entrepreneur on Fire. In today's episode of  Be The Drop, my guests cover the importance of providing skills not information to your clients, we look at why podcasting attracts such inclusive communities, and I share my top hints and tips from the conference. This is Be The Drop, live from We Are Podcast 2017

For the 49th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, Sean D'Souza is here to talk about about the psychological tactics that get people to respond to your sales message. Kira and Rob go deep with Sean asking about how he started his business and what he wants from it today. Sean talks about: •  how he got into copywriting, then out, then back in. •  how a short presentation inspired by Jay Abraham inspired The Brain Audit •  the seven “red bags” of The Brain Audit and how they work together •  the questions he asks when creating a sales page •  the “x-ray vision” problem that books and courses suffer from •  why teaching is the best kind of selling •  how to establish yourself as an expert •  what kind of testimonials you should have on your sales pages (would you believe they should be 1500 words?) • and more... Perhaps most importantly for overworked copywriters, we asked Sean how he manages to take three months of vacation every year and how his morning routine helps him maintain his energy and effectiveness. These are ideas we need to try. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory Leo Burnett Psychotactics Good to Great by Jim Collins Jay Abraham The Brain Audit 5000 BC Superman Article Writing Course Six questions for testimonials Mixergy interview Michael Phelps Bob Bowman The Three Month Vacation Podcast Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you could hangout with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for Episode 49 as we chat with author, speaker, cartoonist, and copywriter Sean D’Souza about psychological triggers that get customers to say yes, creating brand fanatics, how to become an expert in any field, and why he takes so much time off to recharge. Welcome, Sean. Thanks for joining us. Rob: Hey, Sean. Sean: It’s a pleasure to speak to both of you. Kira: Well, we’ve love to start with your story. How did you end up as a copywriter and a business owner? Sean: I always wanted to be a copywriter. When I was in university, that’s what I wanted to do. I had this goal, when I was going to be 30, I was going to be in this agency. I was going to be creative director of that agency. So it was very clear to me, which is why in university when I was studying accounting and stuff, my grades started to go down for the first time in my life. As soon as I left university, I went to Leo Burnett, which is the … I lived in Mumbai, India, and the kind of branch of Leo Burnett that was there. I went and spoke to the creative director, and she said, “You know you’re just a cartoonist. You’re not a copywriter.” I said, “Yes, I know that, but here’s what I’ll do. I’ll work with you a month and at the end of the month, you decide whether you want me to stay, and then you pay me. Or you know if I don’t like you after a month, then I’ll leave.” So it was pretty brash, but they took me on and that was the start of working with several advertising agencies. We’re going back now to 1995, I think, so it’s a long time ago. So I worked in a couple of agencies, and then, at some point, I started thinking, “Well, this is not what I want to do,” and I went back to cartooning. At that point, I was drawing cartoons for these magazines, but also for these organizations. What I found was their copy was really bad, and that my cartoons were getting kind of mutilated or defaced or ...

Can you give a speech that actually inspires action? According to expert communicator Sean D’Souza, that’s exactly what every speech should do.

Sean D’Souza thinks differently. Very differently. Maybe it’s because he’s an accountant, a creative, a cartoonist, a voracious reader, a teacher, and an early riser (4 a.m. to be exact). Fifteen years ago, fresh out of college with a degree in accounting, he joined an advertising agency called Leo Burnett. The opportunity of working with one of the best advertising ... Read More The post 207. Changing Your Life with the Rule of Thirds with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Bond Appetit Personal Chef Services.

Sean D’Souza thinks differently. Very differently. Maybe it’s because he’s an accountant, a creative, a cartoonist, a voracious reader, a teacher, and an early riser (4 a.m. to be exact). Fifteen years ago, fresh out of college with a degree in accounting, he joined an advertising agency called Leo Burnett. The opportunity of working with one of the best advertising ... Read More The post 207. Changing Your Life with the Rule of Thirds with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Amplify Agency.

Sean D’Souza thinks differently. Very differently. Maybe it’s because he’s an accountant, a creative, a cartoonist, a voracious reader, a teacher, and an early riser (4 a.m. to be exact). Fifteen years ago, fresh out of college with a degree in accounting, he joined an advertising agency called Leo Burnett. The opportunity of working with one of the best advertising ... Read More The post 207. Changing Your Life with the Rule of Thirds with Sean D’Souza appeared first on Must Amplify.

You’ve built a new product or decided to start providing a new service to offer your customers. How do you determine the price you are going to charge? Now think of the flip side to this, have you noticed how you buy a product or service? In most cases, you look at what's being offered and then look around for a better price, or at least better value. This behavior means you're not just considering one brand, but also working out what that brand's competition is offering. This is what makes pricing complicated, unless you know the factors that affect pricing, how to get rid of competition, and the magic of pricing sequences. Luckily, this is what we are going to dive into today. Now, let’s go deep into dartboard pricing with Sean D’Souza.

Writing sales pages, landing pages, long-form content or detailed articles is not easy. Getting started can be a drag. Writer’s block is often a problem. And even when you get going, it’s difficult to get and maintain momentum. But what if you started writing the piece from the bottom up? What if that bottom-up method helped you create a quicker and far superior product? In this episode, New Zealand-based marketing and persuasion expert Sean D’Souza explains his bottom-up method of writing... and why it’s more effective than the traditional top-to-bottom approach many of us use.

Owning your own business can lead to the lifestyle of your dreams, but only if you're very intentional about it. Only you can decide what that dream looks like, and only you can implement it. That's exactly what Sean D'Souza has done for himself. Instead of constantly trying to grow ever-higher revenue from his courses... Listen to episode

If you're interesting in learning how to market more effectively and land more sales, a quick Google search will bring up thousands of results, each one promising that their specific tip will be the one that changes your business forever. The trouble is sorting the wheat from the chaff. What's the stuff that'll actually work for you, and what's the stuff that's just clickbait? According to Sean D'Souza, the secret to marketing is actually surprisingly easy to understand. At their very core, all marketing strategies follow the exact same model, D'Souza says. He has cracked the code, and he can prove it. "What I do is I break down things into little pieces, and when I break them down into little pieces it becomes scientific. That's really what science is. Science is taking something very complex and breaking them down into little pieces and reconstructing it so that anyone can do it," D'Souza says. Originally working as a freelance cartoonist, D'Souza somehow found himself indulging his talent for marketing and understanding consumer psychology by helping out others with their marketing efforts. It wasn't long before he started writing about his own experiences with marketing and slowly but surely, he began to gather an audience hungry to learn more. In this episode you will learn: The psychological triggers behind turning someone from a prospect and into a customer Why growing your company might not be the best move Sean's most effective marketing tactics and strategies The myth behind innate talent and why it's all about the hustle What the perfect marketer look and sounds like & much more!

"The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy (and Why They Don't)" by Sean D'Souza Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/the-brain-audit-sean-dsouza

Sean D'Souza, Author and Chief Brain Auditor at Psychotactics, joins Entrepreneur Hour to discuss how you can tap into your customer's minds to determine what they want and convert leads into clients. Today's Sponsor: FreshBooks Resources: The Ultimate Startup Checklist - FREE Download The Brain Audit: By Sean D'Souza  

Vicky invites Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics, on the show today. Sean has been living in New Zealand for the last 16 years, but grew up in India. What's fantastic about Sean is that he offers a breath of fresh air in a word filled with immediate results. Sean discusses why feedback is so, so important to your success and shares a great and fun lesson from Calvin and Hobbes about tuna sandwiches, so stay till the end!   Key Takeaways: [0:55] Unfortunately Joe is not here to join us! [1:40] Who is Sean? [5:05] Sean has lived in New Zealand for the last 16 years. [8:35] What does success mean for Sean? [12:35] What's Sean's 'secret'? [14:35] Why are Sean's products so different from everyone else's? [19:15] It takes quite a long time to build the business that you want. [20:15] So, what does Sean do? [26:30] Sean really, really listens to user feedback. [29:30] Sean gets around 100-600 pieces of feedback every year on his website alone. [32:55] Feedback will help you get better and improve. [35:00] Sean shares a Calvin and Hobbes story. [36:10] Sometimes life is as simple as a tuna sandwich. [36:45] So, audience, where is your tuna sandwich? [37:55] What's next for Sean?   Mentioned in This Episode: www.psychotactics.com www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle www.businessforsuperheroes.com www.businessforsuperheroes.com/inner-circle www.businessforsuperheroes.com/borrow-my-brain

Runs the highly successful Psychotactics.com and marketing consultancy. To give you an idea of what we cover in this interview. Sean says: “But how do you take three months off, without affecting your business and profits? Do you buy into the myth of “outsourcing everything and working just a few hours a week?” Not really. Instead, you structure your business in a way that enables you to put your heart and soul in your work–and then take three months off every single year. Since 2004, we’ve taken three months off every year This podcast isn’t about making endless amounts of money, working like a lunatic. Instead it’s about how to really enjoy your work, enjoy your vacation time–and yes, get paid in advance.” Resources: Sean’s Podcast link: http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/ http://www.psychotactics.com/blog/

Runs the highly successful Psychotactics.com and marketing consultancy. Sean says, “If you don’t understand the simplicity and predictability of the brain, a lot of your business could be walking out the door. And you may not even realise it! Here’s your opportunity to learn the psychology behind what makes your customer’s brain tick. In this interview Sean shares his insights into asking better questions to run your own business. Sean now takes 3 months vacation each year because of one of the questions he shares with us. Resources http://www.psychotactics.com http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast/

Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.” That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters. That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day. The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it? The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn. Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off. The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard. The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.” That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break. We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done. Then we get to the third part, which is learning. What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point. When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug. In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started. In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December. This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead. There are two things that you put on your stop doing list. One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else. Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well. What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014. The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else. We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way. The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks. It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well. For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy. There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing. This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks. Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout? Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity. Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal. That brings us to the end of this episode. Summary What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set. The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do. Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens. If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical. Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition. That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/

Sean reveals how he’s able to run his business and still take months of vacation (without looking at a single email). He also reveals two formulas he created that teaches people how to pick up a new superpower, and guarantees people will buy without a lengthy sales letter.

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

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

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

Sean D’Souza is the author of the Brain Audit, a cartoonist, marketing strategist, and brilliant entrepreneur. Sean says that the first step in creating the way you want to structure a podcast show is to make a list of the things you like and don’t like the type of show you want to create. He has a degree in accountancy ... The post 41. When Should I Start A Podcast and how to make it work with Sean D’Souza appeared first on We Are Podcast.

In The Brain Audit, Sean D'Souza uses an analogy of 7 bags, or pieces of luggage, to explain the sequence the brain goes through during the buying process. Open the bags one at a time, in the right order, and the customer will buy. Skip a bag or alter the sequence, and the customer cannot finish the steps to make a purchase. The post How the Customer Decides to Buy with Sean D’Souza – 096 appeared first on Art Of Value.

Writing isn't easy-but it isn't hard either The key to writing is to know what strategy to follow, so the road isn't bumpy all year long. This episode isn't about going down memory lane. Instead, it's practical advice I wish I'd had—Like how to choose the right coach or the right editor. Writing isn't all about you. Writing depends on the coach, the editor and the client. This podcast is about a strategy that's not commonly expressed and approaches writing in a more philosophical, yet practical way. In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. www.5000bc.com -------------------------- Hi, this is Sean D’Souza and you are listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. Who is considered the second greatest British person of all time? When the BBC did a poll in 2002, they expected somehow that Winston Churchill would be in that top ten list. But there in the second position was someone whose name was reasonably unfamiliar. A name that didn’t belong in this century, nor from the previous century. A man who was born in 1806, somewhat mysteriously found his way to the second spot. His name? Isambard Kingdom Brunel—one of the most famous engineering minds of all time. And Brunel built a magnificent ship—and it was called the Great Western At the time of its construction, the Great Western was the longest ship in the world. There she sat at 236 feet, with one stunning goal in mind—to cross the Atlantic. The trip was to start from Bristol, in the UK, and terminate in New York city in the United States. The goal was audacious because no one believed in the commercial viability of such a long journey. In 1838, despite many technological developments, shipbuilders presumed that a ship had limited capability. They believed that no ship could carry both—commercial cargo as well as enough fuel—and make the long journey across the Atlantic. Brunel was a person who thought differently about long journeys For one, his heart was set on engineering. He developed a theory—a sort of formula that involved the amount a ship could carry and how a ship could be built so that it faced a lot less resistance from the ocean. Armed with his formula he set about building the Great Western, but then added more technological improvements.Instead of a ship, made mostly of wood. Brunel added bolts; he added diagonal iron reinforcements. He increased the strength of the keel and carried four masts for sails. And so the ship—the Great Western—embarked on her maiden voyage from Bristol with 610,000 kilos of coal, cargo and seven passengers. The Great Western on her maiden voyage to New York—powered by steam. A feat never achieved before! Despite all the plans and engineering, Brunel’s ship hadn’t got off to a great start In the 1830’s there was a competition to be the first to cross the Atlantic powered by steam alone. The Great Westernshould have been well on its way, but ran into difficulties before leaving Bristol. There was a fire on the ship, a minor fire, but Brunel was hurt in the fire and wasn’t able to make the journey. As a result of the fire, 50 paying passengers cancelled their trip. Finally, the ship made it out of Bristol’s harbour with just seven people on board. What was worse is that it was four whole days behind it’s competitor—another steam ship called the Sirius. The Sirius left as scheduled, leaving the fire-stricken Great Western still in dock. Now, the Great Western and her crew were well and truly behind—and Sirius would get all the glory. But Sirius’ trip was anything but glorious Along the way to New York, Sirius ran into serious trouble. They started to run out of fuel. Her crew was forced to burn cabin furniture, spare yards—even an entire mast because they ran out of fuel. And they took 19 days to get across the Atlantic. The Great Western, in comparison, arrived like the queen of the seas. She took just 15 days and five hours and with a third—that’s almost 200,000 tons of coal to spare. This is a story about journeys—a writing journey, in particular. I didn’t want to write. My story is one of being nudged and pushed into writing. When we started out Millionbucks.co.nz (yes, that was our pathetic first shot at a brand name), I was writing for a fledging portal called MarketingProfs.com. Back in 2000, everyone was a fledging—and there wasn’t as much content online, as there is at this moment in time. Which is why the founder of MarketingProfs, Allen Weiss, would e-mail me and ask me for an article. This meant I had to write. I didn’t want to write, but I didn’t have much of an option. We were new in the business—and had just moved to New Zealand. The only way I could get any credibility in the marketplace was to get better known. And how you can have two sets of people—one battling almost vainly against the headwinds, while the other reaches its destination with amazing grace. When you embark on the task of writing, the headwinds start almost immediately. I know because I ran smack into trouble when I started writing articles. Every article was a chore; something I detested and yet I persisted. Over the years, I’ve learned that sheer determination and persistence is not enough. That engineering and planning make a big difference to the journey. And on that journey, there are three elements that stand out… Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Element 3: Why the ONE word concept is your compass in the darkness Element 1: Why a Coach And Editor Are Incredibly Crucial Whenever the topic of a child-genius is brought up, one name rises above them all: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This kid, we are told, was a prodigy. Before the age of six, he was already composing music. Most kids barely are barely finding their way around school at this age. And yet, we are told, Mozart was already competent at playing the piano and the violin. He’s also rumoured to have transcribed entire scores of music on a single hearing. How much of this is true, and how much was stage-craft, we’ll never know. But one thing we know for certain—Mozart had a coach. You don’t think of a coach when you hear the name of Mozart, do you? Yet, Mozart’s coach was his dad—Johann Georg Leopold Mozart. And Leopold Mozart wasn’t your average-let’s-play-music-dad. He was already a famous author on violin playing and celebrated enough to be the deputy director of music to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Plus there was Nannerl, Mozart’s sister. When Nannerl was just seven, her father decided to give her piano lessons because he believed she was gifted. So there was Mozart—baby Mozart—surrounded by all these incredible musicians—but primarily—coaches. Without coaching, you can go far—but it takes a lot of time When you read studies that quote the concept of 10,000 hours to mastery, what fails to emerge is the factor of mistakes. As a beginner, you’re expected to make mistakes. You aren’t aware when or where you’re making the mistakes. All you feel is this frustration—this resistance that ships often felt back in the day of Isambard Brunel. Something is wrong with the engineering, but you’re not sure what to fix. And if you can’t figure out where the mistake lies, the journey ends up with furniture and masts being burnt up—so that you can complete some sort of journey Coaching is valuable—that we already know—what’s hard is knowing how to find a great coach For me, this process of finding a coach has been streamlined to a single factor: skill vs. information. I call it “preacher vs. teacher”. Is the coach going to give you more information, or is he/she going to give you a skill? Alex Blumberg, ex-Planet Money, now co-founder of Gimlet Media is a coach. How do I know? Because in the world of telling radio stories, Alex doesn’t pound you with needless information. Instead, he has a method, even a formula of sorts. For example, when telling a story, he shows you how to evaluate the story. Let’s say you’re writing a story about homeless people—how would you use the formula? The formula runs like this: The story is about X, and it’s interesting because of Y. So the story is about “homeless people” and it’s interesting because “20% of them are college graduates”. Immediately that stands out from a line that goes like this: The story is about homeless people, and it’s interesting because “many have mental problems”. What Blumberg teaches us is how to eliminate the vagueness and lack of interest in the story. In his courses, he goes about things systematically, taking about editing, music, etc., in the world of podcasting. And you end up not full of information, but with specific skills. When you look at Mozarts, the Phelps, the Brunels of the world—they all had coaches. Coaches that enabled them to find their mistakes and move forward. And in article writing, going it your own way is the slowest boat to anywhere. I know because I took that boat. I took that boat in the field of cartooning; in the field of article writing too. And it took me ages to figure out the connectors, the “First 50 Words,” the endings, the beginnings, the structure—all of that misery could have been reduced if I had a coach. A coach that had a system; who would point out the errors—and get me quickly down the road. To me, of all the skills you have to learn as an entrepreneur, article writing stands out because you have to have a precise structure when writing. You have to be interesting; you have to tell stories; you have to stand out in a sea of content. Which is why, even today, I will go to workshops, buy a course, read books—because that’s how you get better at what you do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that without a coach, you’re floundering even when you’re pretty good. To get outstanding at what you do, you have to find Johann Georg Leopold Mozart to help you along. And you’re going to need not just a coach, but an editor as well You can be the best writer in the world, and you’re going to need an editor. I have five or six, at the very least; sometimes more. There’s David, Pamela, Teresa, Renuka, Alia, Philip—and Zack (I can hear Zack’s voice here). And every one of these editors come from a different angle; they have a different perspective. They force me to relook at what I’ve written so that I fit their needs. I remember the time I was writing a book, and I’d written more than ¾ of the book when I showed it to Philip. But Philip wasn’t impressed “All your books, they show me how to do things,” he said. This one is all information. Nice information, but not a lot I can implement.” There’s no use fighting these editors. And I’ve tried. There was a time when I went “hand-to-hand” in a battle with Pamela. She wanted me to chop out two whole pages from my pre-sell book. Those two pages were about how crummy marketers use pre-sell. Pamela wasn’t interested in reading about the other marketers—even though no names were mentioned. I fought back. I kept it down to a page. She came back and told me to get rid of it. I kept half a page. No dice. I tried a paragraph—and then finally buckled in. Pamela was right all the time, but I couldn’t see it at the start. I was too busy and too in love with what I’d written. But we’re talking about articles, not books. So would I do this for every article? Going back in time, yes, it’s what I did for every article. One of our earliest clients, Chris Ellington, would pore through all my work and shred it a bit more than I liked. It made me a better writer. But even now, I’ll post a series in 5000bc.com, and there are questions; lots of questions. The questions are a form of edit. They show what’s missing from the series and what needs a repair job. Plus, alongside every article we have a “what bugs me” on the website. So years after an article is written, you can have retrospective feedback. This is my first learning in article writing That at all times you need a coach, finding structural mistakes, helping you to get better at the core skill of writing. And then once you’ve written, you need someone to pick out the holes and make the work get to the level it deserves. Yet, to get to complete the article, you have to write it. And there’s a big barrier in the way. It’s you. You are the barrier. Why are you the barrier? This takes us to Element 2. Element 2: Why Writing For Yourself is A Tedious Process—And To Be Avoided Simone Young is a world-renowned conductor from Australia. Alondra de la Parra is also a world-class conductor—from the other part of the planet—Mexico. In a BBC podcast interview featuring the two conductors, there is a moment when they describe fear—Fear and anxiety. Young pipes in first. “I’m always anxious before I get on stage,” she says. “And that’s because I’m thinking about myself. The moment I get on stage, I start thinking about the audience, and my fear goes away.” At which point, de la Parra chimes in. She talks about the “cocktail party” in your brain. About how everyone is seemingly talking about you, and they’re not saying good things. The “cocktail party” chatter never seems to end, or so it seems. This is what you’d call “writing for yourself”—or at least what I call “writing for myself.” When I write an article, my first act is to ask a client for a question. If they ask more than one question, I’m a lot happier. If they have a list, I’m the happiest. Why? Because now I can stop the silly “cocktail party” in my brain. This cocktail party pops up every single time, no matter how good you get at the craft of article writing. Most times, I’m just writing an article, but sometimes that article becomes a book. Like the time I wrote the book on “Dartboard Pricing”, for instance I couldn’t figure out whether it was good enough. I couldn’t understand why anyone would buy the book when I’d written so many articles and done so many podcasts on the topic. Of course, I knew—I knew it’s an entirely different experience reading a structured book vs. random articles. But even so, you think about the “cocktail party” a lot. I had no such trouble when coming up with answers for a future book on “The Three Prong System.” A client and friend, Paul Wolfe, decided to do a series of three interviews with me on the topic of how I take breaks; how I manage to take a three-month vacation; how we handle vocation and vacation. And Wolfe had a series of questions—some prepared in advance, and some that organically sprouted from the discussion in progress. It’s not like I haven’t tried to write the book before. I’ve created an outline, started on the project and then abandoned it repeatedly. And it’s not because of a lack of skill, either. I can easily write the book—possibly in under a week. The problem is that I’d have to clamber into my brain to write that book. When Wolfe asks me the questions, I’m not trying to think about me. I’m thinking about the person asking the question—and occasionally other clients too. And the interview brings up a wealth of information—practical information too! When a client (or interviewer in this case) asks the questions, the cocktail party syndrome disappears, and it’s replaced with a focus on the audience. To write quickly and write a lot, I need questions—a lot of questions. But where do we get the questions? I get most of my questions in 5000bc. Clients ask a ton of questions and get articles in response (yes, I know, it’s a mad system). However, I also get a lot of questions through the podcast, e-mail, through consulting (I rarely consult, but every time I do, it’s amazing). Questions com from chats, after I make a presentation, and through just listening and reading. What I’ve learned is that I can’t just look for a random person asking a question online. That doesn’t fire me up at all. Instead, I have to have a specific person asking me a specific question. And when I’m writing the answer, I’m thinking of that person. Which is what gets me to talk a walk in those shoes and write with far more fluidity than if I sat down with a blank screen staring back at me. But where do we get the questions? We all wonder: Hasn’t this question been answered before? Aren’t there fifty thousand and three variations of this question already on the Internet? And the answer is NO. No one is going to answer the question like you do. For instance, there are whole books on the topic of focus. But my angle on focus—and focus in a distracted world—is different. I take three months off every year, still meet our “fixed revenue” goals and still manage to write books, conduct courses, do workshops, paint, cook—in short, do whatever I want, despite the distractions. So my angle is always going to be unique; my voice is going to be unique. And yours will be too. Your voice, your tone, your language—even the structure of your answer will be different. The question may have been asked a million times before, but the answer—your answer—is different. And you get questions from many sources, but you have to listen—that’s what I’ve learned. When others speak, they’re asking you the questions and doing so in many forms. You’ve got to listen, answer those questions and then keep a writing pad right next to you. Why a writing pad and not a recording? Well, have a recording, but the writing pad is vital because it captures the gist of the conversation. Then, while the ideas are still fresh in your head, you sit down and write. And the orchestra in your brain begins to play. You may not be a great writer yet. You may struggle as I did. But even in the middle of that struggle, you’ll notice the emotion. You’ll realise that everyone has gone home from the cocktail party, but you’re not quite alone. You’ve got words on paper. Writing for yourself is disgustingly difficult. It’s hard to reach into your brain and work out how to write an article, a report or a book. But write for others and you get the feeling that Young and de la Parra talk about. Suddenly, you feel free. ====== A coach, an editor. They help you along. The client and her questions—they bring out the orchestra in your writing. And there’s the article itself. It is also a guide—a big guide. So how do you use the article to stay on course? It’s a concept called the “One Idea.” This takes us to the last element. Click here to continue reading about—Three Interesting Things I Know About Writing-Part 2  http://www.psychotactics.com/writing-for-yourself/

Whenever you hear the story of products and services, it’s always a sugar-coated, goody gum drop story. You rarely get to hear the not-so-great side of things; the mistakes; the second-guessing. In this episode, you get to hear what’s happening behind the stage. How—and why—we started the article writing course; how we decided to go to the Netherlands and do a workshop; and how we launched several of our products without a sales page.  If you like back-stories as much as I do, you’re going to love this episode. ============================= The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” Hi. This is Sean D’Souza, and you’re listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about how to work less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy the work that you do and to enjoy your vacation time. Billy Joel: I dreamt the song. I dreamt the melody, not the words. I had a dream, and then I remember waking up in the middle of the night and going, “This is a great idea for a song,” and going back to sleep, and waking up, and not remembering what I dreamt and going, “What was that? I had a really good idea, a really good idea, and then I forgot.” In a couple of weeks later, I’m in a business meeting talking to accountants or lawyers, some kind of boring stuff, and the dream reoccurs to me right at that moment because my mind drifted off from hearing numbers and legal jargon, and I just drifted off. Boom, it came right back into my head. I said, “I have to go. I have to go right now. I think I have an idea for a song,” so the accountants and lawyers were, “Go, go, go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, go.” I ran home, and I started playing the theme that had reoccurred. On my way home, I was thinking, “Okay. How am I going to remember this? Da, da, da, da. Da, da. Don’t be crazy. Don’t be stupid.” They’re called “[bail out lyrics 00:01:34],” but you have to use them to remember the notes, remember the theme you’re saying that you came up with. I got home, and I ended up writing it all in one sitting pretty much about … It took me maybe about … I don’t know, two or three hours to write the lyrics. I probably reshaped them a little bit in the studio, but yeah. I remember writing that very well. It was a dream that reoccurred, which happens a lot on me. What you were listening to is the backstory of Billy Joel and The Stranger. As I was listening to this on my walk yesterday, I thought, “This is a good idea. This is an idea where I can talk about the backstory of a product, a course, and a workshop.” I can bring it to life to let you know what’s the backstory instead of just hearing the success story. The reason why I thought it was so cool was my niece, Marsha, and I, we watched the series on BBC by David Attenborough, and the thought that gets us really excited is when they tell us the backstory, how they started, the trouble they run into, and I hope to bring some of that excitement into you all listening today by telling you the backstory about a course, a workshop, and a book series. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the course, and let’s deal with the article writing course. Part 1: We’re going back to 2005. In 2005, there was no Article Writing Course. In fact, there was no plan to have an article writing course. You see, in the year 2000, I was writing an article maybe a week. I would struggle over it for one or three days, and then eventually, get it corrected and edited, and then finally, it would get published. By 2003, I started up 5000bc. For some reason, I promised the members at that time that I would write five articles a week. Did they care that I wrote five articles a week? I don’t know, but that’s what I promised, so that’s what I did. Because I did that, I started to write every single day, and my article writing got quicker and better as the years ticked along. By 2005, I was pretty sure that anyone could do what I did, which is sit down, work it a few years, and then you could write good articles. Did I think there was a demand for an article writing course? No, I didn’t think there was a demand for an article writing course. So then, why announce an article writing course? What we decided was that we’re going to take a chance. We’re going to put up a sales page, and we don’t really care if anybody signs up this year, but it would be like an advertisement for the next year. That was our goal, to have an advertisement for the coming year, and the article writing course filled up. That was a big surprise, and if there’s one thing that is streaming through this entire backstory, it’s this factor of surprise. Now we have all the strategy at Psychotactics, but surprise seems to jump up at every point in time, so there we are. We have signed up all these people for the article writing course. There’s only one problem. The problem is there are no notes. The problem is there was no audio. What are we going to do? What I did was I conducted the entire course through teleconferences and forums. There were no notes, and there was no audio, and the clients knew it, but they were still keen to the course. When you look at the article writing course, the sales page today, one of the testimonials, that really long, detailed testimonial, it’s from the very first course. It is from the course where we had none of the stuff ready, where we weren’t prepared mentally for it, but we knew what we were doing. Even back then, we knew what we were doing, and we went ahead. Surprise, surprise. It turned out fine. Since then, we’ve had courses in 2006, 2007, and then we got a little greedy. We started to do several courses, so we did … In one year, we did two courses simultaneously, so 25 people in one course, 25 people in the other course. Then, later on the year, we did 25 people and another 25 people, so 100 people went through that article writing course in that year, and it killed me. It was too much to handle because I’m there all the time in the article writing course, and if you write and tweak your articles several times a day, then I will be back telling you what to do, how to do. It’s pretty hands-on, and I had to learn from that lesson. I had to learn to space out the article writing course, so now, we have it just once a year, and sometimes, we don’t even have it for a few years like in 2013, we had the course, and then the next one was in 2015. If you want to take the jest of the backstory of the article writing course and put it into a nutshell, it is that we were surprised. We were surprised that it would turn out like it did. We were so surprised that we had to now deliver the course, and we didn’t have notes, but we did it our way anyway. Finally, the fact that we overdid it, and then had to pull back, and these are the lessons that we had from the article writing course. It’s one of the most fascinating courses for me because there’s so much depth to writing. Writing is not just a factor of, “Hey, let me string these words together.” It is communication. Once you can write, you can speak. You can do a lot of other things based on the structure of writing. To me, the article writing course is like you can’t do without this course, and yet, back in 2005, I thought, “Who would need a course like that?” I was wrong. Surprise, surprise. Part 2: Psychotactics Netherlands Workshop This takes us to our second surprise, and that is the workshop in Netherlands. Around the year 2011 I think, we decided to go to the Netherlands. Why did we decide to go to the Netherlands? For one, we started getting a lot of subscribers from the Netherlands, and we thought, “How are these subscribers coming in?” We went online, and we found that a lot of our products, especially the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and several other products were being pirated. Where were they being pirated the most? In the Netherlands. We decided that there were so many customers that were buying products from the Netherlands, and there were so many people that were pirating from the Netherlands that somehow we need to go to the Netherlands, and so we decided to go to Amsterdam. Now, the good thing about the Amsterdam trip is that I’d already done the Brain Audit workshop in the US. I’d done the Brain Audit workshop in Auckland, New Zealand, and so I had the page ready. I just had to activate the page, and then send it out to the list. Again, we weren’t expecting a thunderous response. What we did was we set up the page, we sent out the email, and we went for a morning walk. By the time we got back, 7 people have signed up, and that took us totally by surprise. We were expecting some people to show up from different parts of Europe, but 90% of the people that showed up were from the Netherlands itself, and this was a really good lesson, and this is the lesson that we’ve learned other companies use as well. There is a rumour that Netflix follows the same strategy. They look at these sites where they’re streaming movies and series, and they see the series and the movies that are the most popular on the pirate sites, and they decide, “Okay, that’s what we’re going to put on Netflix.” Because it’s already popular, and that’s what it told us. It told us that the Brain Audit, and the website master class, and the copyrighting class, they were already popular, so there were people that were buying it, good clients, and there were the not so good clients who were pirating it. Instead of getting mad at the not so good ones, we decided to work with the good ones, and we decided to have the Netherlands workshop. It went really well. Amsterdam, of course, is beautiful. It’s wonderful to walk around Amsterdam, so we had an outstanding workshop in the Netherlands, but it was a surprise. What this is teaching us is that we have all the strategy, but there will be a surprise, and this takes us to our third part, which is about a book series, which is the Black Belt Presentation Series. Part 3: Black Belt Presentation Story One of our favourite places in New Zealand is Nelson, and Nelson is on the northern tip of the South Island, and it’s got the Abel Tasman Park. It’s a wonderful place to go, but one of the reasons why we go there is food. We love our food, and there is this restaurant, which is sitting right on the edge of the bay, and it’s called the “Boat Shed.” Now, at the Boat Shed, you get this fabulous view, but you also get this fabulous food, and they have a regular a la carte menu and a trust-the-chef. Trust-the-chef is as you’d expect, the chef decides what you’re going to eat tonight, and they put it in front of you. You have no idea what it’s going to be. Every time we go to Nelson, we go to the Boat Shed, and every time we go to the Boat Shed, we have a trust-the-chef, so what’s the business application of trust-the-chef? We got back to Auckland, and I wanted to write a book on presentations. I love presentations. I love to make presentations, and I love the structure of presentations. When I looked at all the books out there, they weren’t covering it like the way I wanted to cover it, so I decided to write a series on presentations. In reality, there were 2 problems. The first is the books weren’t written, and the second is that there was no sales page. I didn’t have any time for the sales page, so what I did was I decided to use the Boat Shed’s philosophy of trust-the-chef. I wrote an email. I said, “I’m writing a book series on presentations, and it’s going to cover 3 elements. The first is, how do you design your presentation so it looks absolutely stunning, absolutely yummy? How do you have 200, or 300, or 500 slides, and the client doesn’t even know? They think they’ve just been through 25 slides? How do you make every one of those slides work for you in a way that’s amazing?” That was the first part of the book or rather the first book. The second part was the structure of the presentation. How do you get the presentation to flow from one end to the other, so it’s absolutely seamless, and then you have these summaries? Pretty much like you’re listening on this podcast. You have a structure, and what is that structure? That’s what the second book was all about. Finally, it was about the crowd, the audience. What do you do with the audience that enables you to get their attention, to keep their attention? I felt that was very critical because you can have a great presentation, you can have great slides, but if you don’t know what to do with the crowd, how to get them to do what you want them to do, then you’re not going to get the results that you’re looking for. So, all of these dreams, all of these plans, but there’s no sales page, and we just send out email. We said, “The book costs about $200. If you would like to get a refund because you find it useless at the end of it all, we’ll be happy to do that, but here’s the trust-the-chef offer.” Only 200 people signed up, but do the math, 200 into 200 is $40,000. Now, a lot of people talk about, “I sold to 400,000 people. I sold to 100,000. I sold to 50,000 people.” You don’t need to do that. You can sell to 15 people and be fine with it. Think about it, 200 into 15 is $3,000, $3,000. That’s good revenue for a book. We happened to sell to 200 people with that email, but the point was that it surprised us. It was surprising how clients were willing to trust you even though you had no information or very little information about those books. Summary This is the theme of today. When we summarise, we look that surprise becomes a strategyin its own way, that you want to surprise yourself, and that’s what happened with the article writing course, which we didn’t expect people to sign up. They’re still signing up 10 years later. We didn’t expect anyone in the Netherlands to sign up. It was just a random email, and people signed up. Finally, the trust-the-chef. That was the weirdest one of them all, and clients still bought into that. We’ve done several trust-the-chef offers ever since, and all of them have worked the same way. This happens when you have respect for the client, when you act like a GPS system because that’s what the client really wants. They don’t really want more information, do they? They want you to be their GPS just like a GPS works. No matter whether you get to Rome, or Auckland, or Berlin, you switch on your phone, and your GPS is working, and it takes you to your destination, and that’s what clients want you to do. They want you to take them to their destination. They want you to be the guide. They want you to show them the sites, and that is why the article writing course worked, and that is why the presentation book series worked, and that is why the Netherlands workshop worked. It’s because clients expect us to care, protect, and guide them just like a guide does. In that, there is no surprise. What is the one thing that you can take away from today’s podcast? The one thing that you can do is to surprise yourself, so we can believe in planning, and we plan every Friday. We’d go to the café, and we work on a plan, but one of the things that really works in our favour is this factor of surprise. Now, you have the backstory of the article writing course, and the Black Belt Presentation Series, and one of the workshops, which is the Amsterdam workshop. Go and surprise yourself. You don’t know what you will get. That’s what life is all about, that’s what business is all about, and that’s what The Three-Month Vacation is all about. One of the things that’s not going to be a surprise is when you sign up to the article writing course. When you do that, you’re not going to sleep all of April, all of May, and all of June. The reason for that is we don’t want it to be surprise. We want you to be able to write and to write well, to have a skill and not to have more information. The article writing course is starting in April. March 5th at 3:00pm Eastern, that’s when we open the doors. As you know, we have only a few seats. Everyone says we have limited seats. We put a number on those limited seats, not more than 25. If you would like to surprise yourself and figure out how good a writer you are, then join the article writing course. Later in the year, we’re going to have the cartooning course, and that’s at psychotactics.com/davinci, and you can learn how to be a cartoonist too. Most people are surprised when they can write so well, when they can draw cartoons, when they can make great presentations. They think that somehow this skill has to be inborn, and it doesn’t have to be. There are no inborn skills. You can learn from a good teacher. You can learn from a good system. You can learn a lot from a good group, and that’s what the Psychotactics training is all about. It’s not about information. It’s about skills, so get yourself on a course this year, and you will surprise yourself. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now, but wait a second. If you run into postcards anywhere while you’re walking, send me a postcard. I’ll send you a postcard back. To send a postcard, send it to PO Box 36461 Northcote, Auckland 0748. You can also find us on the website, on the “Contact Us” page. The address is there. Send a postcard, and bye for now. Useful Resource 5000bc: There is a lot of information on the internet. You can read and learn from it. But in 5000bc the discussion is about you. About your specific problem. And how to go about your specific situation. And Sean is around answering all your questions. Find out more here—5000bc. (5000bc.com)

There are two options in life: greatness or mediocrity. But greatness seems so elusive, even so pompous. How do you call your work "great"? How do you even know or benchmark "greatness?". And can a small business achieve greatness or do you have to be a dominant player like Apple, Disney and Walmart. In this episode we get right to the root of greatness and how the book "Good to Great" by Jim Collins changed my life. But instead of the massive journey to greatness, this episode shows you a tiny path. A path most of us can manage with just a little bit of effort. A life of mediocrity is hardly worth living. Here's the pathway to greatness. ----------  Useful Resources / To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/79 / / Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com / / Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza / / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic ----------  Part 1: The Hedgehog Principle Part 2: Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress Part 3: Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems Why Happiness Eludes You: 3 Obstacles That We Need To Overcome Find out: Do We Really Need To Start With Why? ----------------- The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.”   Around the autumn of 1890, Daniel Burnham was given a project. Burnham was an architect—an extremely well known architect—in Chicago. And he’d been given a job like no other. He was expected to turn a boggy square mile into what would be the spotlight of the world. He was put in charge of the World’s Columbian Exposition. He just had one tiny problem—the Eiffel Tower. On March 31, 1889, Paris had had it’s own Exposition. And it quickly surpassed the Washington Monument to become the then tallest man-made structure in the world. Burhnam had the unenviable job of surpassing the hoopla around the Eiffel Tower, but no one had a clue what to do. “Make no little plans”, he said to his team of engineers, but they could come up with little to rival the magnificence of the Eiffel Tower. Of course there were proposals: a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in chairs (pretty much like today’s bungee jumping). And Eiffel himself proposed an idea for the Chicago exposition—a bigger tower than the one in Paris. How could the Chicago Exposition outshine the now most famous monument in the world—the Eiffel Tower? It seemed almost impossible to come up with something that would rival the French monument. An engineer called Ferris has the answer. The ideas were going nowhere and the Chicagoans were pulling their hair out, when a 33 year old engineer from Pittsburgh came up with an idea: how about a huge revolving steel wheel? He came up with sketches, added additional specifications and then shared the idea with Burnham. But Burnham was not impressed. The slender rods of the wheel were too fragile. It would be madness to carry people to a height taller than the Statue of Liberty in such a fragile wheel. But Burnham wasn’t just dealing with any ol’ engineer. He was dealing with George Washington Gale Ferris Jr—who would forever be associated with the Ferris wheel. Ferris was so convinced his idea would work that he spent $25,000 of his own money, hired more engineers and recruited investors. And consider that $25,000 would be worth over $650,000 in today’s money. Over a 100,000 parts went into the Ferris wheel. And an 89,320 pound axle had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air. On June 21, 1893 when it was launched, it was a stunning success. As the exposition went through the next three week, more than 1.4 million paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride. George Washington Gale Ferris had literally reinvented the wheel. The year we moved to New Zealand, I had to reinvent my own wheel. You see, I wasn’t in marketing. I had no plans of being in marketing. I was already an established cartoonist back in Mumbai, India and when I moved to New Zealand I pretty much expected to continue to draw cartoons. In fact I was so determined to take that cartoon career forward, that when we moved I had over 100 kilos worth of books shipped. These were no ordinary books. These were the books on graphic design and cartooning that I’d accumulated over the years. Plus, there were brochures. Before I left India, I had no idea what New Zealand held for me. So I printed business cards—as you do But also lavish four colour brochures, postcards and yes, stationery that I could use when I got to New Zealand. All of this material had to be shipped by air—not by sea—because I was in a big hurry to get going in this new country. Yet, almost a year later, I had to reinvent what I was doing—and it was all because of one book. That book, “Good to Great” has sold over 2.5 million hardcover copies. But more importantly, it was the catalyst in my own reinvention. In 2000 as I got on a plane back to India (I had to go back and tidy up things I’d left undone), I had loads of time to read the book and mull over the ideas. And as I’ve mentioned before in articles and podcasts, I realised that I would never reach my greatness in cartooning. To me, the pinnacle of cartooning was the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. If I couldn’t get up to those lofty heights, it wasn’t feeding my greatness appetite. And so I turned to something I was getting exceedingly good at doing—creating taglines for small businesses. Without realising it, I was wandering down the aisle of marketing. The book—and that 19 hour flight—it did it for me. It put me on my quest for what I’d consider my “greatness journey”. But just as it set the benchmarks, it also raised a ton of questions. Are there benchmarks to know that you’re moving from good to great? How do you know what you’re choosing will end up being great? With all the stories of greatness bouncing around Apple, Boeing, Disney and Walmart, how can a small business owner get to greatness, without becoming big and dominant? Big questions—and it’s best to keep the answers simple. Deep, yet simple. Let’s take a trip and explore the three core elements required to get your own Ferris wheel going—even when the odds seem stacked against you. The three elements we’ll cover are: The Hedgehog Principle Preserving the Core + Stimulating Progress Big, Hairy Audacious Goal—The BHAG.   Avis—the car rental company—was pretty much in the doldrums. Back in 1961, it was losing $3.2 million a year and there seemed to be no way to beat the domination of their biggest rival—Hertz. And the two companies had been at each others throats since the mid-1940s, when Air Force officer, Warren Avis created a niche out of thin air. As he travelled around, Warren Avis  realized that most car companies were downtown—not a very convenient place to get a car if you just flew into a city. Business travel was growing steadily and many executives would touch down, rent a car, drive to their meetings and drop the car back at the airport on the very same day. Hertz was not impressed They continued to run their rental car business downtown, as if Avis didn’t exist. Yet, over time, they found Avis gobbling up chunks of their business. It seemed logical to simply replicate what Avis had done. With this move, Hertz signalled the start of the rivalry that exists to this day. But then, along came 1962 and an creative agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). The copywriter team of Paula Greene and Helmut Krone created an advertising campaign that would take Avis from losing $3.2 million to earning $1.2 million. What’s more, it would rock Hertz’ smugness to its very core. From 1963 to 1966, Hertz smug look turned to paralysis The market share percentage gap between the two car companies shrunk from 61-29 to 49-36. The “We’re only No.2. We try Harder” immediately captured the attention of the public. But why did this “We try harder” campaign really work? When we look at the Hedgehog Concept outlined in “Good to Great”, the answer is more than apparent. The Hedgehog principle consists of three pertinent questions: – What can you be the best in the world at? – What drives your economic engine? – What are you deeply passionate about? Avis could easily answer those questions—but only once it had the new ad campaign going It was the best in the world at “bending over backwards” to make car customers happy. After all it was only No.2, and couldn’t afford to rest on its laurels. This concept of “trying harder” got the entire company to indeed try harder. And yes, we all know how their bleeding balance sheet made a sharp U-turn into decent profitability. They got the “best in the world” covered, the “economic engine” was purring away. Only one thing remained—the passion. The “we try harder” might have been just a slogan, but it was a slogan that drove the passion—and if the slogan is right, it often does drive the passion! Avis ticked all the three boxes, and they were well on their way to scaring the heebie-jeebies out of Hertz. Notice how money—or the economic engine—isn’t really the focus of greatness? Money is important, that’s for sure. A company gasps and coughs it’s way into oblivion if it can’t fire up that economic engine. And yet, it’s more than clear that for most of us, at least, money is not the driving factor. All those website owners that show you how their income doubled and quintupled are still sitting on the same sofa; they’re still typing on that same yellowed keyboard. Yes, they may have doubled or quintupled the size of their house or boat, but when money becomes the only focus, there’s no time to enjoy the good stuff in life. Which is why the “best in the world” journey needs to start with what makes you deliriously happy. It’s the stuff that wakes you up and keeps you going, no matter what. Your work becomes your passion and the complete opposite of trying to outsource everything and doing as little as possible. Money helps enormously in getting you to your goal, but the passion and desire is what’s behind the wheel. And this is where confusion comes bouncing through the door When I quit my career in cartooning, I was doing very well indeed. I’d moved to New Zealand and despite being in a brand new market, the profit for the first year was $75,000. Picture me sitting at my computer, drawing cartoons, listening to music and then taking a nap and you get the idea. It wasn’t exactly like I was struggling to put food on the table. Still, the moment you decide you want to change things—the moment I decided I couldn’t beat “Calvin and Hobbes”, I was in trouble. I’m good at a lot of things. I whizz my way around Photoshop, I can cook exceedingly well, you’ve probably seen my food and travel photos on Facebook—and you’re getting an idea of the looming problem, aren’t you? The moment you can do more than one thing, you’re not sure where to go. The journey to greatness seems to run right into a pool of quicksand. So how do you get yourself out of this mess and back on track? I’d decided I didn’t want to do cartooning—at least at that point in time—and I wanted to take this leap into marketing. I didn’t know much about marketing, but that minor detail wasn’t keeping me up at night. Still, I was in a fog—after all marketing is this big, nameless, faceless profession and I hadn’t a clue what the journey to greatness was going to look like, or whether one existed at all. And that’s when I ran into a subset of marketing. A subset is what starts the journey to greatness My story was quite accidental—as yours may well be. I joined this networking group called BNI. We’d meet every Friday, enjoy breakfast and hand out referrals. And crucial as all this referral giving was to me at the time, one factor was even more pivotal to help me on my journey. BNI has this strange custom called “the dance”—as in “dancing with a partner”. In this so-called “dance”, you go across to visit another of the members. For instance, I might go and meet the real estate agent at her office. Or another week I might end up talking to the financial planner in the group. Being new and enjoying this extroverted behaviour, I binged on the “dance” I started meeting several members of the BNI group in relatively quick succession. They’d tell me what they did—often spending between 10-20 minutes explaining the details. Then I’d ponder over what they just said, and boil it down to a single line. In effect, I’d given them a tagline—a working tagline that would elicit curiosity and get their prospects interested. The first time I encapsulated their 20 minute speech into a single line, I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. Twenty or thirty tagline later, with everyone telling me how “great” I was at taglines, I decided to make that my entry point into marketing. I wasn’t going to be the best in the world at marketing—and no one can ever take such a title. But I could create a subset. And that’s because a subset is simpler than a well-laid out, world domination plan. Which means that you’re going to make a career out of teaching a program like InDesign, don’t take on every tool bar in the program. Just teach clients how to create an amazing e-book in under an hour. The Hedgehog Concept If you’re going to be the best in the world at WordPress sites, you’re headed for chaos. But take on a subset and you could be the designer that gets clients to their destination in just three steps. Even the all-time greats in the history of mankind—take Michelangelo for instance—he made the statue of David his subset. He was headed towards the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel in time, but to start on that journey of greatness, he had to take on carving just the statue of David. Once you deal with a subset, passion almost force-feeds you with energy Avis found its passion once it had the subset of “trying harder” instead of the grand scheme of “trying to do everything”. I found my subset quite by accident while taking on taglines. And the moment you streamline your idea into one tiny bit, you’ll get enormous control over that bit—and the passion faucet will begin to flow. You’ll read more about the subset, practice it longer and harder and it will take over your life. Which effectively means you’re done with two elements of the Hedgehog principle all at once. You have your passion—thanks to your subset—and it’s put you well and truly on the road to personal and professional greatness. That leaves just the looming question. Will it drive your economic engine? Will it pay the bills? And how soon? I didn’t know the answer to that question of the economic engine In fact, I did something very silly in my quest for “being the best in the world”. I quit cartooning—yup, just like that. One fine day, I decided I wasn’t going to do any cartoons. And then something extremely strange happened. No one called me for a cartoon project any more. Right until that moment I’d been filling that balance sheet with a decent profit, and suddenly I didn’t get a single call or e-mail for another cartoon project. Be aware that I was drawing stuff for ad agencies, magazine covers, local councils and private clients. And yet, it stopped almost as if I had taken a full page ad in the newspaper that said, “Sean D’Souza doesn’t want to draw cartoons any more. Stop bugging him.” My dream had come true, but I didn’t have a buffer. The buffer isn’t just money It’s also the buffer of knowledge and of confidence. Remember, I wasn’t a marketing guy, I was a cartoonist. That thought stays in your head and seriously undermines your confidence. Getting to the library, stacking up 30 books at a time was top priority. We’re talking about economic engines here, and knowledge plays a big role in how you get paid. Having the skills to run a business is what allows you to make that engine vroom. I had to teach myself how to write great articles, how to create compelling copy—and yes, how to speak. That buffer was important for my economic engine, but money played its role too. I jumped right into marketing and out of a business I’d spend a chunk of time beefing up on the learning and the skills. But I hadn’t considered the factor that everything takes time to turnaround. It was a rash move, and luckily Renuka had a decent job. That paid the bills, the mortgage and let me fumble forward toward this “greatest in the world” dream. Um, Renuka also quit her job and joined Psychotactics a few months later, but that buffer was all we needed. We were now on a trajectory to align ourselves with the Hedgehog Principle. Like Michelangelo, we had to carve one David at a time. Like Avis, we had to “try harder” one car at a time. We were passionate about what we did. And the clients started to trickle in. But the Hedgehog principle itself, isn’t enough Jim Collins stresses a second more important factor. In fact, he considers this second factor to be the most important of all the material he’s written over the years. It’s called: Preserving the core AND stimulating progress. Let’s find out just what this means for you and your small business. Preserve the Core AND Stimulate Progress Recently a client called Rosa wrote to us with a request. “I would have preferred to read the series on Dartboard Pricing in ePub,” she said. She made it clear it was a request, not a demand. Which brings up a whole new set of problems for us at Psychotactics. Most business books are designed with text in mind and may contain a few graphics. Our books aren’t designed that way at all. They have dozens of cartoons and under every cartoon is a caption. In The Brain Audit alone there are almost 100 cartoons and corresponding captions. In a PDF, this layout is easy-peasy. Create the book in InDesign and export it as a PDF and it maintains its design integrity. Try to do the same thing for an ePub and it’s like stepping in poo. It’s a tedious, frustrating process to get all the graphics to align the way they should The easier way is to just make a quick excuse, apologies and move on. After all, it isn’t like 90% of our audience is asking for an ePub. It’s just a stray request, isn’t it? It’s simple to ignore the request and get on with the important task of doing whatever it is we do. But that’s where the problem lies, doesn’t it? We’ve ignored the concept of progress. Almost all of us today read on a tablet or our phones. I know I do, my wife does, even my mother in law who ranted and raved about computers—she now loves her iPad. And PDFs work on tablet devices and phones, but they’re super clunky. Sadly that’s not the only problem Jim Collins talks about two elements: preserving the core and stimulating progress. And he goes to great lengths to stress the AND in between both of them. So all of us have to stand back and ask ourselves: What’s our core? The core of Psychotactics has been the factor of “consumption”. Any one can create attraction and conversion. It’s super-hard to get clients to consume what they’ve bought from you. Books, courses, workshops—we spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure out how to achieve a skill. The cartoons, the captions in the book—they’re not just a design concept. They’re placed there as memory hooks; as a method of summary. They need to be exactly where they are in the books and courses. We could remove them and easily create an ePub like most ePubs, but that would fit in with our core. Collins says it has to be an AND. We have to preserve the core AND stimulate progress. This principle is clearly frustrating and pulls in opposite directions. When you’re starting out, you don’t have any legacy issues in place. You create a business the way you want to shape it. And the core and the progress moves along nicely. It’s when you “grow up” that you have to worry about how all the past has to fit in with the future. The longer you’ve been in business, the greater the past, and the more the past has to merge with an ever changing future. Take Nokia for instance You can almost hear the sound of the Nokia ring, can’t you? In the early 2000s, all of us would have at one point in time run into, or owned a Nokia. Nokia was no slouch in realm of being super-progresssive. They were into paper, then electricity and bounced from there to rubber, galoshes and finally were the most dominant phone manufacturer on the planet. In the early 1990’s they had a clear and accurate vision of the future. They saw the coming of the cell phone, dumped all their businesses and stuck with the cell phone. And then, just for good measure, they invented the first smart phone. That amazing device you take photos with, use to find your way around and yes, make phone calls—Nokia was on the ball way back in 1996. They even built a prototype of an Internet-enabled phone at the end of the 90’s. And then they got stuck in a loop They failed to see the link between their core—which was to make really simple phones—and the future. The future was software. The core of their legacy was hardware. They spent millions of dollars turning out failure after failure. They believed so much in their hardware that they just couldn’t figure out the software issues. And down they went, ring and all, finally selling their company to Microsoft. To go from good to great we have to ask ourselves What’s the core of our business. What do we stand for? What will we never change, never compromise on—and yet how will we step into the future when it presents itself to us. Most of us rarely have a problem with core values. Once we’ve spent enough time in our business, we know what we stand for, but what we fail to prepare ourselves for is the oncoming storm. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done. The worst three words we repeat over and over, when faced with change is: I know that, I know that, I know that. I thought I knew a lot about podcasts After all I’d rode the early wave of podcasts when Apple first introduced them. And then in 2008/09 we decided to pull the plug on the podcast. When clients—and one client in particular—kept asking me to create a podcast, I’d ignore the comment. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were a thing of the past. I wasn’t ready to listen and the years ticked away while we busied ourselves with the core of what we’d always done. Today, the “Three Month Vacation” podcast is one of the biggest joys in my day I love writing, I love presentations, but it’s the podcast that connects me to a medium I love. And in turn the podcast connects us to our clients in ways that not possible on paper, or through books. The podcast is the closest we come to an offline workshop. But I wasn’t interested in the “future”. As far as I was concerned, podcasts were the distant past. And today we know those thoughts, that strategy was wrong. We see the enormous number of clients who find the podcast, then sign up to the newsletter. At our offline workshops over 50% of the audience listens religiously to the podcast. The podcast fit in so nicely with our core. And was the medium of the future. Even so, it’s not possible to chase every rainbow Technology moves ahead at a blinding pace. You can’t play with every new phenomenon. Which is why we have to go back to the Hedgehog principle. What can you be the best in the world in? What are you deeply passionate about? What drives your economic engine? In the subset of podcasting, we achieve all three. And this is what you’ll have to do as well. Find your core AND stimulate progress, with your eye always on the passion. The passion is what drives your business today and will continue to do so in the future. If you don’t wake up crazy with happiness, then you’re not headed towards greatness. It’s the reason I moved on from cartooning back in the early 2000s. I wasn’t waking up happy as a lark—and so I had to find something else. Which, interestingly, takes us to our third element: The hairy, audacious goal—oh, it’s big too. That makes it the BHAG (pronounced: bee-hag). The BHAG Until the moment Greig Bebner set to work on his kitchen table with a glue gun and some kite material, the basic design of the modern umbrella hadn’t changed since 1928. They come in all sorts of colours, shapes and fancy gizmos, but the core elements of the umbrella are the same—and they don’t work. The moment a gust of wind comes along, you hear cursing, then more cursing and finally the umbrella being thrown on the pavement. So Greg set about on a big, hairy, audacious goal—a BHAG. He wanted an umbrella that would stand up to the crazy wind and rain on One Tree Hill. Now if you’ve ever visited Auckland, New Zealand, you’re likely to have your hair tossed around wildly on a windy One Tree Hill day. It’s certainly no place to open an umbrella. Then to push that BHAG even further, he tested the Blunt at Force 12 (117 km/h) which is the maximum setting of the test wind tunnel. The umbrella stood up to the punishment with ease. But why did the umbrella work so flawlessly? It starts with the BHAG. It’s almost a Star Trek kind of goal—to go where no man gone before. It’s not a namby-pamby set of goals. It’s one overarching factor that scares the heebie-jeebies out of you as a business owner. A windy day on One Tree Hill in the middle of a storm. That’s a good testing ground for an umbrella. Sometimes this goal is restricted to your product, sometimes it’s a lot bigger. Like Akio Morita, the co-founder and former chairman of Sony Corporation. He was working on a revolutionary product called the Walkman. Until the Walkman was introduced on July 1, 1979. Until the Walkman showed up, portable music players were non-existent. Even though the Walkman stuttered with disappointing sales in the first month, it went on to sell over 400 million units. But Morita’s goal wasn’t just to sell a ton of Walkmans His goal was a lot loftier. Before Sony introduced a ton of extremely sophisticated equipment, Japan was considered to be a backward country. It was associated with paper parasols and shoddy imitations. Akio Morita wanted to turn that perception around so that “Made in Japan” commanded respect and was associated with high quality. And he succeeded, with Sony at the forefront of his BHAG. In 2014, A Harris poll showed Sony was the No. 1 brand name among American consumers, ahead of American companies like General Electric and Coca-Cola. At Psychotactics, we have a BHAG too The goal is to get rid of information for information sake and replace it with skill, instead. We’re drowning in information, and yet every book, every course brings even more information to the table. But is that what we really want? Or do we want the skill instead. We want to write articles, create sales pages, be able to sell at higher prices. We want to learn to cook, draw, paint or acquire skills that make us look, feel and be smarter. A BHAG has to be hairy, audacious, and bigger than anyone thinks possible. Starbucks had a BHAG too It was to open up a new Starbucks cafe every single day of the year. But soon enough, Starbucks was running into trouble. Can you see why? It’s big, hairy and audacious to open up a Starbucks every single day, but does it inspire any passion? Does it feel like you’re somehow changing the world you live in, let alone the world around you? The BHAG wasn’t to make Sony the star, but instead to make Japan and Japanese products top-notch once again. Every business should have a BHAG. Something that sits there in the corner challenging you to become better—not necessarily bigger—than you are. To create a Ferris Wheel or an Eiffel Tower. To create artworks of enduring magnificence as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt did. And the way to create that BHAG is to scare yourself. To know that everyone says there are things you’re not supposed to achieve. That these things are impossible. And yet, you do it, because it’s the most inspiring thing to do! Combined with the Hedgehog principle, preserving the core and stimulating progress, you have a system in place that can take your business from good to great. And even as you embark on this journey, you know that you will forever be on the road to making things better, not necessarily bigger, but always better. Better—it’s a great place to be! The action plan and summary coming in the next episode. Click here to listen to part 2:  Good to Great: How To Escalate The Path To Greatness http://www.psychotactics.com/path-to-greatness/

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

When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out and more importantly, get read. http://www.psychotactics.com/secret-getting-your-report-read/  ------------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What makes a report powerful? Part 2: What are tiny increments? Part 3: How to empower your reader Earlier Recording: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode. Re-Release: Right click and ‘save as’ to download this episode. Useful Resources and Links Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park  ------------------------------------- Back in the year 2003  I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report. This is the interesting part. The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements. What makes the report so powerful? The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments. What are tiny increments? About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment. You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed. You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target. When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake. You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment. The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments. You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step. Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length. Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report? The core of empowerment is simply one of length. When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one. What is the third concept? The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor. Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour. That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either. Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes. We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying. Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do? I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea? What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so? If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together. During the event, some things went wrong for speakers. The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them. Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia. We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C.. If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study. It’s not cheap but it helps you construct that book. You go from this report and you can create audio, video or webinars, but not just any old webinar or any audio or book, but stuff that empowers and empowers in a big way. You can find that in the product section of the Psychotactics site. If you’re not looking for something quite that big, you might want to check out Dartboard Pricing, because if nothing else you want to increase your prices without losing customers. You can find that at psychotactics.com/ttc. If on the other hand you want to send me a message, I’m at @SeanD’Souza on Twitter, Sean D’Souza on Facebook, and of course on Psychotactics at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re wondering how you can deconstruct the headline report, you can go to psychotactics.com and subscribe, and you will get the headline report. If you’ve already subscribed, go to psychotactics.com/psychoheadlines.pdf, and there it is just for you. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now.   You can also listen to or read this episode: #8:The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity http://www.psychotactics.com/power-enough-critical-sanity/

Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours?  http://www.psychotactics.com/expertise-fewer-10000-hours/ ----------- 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. Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? They probably practice for two or three off and on, and then after that, they drive. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today? Several years ago, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”. Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work. The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t? What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented? Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all. In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true? The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours? The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours? Let’s start out with the concept of why the 10,000 hours is absolutely true. Now, nothing is absolutely true, but the 10,000-hour principle works for a simple reason. That is we don’t know that we’re making mistakes. If you take a guitarist, say someone like John Mayer, or Eric Clapton, or B.B. King, and you look at how long they spent with their guitar, they probably spent an excessive 10,000 hours. When you’re starting out and when you’re playing that guitar, you don’t really know what mistakes you’re making, and you don’t really care. You’re there just to play the guitar, and this is what a lot of artists do. This is what a lot of writers do. They spend enormous amounts of hours just fooling around, just playing the guitar, just drawing a cartoon, just writing something, and they make mistakes. They make a lot of mistakes, but the problem is they don’t know that they’re making a mistake. Take for instance my own life. When I started drawing cartoons, I was probably just out of school, and I was drawing cartoons that are pretty flat. One day, my friend, Howard, he said, “Well, there’s something wrong with your drawing.” I said, “What’s wrong?” He couldn’t explain, but he said, “They’re really flat.” It was then I realized that I wasn’t using perspective. Until that moment, I didn’t realize. I’ve been drawing for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours, but I didn’t realize I was making a mistake. Several years later, I started doing commercial projects, and someone mentioned that my lines were too weak. Lines are too weak? What do you mean by lines are too weak? They couldn’t explain, but I had to do my own research, and then I found that great artists have this variation in their life to take and attend. This is what most musicians, artists, painters, people who are talented at anything that you think are talented at something, they’ve spent thousands of hours just making mistakes. If you take the mistakes out of the equation, we don’t have 10,000 hours. We have a thousand hours, maybe less. If you go strictly by the rulebook, you can fly a commercial aircraft after 1,500 hours. Now, admittedly, you’re not going to get a job for 1,500 hours, but you can fly it. You can fly one of those big jets after having done just 1,500 hours. This is true for cartooning as well. This is true for writing. It’s easy to say that it’s true, but the proof or the footing is in the eating, so we decided to prove the point. In 2010, we started a course that we knew for sure no one or very few people to do, and that is to draw cartoons. People into the course is saying, “Well, I can’t draw a straight line.” The ironic thing is that to be a cartoonist, you don’t have to draw a straight line. You have to draw wobbly lines all over the place. Nonetheless, within 6 months, those people that joined the course and stayed for those 6 months were drawing so well that people were commissioning work from them. They were asking them, “Are you a professional cartoonist?” It’s amazing because when you think about it, these are all business owners. They probably have an hour a day, five day a week. That makes it about 25 hours in a month. In 6 months, that’s 150 hours. Within just 150 hours, they changed the perception of someone looking at them. Suddenly, to the outside world, these guys were cartoonists since they were little. It doesn’t take 150 hours to learn to drive a car, and that’s because there are fewer moving parts as it were. There are moving parts with cartooning. You have to learn perspective, and thick and thin, and background, foreground. Lots of things. Lots of little, little things that make a great painting, and the same applies for writing, and the same applies for any language that you’re learning. There are lots of these moving parts. The difference between a guitarist that just picks up a guitar and plays, and this person who’s learning how to draw cartoons or write, they are running into mistakes, and those mistakes are being picked up very quickly and fixed. Yes, the 10,000 hours work, but they don’t work when the mistakes can be picked up very quickly and fixed. This is the reason why pilots don’t crash planes every day. It’s because they sit in a simulator, and the simulator picks up those mistakes, and it enables you to fix those mistakes. Yes, the 10,000 hours works, but only if you don’t know what mistakes you’re making. When you’re younger, there is no pressure to earn money, or win any competition, or do anything, so you’re allowed to make those mistakes, and then fix them in your own time. This is why it takes 10,000 hours to get to that level of mastery. While this brings us to the end of the first part, we have to explore the second part which is, why does the flaw exist? Why don’t we pick up these mistakes? The biggest reason why we don’t pick up the mistakes is very simple. As we grow up, we’re not supposed to make mistakes. We’re supposed to get things right. When you do a test, nobody says, “Hey, you have to get 30% of your test wrong.” You’re expected to get it all right. Once you have this situation where there is pressure to always get things right, then we have a real problem. People will routinely tell you, you should make mistakes. Then, you can learn from your mistakes, but you’re not allowed to make mistakes, so it becomes a catch when you do situation. When we sit down to write a book or a report, or we sit down to write an article, or we sit down to draw, or we sit down to learn Photoshop, we run into this situation where we are not making enough mistakes, and not being able to pick them up quickly, and not being able to fix them. The only way out of this problem is to have a system where you can make mistakes, and so this is what we do on the headline course, for instance. There is one week where you learn how to write the headlines and another week where you write the wrong headlines, and you would say, “What’s the deal?” Why should you learn to write the wrong headlines? Think about it for a second. It’s the same thing that pilots go through. They go through a simulator exercise where the plane is crashing. They have to learn to identify the mistake because mistakes are not apparent. The mistakes have to be highlighted. You have to run through the mistakes, and that’s when the speed increases. The reason why we struggle and think that everyone else is talented is because somehow, they’ve had time to get to those mistakes and fix those mistakes, and we don’t have that time. As we grow up, we have more responsibilities, and we have more activity, and we have more things that we have to do. Getting straight to the mistakes and fixing those mistakes is what makes it powerful. If you look at talent as something that is inborn, you will struggle all your life because it means you can never have it; but if you look at talent as a reduction of errors or reduction of mistakes, then you realise that you just have to find the mistakes and eliminate them, or at least reduce them, and you have talent. The flow exist in the system that doesn’t allow you to make mistakes, and this takes us to the third part of this episode which is how to get there quickly. There are three elements to get to a talent very quickly. The first is the teacher, the second is the system, and the third is the group. If we start up with the teacher, then the teacher must have a method, and that method should be about creating safety. If you’re intimidated, it is much harder to do anything because you’re scared all the time, so the teacher must be able to create a safe zone for you. They must have the second element which is the system, and the system must take you through tiny increments. When you say tiny increments, they need to be very small moves like one inch today, one inch tomorrow. Very, very small moves. The reason for that is, supposing you were given a big move to make and say I said, “Move a few steps,” well, you can move three steps left, three steps right, three steps forward or backward. Now, you have to come back three whole steps. Instead, if you make a very small move which is one step, you only have to move one step back, and this is not usually the case. If any of you have done a photography class, you know exactly what I mean. In that one class, they will talk about exposure, and F-stops, and aperture, and everything; and then, you’re completely confused. You’re not able to take one step, and so you go back to your auto-mode. Most photographers will tell you, “You shouldn’t be on auto-mode. You should be in manual mode. That’s the way to be. You should know your camera like your left hand or your right hand.” Wait a second. Did you actually take one step at a time when you were teaching? Because even when you take a single step, you can be sure that at least a good section of your students have got it wrong, and now you have to bring them back. You have to bring them back to parity, and then take them one step forward. That’s not how training is built. Training is not built by these tiny little increments. Books are not written with these tiny increments. There’s chapter after chapter, after chapter. Of course, we get lost, and so then we think we’re not talented where in fact, the system is at fault. There aren’t enough opportunities to make the mistake for the mistake to be detected, and then for you to rectify that mistake. The way to fix this flaw is to learn in a group. The reason why a group setting is so powerful is because the traditional way of testing someone is really bad. Remember when you were in school, and everyone did their test, and you got some things wrong, and somebody else got some things wrong; but eventually, nobody got to see what the other person got wrong. You’d do your assignment, and you’d hand it to the teacher, and she’d mark it and give it back to you, and only you could see what you got wrong; but if the entire group could see what you got wrong, they could learn from your mistake and you could learn from their mistakes. This is the fundamental flaw in most training. We’re not allowed to see everybody else’s work, but when you see other people’s work, you can learn from their work. It seems quite obvious when someone tells you this that you could learn from other people, but that’s not how the system is built, and this is why it takes 10,000 hours to reach anywhere or 10,000 hours to reach that level of mastery. People are not stupid. People are very, very intelligent. People have the ability to acquire talent. People have the ability to reduce their errors; but often, it’s the teacher, the system, and the group, or the lack of group that lets them down. If you believe that someone else is more talented that you at cooking, at drawing, at painting, at writing, the reason is you haven’t figured out the mistakes and removed them. Once you do that, you have talent. Let’s summarize what we’ve learned so far. The first thing we covered today is the whole concept of the 10,000 hours, and was it true? We found out yes, it is true. It takes a long time because we don’t know the mistakes. If we don’t know the mistakes, then we make them, and we don’t realise we’re making those mistakes. The second thing we covered was the flaw that exist, and that is people tell you to make mistakes, but no one gives you the chance to make the mistakes. There is no system emplaced. There is no whole week of, “Let’s make these mistakes, so that we can learn from them.” This takes us to the third part which is you have to have a teacher, you have to have a system, and you have to have a group. When you have these three elements, the teacher will work out the tiny increments and move you forward. The system will be not just how to, but how not to. Finally, the group will expose the errors of another 20 people; so now, you’re able to look at 20 errors, and at least learn from them, and possibly not make those errors in the future. The exposure to errors, that is the critical part of talent. Talent is simply a reduction of errors. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Probably, the best thing that you can do for yourself is to stop looking at how to. Start looking at courses, and training, and systems that talk about how not to because unless they have both the how-to and the how-not-to component, you’re going to make errors that you don’t even realise you’re making, and then you get stuck. In the moment you get stuck, you think, “Well, this is not for me. I’m not good at this. I’m not talented;” and it’s not that at all. When the system is built with mistakes as part of the assignments, that’s when you know that you’re in the right path, and that’s when you know what you can quickly acquire that talent. Talent acquisition is really cool because you can now do the very same thing in half the time or a lot of the time. Of course, this gives you more scope to do other stuff, achieve more stuff, and go on vacation. If you have any questions then email us at sean@psychotactics.com. You’ll find this on the website or sean@5000bc.com. Also, I’m giving away something free that is a report on outwitting resistance. If you’ve ever been stuck because you don’t know how to battle resistance, there’s this really cool report, and it’s free—How to Win the Resistance Game. http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/

When you're speaking to a client or presenting your product or service, do you have a ton of "ums" and "ahs"? Do you find it frustrating, but don't know how to get rid of that irritation? And if you're recording an event, a whole bunch of ums and ahs can cause a major headache in editing?plus push up editing time and frustration levels. So how can you get rid of all your ums and ahs in under 15 minutes? http://www.psychotactics.com/speaking-professionally/ ---------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1:  How to get rid of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ when podcasting or speaking in  under 15 minutes Part 2:  The sound of spit and how to get rid of it Part 3:  Why you need variation in your voice Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Read about: Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain Preacher or Teacher? Why Our Clients Struggle To Learn Skills Quickly Other techniques:  Why Variation Is The Hallmark of Outstanding Presenters ---------------- The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. We’ve been podcasting since around November of 2014. One of the things that I never seem to cover is anything to do with podcasts. That’s not on purpose, it’s just something that I’ve never covered. Today I’m going to have this very short podcast, no stories, just a little technique that will help you as you’re going about creating audio or even speaking in public. Little Technique To Help Creating Audio There are a few things that we do when we’re recording podcasts that are very frustrating. The first thing that we do is we cannot help it and we go um, uh, um. These ums and uhs seem to infiltrate our speech whether it’s in a podcast or in an interview or just presenting to your client. On podcasts, you also get the sound of spit, yes? Moisture in your mouth. It sounds like [chump chump 00:01:06], like that. It’s very frustrating for you, not so much for the listener. After awhile even listeners start to tune in to that spit kind of sound. How do we get rid of that? Finally the third thing about the podcast is just this variation in your voice. It’s very easy to start recording and forget that there’s an audience out there. You’re never speaking to an audience, you’re always speaking to one person and this is the mistake that we make. These are the three glitches that we make when we’re podcasting. Today I’m going to get rid of all three of them. How to get rid of ‘ums’ when podcasting or speaking Let’s start off with getting rid of all the um and the uhs that we have when we are podcasting or speaking to anyone at all. It doesn’t matter whether you use a PC or a Mac, you’ve seen that spinning ball on your computer haven’t you? When the computer’s trying to access something, it’s going through that, hey let’s get to this something. You can’t do anything and you’re just sitting there waiting for it to do it’s thing before you can continue working. That’s approximately what your brain is doing, but at a much higher speed. It’s a better processor, your brain. What it’s doing is it’s trying to access the information. Every time a speaker says um or ah or like, that’s approximately what they’re doing. They’re accessing their database. How do you stop it? At all points in time, especially if you’re not reading off the screen, like right now I’m not reading off the screen. My brain has to work out what I’m going to say next and yet there are no ums or likes or ahs coming out. The reason is, I’m pausing. I could say “Um what we need to do next is um” or I could say, “So … what we need to do next is …” It’s a little break. You’re noticing it now because I’m bringing it to your attention. That’s all I do. Whenever I’m making a presentation, whether it’s on stage or it’s a webinar or any kind of recording, I’m conscious about the ums and the pauses. All I do is stop speaking. Just let your brain access the information it needs and let a natural pause come in. Now if your podcast is anything like this podcast, then there will be music in the background, and sometimes not even music in the background, but a lot of music, and the pause won’t be noticeable. If you’re speaking in public, it’s critical to get rid of the ums. If you’re doing a recording like this, it’s a nuisance to remove all the ums. When I started out many years ago, when we did our first workshop in Los Angeles in 2004, there were ums and ahs all over the place. The more tired I got, the more ums and ahs just popped up out of the woodwork. I just had to learn to pause. I’m not saying that in a live workshop, which lasts two or three days, you’re not going to get ums and ahs. It’s just that you can reduce it dramatically. In a podcast or a speech like this where you’re nice and fresh, you can eliminate it completely. Just practice that for 15 minutes. Just pause whenever you think you should be saying an um and sooner or later you get rid of all the ums and the ahs. If one or two creep in, that’s easy to edit. The second factor that we are dealing with when recording podcast is this sound of moisture in your mouth. Whenever you sit down to do an interview, often you’ll find that the person on the other end of the line will say hey wait I’m going to get a glass of water. That’s because they want to keep their mouths nice and moist. Your voice doesn’t crack and it’s a really good idea, especially if you’re on a call for maybe an hour, like later today I’m on a call for an hour and a glass of water really helps. When you’re doing something like a recording, you’re very close to the mike. Every little [click click 00:05:29] sound just clicks in as one more click. It’s very frustrating for you. What I tend to do is I record in short bursts. I’ll keep my mouth very dry, which is totally counter intuitive. I’ll keep it extremely dry, actually try to suck out all the moisture, and then I’ll record in short bursts. One sentence, two three sentences at a time and then I’ll stop and then continue. It’s funny but if you concentrate on it, you will find that the moisture doesn’t enter your mouth at all. You can go for several sentences, as I’m doing right now. I haven’t really stopped, even though you don’t know, the tape is just rolling. The funny thing is that if you train yourself to speak for long periods without having to access any moisture in your mouth, you will find that you can speak for quite a long time without any of those clicks that you get from the moisture in your mouth. The trick is to just keep it dry. That’s the trick I use rather than moisten it. The moment I get access to water, I’m in trouble again. This is not foolproof. Obviously some of the clicks are going to escape and they’re going to get on tape, but it doesn’t matter. You can go and edit it. You just have to do a lot less editing and you’re more aware of the clicking sound. The third and final issue is one of speaking to an audience. Often when we get in front of the mike, we think that we have the whole audience listening in. Good presenters and people who have been on radio know that you’re always speaking to a single person. When you’re speaking on stage, you have lights in front of you and often you can’t see much. You can’t see more than a few people in the front row. What you’ve got to do is start to pick on one or two people in the audience and speak to them as if you were having a conversation with them. The same thing applies to the podcast. When you start to speak as if you’re speaking to an audience, it becomes less of a discussion, a conversation. Think of it more as someone sitting in the same room with you or at a café. Always use the word you. The second thing that we forget is that we have to change our tone, our pitch, our speed. If you listen to this podcast you will notice that I will suddenly speak quickly and then really slow down. In real life we have variations. We speak quickly or slowly, we get all excited and go louder and then go really quiet. You can do this on stage, you can do this in your podcast, you can do this in your presentation. You have to be aware of it. You have to have this space or this sudden movement through it, and then it becomes like a conversation and it’s no longer this single paced monotone podcast where you’re speaking to an audience. One last tip. When you’re recording audio, you want to smile. When you smile, I don’t know, something in your voice changes. When I announce this is The Three Month Vacation, I’m smiling. You can feel that smile. You can’t see me, but you can feel that smile. Smiling when you’re speaking- not all the time, just some of the time- the audience figures it out. I don’t know how. That’s pretty much it for this podcast. Three things that we covered. Let’s do a quick summary. The first thing that we did was the ums and ahs. It’s very simple to get rid of the ums and ahs. All you have to do is pause. It sounds like a crazy long pause, but it doesn’t matter. Just pause. It’s fine. The second thing is this moisture in your mouth which causes all these clicks. The way to do that is not to have water around, or at least to keep speaking, don’t worry about your mouth getting dry, and if you get some clicks in, you can go and edit them later. Anyway, the clicks seem to come just before you start speaking or just after, so start speaking, leave a little gap, and then continue speaking. You’ll be able to edit out those clicks quite easily. Finally remember you’re not speaking to an audience. You’re always speaking to one person, maybe two people. You’re always using the word you. It’s a good idea to vary your tone. When you press the pause button more often, the tone changes automatically. When you come back again, your tone has changed just a little bit. Because all of my recordings are done without a script, I have to hit the pause a lot of times. That’s why you’ll find the tone shifting a lot. I’m also conscious of the fact that sometimes I’m slowing down and sometimes I’m going really fast. Sometimes you go softer and sometimes you get more excited and you go a little louder. All of that creates for this variation that you find in normal every day speech. That makes it so much better to listen to a podcast. There you go. Finally some tips on podcasting. What’s the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to put these gaps. It doesn’t matter where you speak, you’re going to have the ums and ahs come in because that’s how we access the database in our brains. If you just put in these pauses just like I’m doing right now and train yourself to do it, you’ll find fewer ums and ahs on a regular basis. Another trick is to make sure that you have examples. For instance I will get a lot of ums and ahs when I’m doing an interview and I’m trying to work out some examples to give in that interview. If I’m talking about The Brain Audit, I need to have examples of the problem and of the solution. I need to have examples of the objections. When the person asks me about the problem or the solution, my brain is trying to access the examples and then I go um and ah. That’s another way to avoid it when you’re in a live call, when you’re in a live interview. To have the examples prepared in advance. This is podcast number 72. That’s at psychotactics.com/72 where you can get the transcript and the audio. You’re listening to this podcast while we’re in Amsterdam. It’s going to be cold and freezing in Amsterdam. This podcast is being recorded while we’re still in Oakland and it’s warm and sunny out there. We’re going through the United States, Amsterdam, Morocco, Singapore, before we get back to New Zealand. It’s going to be a long trip, a month away, and we’ve got to have everything cued up in advance. All the podcasts have been cued up and all the newsletters and all the 500bc newsletters, which is our membership site. That’s a lot of work, but once we’re done with that work we can go on vacation. We don’t have to check email, we don’t have to do any of that stuff. If you have any more questions on podcasting, or you have tips on podcasting, send them to me at sean@psychotactics.com. I’m also on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now. Still reading? Don’t miss—Why A Relaxed Brain Works Faster Than A Tired Brain http://www.psychotactics.com/relaxed-brain-faster/

Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1:  Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How ‘Irregular’ Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn’t really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn’t mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, “Do you do goal setting?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have goals,” and he goes, “No. Do you have goals on paper?” I said, “No.” He says, “We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper.” That’s how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you’re just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can’t write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That’s exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That’s when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, “Pick three.” I said, “I could pick five.” He goes, “No, no, no. Pick three.” I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I’d achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug’s method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don’t happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I’m going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we’ll go the other way. We’re create a stop doing list. Finally, we’ll look at benchmarks and see how we’ve done in the year. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven’t ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters. That’s because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day. The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don’t seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There’s too many things and we have no control over it. What’s going to stop it? The only thing that seems to stop anything is some kind of focus and goal setting is focus. The way we go about our goal setting is the way Doug showed me. The first category of goal setting is what we want to achieve at work. The second set comprises of our personal goals. The third, this is the most critical of all, what we’re going to learn. Should we start off with the first one, which is our work goals? Well, that’s not the way we do it as Psychotactics. The way we work at Psychotactics is we look at our personal goals. Our own lives are far more important than work. What we do is we sit down, and first, we plan vacations. As you know, we take three months off. We’ve been doing this since 2004. We started our business at the end of 2002. Yet by 2004, we had decided we were going to take three months off. The thing is that your vacations also need planning. Our vacations are broken up into big breaks, small breaks, and weekends. Now the big breaks are the month long vacations, and then the small breaks are in between that. We’re go away for a couple of days somewhere, and that’s our small break. I’m saying weekends, because before I wouldn’t take weekends off. I’d be working on the weekend at least for a few hours on Saturday morning and a few hours on Sunday morning, and I don’t do that any more. Now that’s almost written in stone. It’s very hard for me to get to work on weekends. I’ll slide sometimes, but it’s very hard. The most critical thing to do is to work out the long breaks. When are we going to have those, and then the shorter breaks. That comprises that whole vacation concept, but you also have to have other personal goals. Maybe I want to learn how to cook Mexican dishes, or maybe I want to learn how to take better photographs. Now, these are personal projects. They’re not not pseudo work projects. They’re things that, at the end of the year, I go, “Wow, that’s what I’ve achieved. That’s how much I progressed.” That’s how you start off with personal goals. You plan your breaks. You plan what you want to do personally. Once you’re done with that, then you go to your work goals. We have a lot of work goals, we have the article writing workshop coming up, we’ve got the 50 words workshop, which is, how do you start up an article. We’ve got a whole bunch of things, because we’ve got products, we’ve got courses, we’ve got workshops. All of this has to sit nicely between, so that we work for 12 weeks and then we go on a break. We’ve decided that we’re not having any workshops next year. We’ve had a lot of workshops this year, no workshops next year. Now, this leaves us the chance to focus on the courses and the products. Now my brain is like that dam, there’s always water rushing over. I want to do a million projects, but then I have to choose. The article writing course is one of the things that I want to do for sure. I want to do a version 2.0 of it. The cartoon bank, I’ve been putting that off for a long time. That’s definitely something I want to do. Then I’ll pick a third one. Do I stop at three? No, but I make sure that I get these three down. The three that I’m going to do, they go down on paper. Some other projects will come up, a lot of stuff that I might not expect, and yet I’ll get all of this done, but these three, they’ll get done. Those three vacations, they will get done. Then we get to the third part, which is learning. What am I going to learn this next year? Maybe I’ll learn a software, or maybe I’ll learn how to use audio better. The point is, I have to write it down, because once I write it down, then I’m going to figure out where I have to go and what I have to do to make sure that learning happens. This is not just learning like reading some books or doing something minor like that. This is big chunks of learning, so that by the the end of the year, I know I’ve reached that point. When it comes to planning, the first thing that we’re always doing is we’re looking at these three elements, which is work, vacation, and learning. If we have to do other sub projects, we’ll do it, but these nine things get done. Year after year after year. This is what Doug taught me, he gave me this ability to focus. I consider myself to be unfocused, I consider myself to want to do everything and anything. That was the gift of Doug. In the year 2008, we had a program, it was a year long program. You probably heard of it. It was called a Psychotactics Protégé program. We would teach clients how to write articles, how to create info products, public relations. Lots of things along the way in that year. As you’d expect, it was reasonably profitable. 15 students paid $10,000, and so that was $150,000 that we would have in the bank before the year started. In 2009, we pulled the plug on the Protégé system. Why would we do that? We started it in 2006, it was full, in 2007 it was full, in 2008 it was full, in 2009 there was a waiting list. We decided not to go ahead with it. We decided it was going to go on our stop doing list. We were going to walk away from $150,000, just like that. Yes, some clients were unhappy, because they wanted to be on the next Protégé program. They had seen the testimonials, they had seen the results. They knew that it was good enough to sign up for. They knew that $10,000 was a very small investment, for a year long advancement. On our part, we realized that we had to walk away from $150,000 that we were getting on cue, every December. This is what’s called a stop doing list. We’ve used this stop doing list in our own lives. When we left India, and got to Auckland, it wasn’t like we were leaving something desperate. We were leaving something that was really good. I was drawing tattoos all day, going bowling in the afternoon, having long lunches, Renuka’s company was doing really well. They were picking up all expenses, and the only thing we really had to pay for was food but, at that point in time, we decided we had to make a break. We had to stop doing something so that we could do something different. We don’t know whether that different is better, but at that point we have to stop it, so that we can explore what is coming up ahead. There are two things that you put on your stop doing list. One, something that is working exceedingly well. The second thing, something that’s doing really badly. Or something that’s getting in your way. Now, the first one doesn’t make any sense. If something is doing exceedingly well, why would you stop it? Well, the point is that if you continue to do something, then you can’t do something else. You don’t know how good that something is until you stop doing it and then you go on to do something else. Last night, I was reading The New Yorker, and The New Yorker is one of my favorite magazines. There’s James Surowiecki saying exactly the same thing. He’s saying that Time Warner should sell HBO. HBO has now 120 million subscribers globally. It has earned over 2 billion dollars in profits last year. It’s stand alone streaming service has got over a million new subscribers since last spring. What does the article recommend? It recommends that they get rid of it, they sell it, they get the best price for it at this point of time, when they’re doing so well. What if it doubles in its value? That’s the answer we’ll never know, but the article went on. It talked about ESPN and how in 2014 it was worth 50 billion dollars. Disney owned it, they should have sold it, they could have banked the money. They could have focused on something else, but no, they kept it. ESPN is still doing well, it’s still the dominant player, but you can see that it’s not exactly where it was in 2014. The Protégé program was doing really well for us, clients were with us for the whole year. They would then join 5000 BC, we’d get to meet them. It was a lot of fun, and it generated a sizable revenue and we walked away from it. It enabled us to do other stuff that we would not have been able to do. When you say stop doing list, it’s not just the bad stuff that you have to stop doing. Sometimes you have to stop doing the things that are very critical, like next year we’re not doing workshops. Workshops are very critical to our business, but we’re not going to do the workshops. Instead, we’ll do online courses. Instead, we’ll do something else. We’ll create that space for ourselves, even though the workshops are doing really well. The other side of the stop doing list is stuff that’s driving you crazy. You know it’s driving you crazy, but you’re not stopping it. For instance, in September of this year, we started rebuilding the Psychotactic site. Now, there are dozens of pages on the Psychotactic site and I want to fiddle around with every single one of them, and do things that are interesting, different. The problem is that there are other projects, like for instance the storytelling workshop. Of course, vacations that get in the way. The point is that, at some point, you have to say, okay, I really want to do this, but I’m not going to do this. I’m going to put it off until later. This is procrastination, but it is part of a stop doing list. You can’t do everything in the same time. Last year, this time, we had the same dilemma when we were going to do the podcasts. I wanted to write some books for Amazon, and I wanted to do the podcast. Every day, we would go for a walk, and it would run me crazy. I didn’t know where to start, when to start, what to do first. I had to sit down and go, okay, what am I going to stop? I just dumped the Amazon books and started on the podcast. Now we’re on podcast number 70, and it’s not even been 52 weeks. It shows you how that stop doing list can help you focus and get stuff out of the way. Sometimes you have to procrastinate to get that point. Now the stop doing list is not restricted to work alone. You can take it into your personal life as well. For instance, I used to get my hair cut by a hairdresser, and I was dissatisfied for a very long time. You come back in, you grumble, and my wife, Renuka, she said, “Okay, stop grumbling. Go and find another hairdresser.” I ran into Shay, now Shay was cutting my hair so well, it was amazing. I wasn’t the only one who thought that was amazing. Usually, I was on a waiting list at a barber shop. I would get there, and there were two people in front of me, waiting for Shay. While a few of the barbers just stood around, doing absolutely nothing because no one was interested. Then, one day, involuntarily, Shay went onto my stop doing list. Kimmy was around and Shay wasn’t and so Kimmy cut my hair. She was better than Shay. I thought, “Oh my goodness. I should have done this a long time ago.” Then Kimmy got transferred to another branch, and now there’s Francis. You’ve heard about Francis in other podcasts. Now Francis is my top guy. There you go, even in something as mundane as cutting hair, there is a stop doing list. You have to push yourself a bit, and at other times you have to pull back and go, “No, we’re not going to do that.” The stop doing list is for good times, as well as for pressurized times. You have to decide, I’m going to stop doing it, I’m going to move onto the next thing. This takes us to the third part of planning, which is benchmarks. Now what are benchmarks? Often when we set out to do a project, say we’re going to do that website. What we don’t do is we don’t write down all the elements that are involved in doing that website because a website can go on forever, can’t it? It expands exponentially. When you are saying, I am going to write books for Amazon. Well, how many books are you going to write? How many pages are the books going to be? What’s the time frame? Where are you going to get the cartoons from? Who’s going to do all the layout? Having this kind of benchmark in mind makes a big difference. When we plan for something, for instance if I’m planning for the article writing course, which is version 2.0. I’m going to have to sit down and work out what I’m going to have to do. When I’m doing the stock cartoons, I’m going to have to sit down and work out what kind of stock cartoons, how many. It’s perfectly fine to write a top level goal. You should do that, you should say, “Okay, I’m going to do the website,” but then you have to get granular. The granular bit tells you, have I reached my destination. Otherwise, people don’t get to their goals, and that’s why they’re struggling, because there’s no clarity. Usually, you’re going to get the clarity when you have only three things to do, but even so, if you don’t have benchmarks you’ll never know when you’re reaching your goal or if you’re going to reach your goal. That brings us to the end of this episode. Summary What did we cover? We looked at three sets of goal setting, and that is your personal goal setting, your work goal setting, and your learning goal setting. Instead of having 700 of them, you just have three things that you want to achieve in the year. Three major things that you want to achieve in the year. Logically, you start with the work, but don’t handle the work. Just go to the breaks. Organize your breaks first, because you get reinvigorated and you come back and then you can do better work. First, fix the breaks and then go to the work, then go the learning. That takes care of the first set. The second thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that you have a stop doing list. Sometimes, things are working, they’re going your way, and they still have to be dropped. That’s what we did with the Protégé program, that’s what we did with our move to New Zealand, and a lot of good things have become better, because we’ve decided to move along. Sometimes, you’re just confused because you have too many things to do, and procrastinate. Go ahead. I mean, I know this about planning, not procrastination, but procrastination is a form of planning, when you have too much to do. Finally, have the benchmarks. Make your goals a little more detailed so that you know when you’re hitting those benchmarks. Plan it in a little more detail. That’s how you’ll reach your goal. This is what goal setting is about. It’s very simple. People make it more complicated than it needs to be. What’s the one thing that you can do today? Very simple. Work, vacation, and learning. Get your paper out, get your pen, and start writing. Three goals. You can start off with seven, or ten, but whittle it down to three. Oh, and make sure you write it down. When you write it down, things happen. It’s like magic when you write it down. Keep it in your head, it’s not as powerful. Write it down, it happens. If one of your goals is to join 5000 BC this year. That’s 5000 BC, our membership site. You’ll find that it’s quite a nice place to be. It’s a very warm and friendly place. It would be great to see you there. It also gives you the opportunity to be first in line for any of the online courses that we’re having. That might not seem like a big deal until you see how cool the online courses are at Psychotactics. It’s not just another information dump, you actually get the skill. If you set out to be a cartoonist, you become a cartoonist. If you set out to be a writer, you become a writer. It’s not just information that you’re getting, it’s all very practical. Being a member of 5000 BC gives you that little edge to get in there before everybody else. You have to read The Brain Audit, however. You can get that at psychotactics.com/brainaudit or on amazon. Com. If you’ve read The Brain Audit and you would like a special collector’s edition, then email us at Psychoanalytical. We’ll give you instruction on how to get the special collector’s edition. That’s it from me at Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance. Resistance is often just seen as a form of laziness, but that is not true at all. There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. http://www.psychotactics.com/free/resistance-game/

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

Sean D’Souza is one of the most respected marketers and copywriters that I have ever come across, and I’m incredibly excited to have him on the show today to walk us through the framework of his book, the Brain Audit. Sean guides us through his Seven Red Bags analogy, and explains the importance (and the trickiness) of working with urgency as a motivator. He also shares where you can find the first chapter of his book for free.

How does a three month vacation sound? How about not checking email for just the weekend? Sean D’Souza joins KYD Expert Series to share insight on how your vacation time is key to creating success in your life. Sean D’Souza is the host of The Three Month Vacation podcast. In this episode, Sean provides tips on how to spend 5 minutes to save a few seconds. That might sound crazy at first, but the idea is preparing to succeed and optimizing your work so you can focus on the things that make the difference. In this episode, Sean shares how he makes the most of his vacation time by the routine leading up to the departure and how he earned the reputation of “five monument family”. Check out the full description, pictures and show notes at www.KeepYourDaydream.com. Join the KYD email list for travel ideas and even more inspiring stories. Can we ask a favor? Ratings & reviews help us rank better in iTunes and reach more people. We also want to know what you think of the show! Click the link to leave a rating and review. http://bit.ly/kydit Let’s get social: Click here to follow us on Instragram https://instagram.com/keepyourdaydream Follow-us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keepyourdaydream  

When we sit down to write a landing page, we usually have a ton of confusion in our heads. We have so many elements on that landing page. What should we put first? What should we leave out? The sales of our product or service depends on us having incredible focus. So how do we get that focus? The answer lies in the "pebble system". The moment we apply the "pebble system" we are able to prioritise what's important to our client—and to ourselves. The sales page gets crystal clear and we stop going around in circles. So what is this "pebble system" and how do we use it right away? -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/64 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Improve your planning (with chaos): http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos Write your home page/about us page: http://www.psychotactics.com/web ---------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 1) How To Avoid Dragging Out A Well Known Story (And Boring The Reader) 2) Why Stories Are Great For Sales Copy3) How to put that Zing-Kapow in your articles (with story telling) -------------------------------- The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is the Three Month Vacation, and I’m Sean D’Souza. Every evening at about twilight in New Mexico and Arizona, thousands of bats stream out from caves. One of the most famous of them all, at least among biologists, is the Mexican free-tailed bats, because they’re known for their hunting sprees. Like all animals, bats communicate with each other. But these Mexican free-tailed bats, they not only communicate; they also confuse. Aaron Cochran is a biologist who’s at the Wake Forest University. He was studying the hunting habits of Mexican free-tailed bats in Arizona and also in New Mexico. What he found was that his ultrasonic equipment was picking up two completely different sounds. When the free-tailed be able to was trying to communicate it was one sound, and then, the moment they had competition in the area, they would send out a send that was totally different. What these bats were doing was jamming the signals of other bats. Usually when a bat is hunting, what it does is it sends out a signal. It sends out what is called a feeding buzz. That bounces off the prey, and then they know, “Hey, it’s time for dinner.” What these free-tailed bats were doing was jamming the signals. It reduced their capability of capturing moths from 64% down to just 18%. This confusion, this reduced capability is a lot like what happens on our sales pages. When we are trying to write sales pages, we’re trying to get too much information across. It sounds like there’s one buzz and a second buzz, and now there is confusion and we miss the point. Today what we’re going to do is we’re going to stick to the point and we’re going to use pebbles. We’re going to use pebbles to figure out how we get to exactly what we want to say to the client, and then how we continue to say that over the rest of the sales page. The three things that we’re going to cover are, one, we find the confusion. The second is we use the pebbles. The third is we expand each issue all by itself. Let’s start out with the first one, which is finding the confusion on your sales page. Part 1: How To Find The Confusion On Your Sales Pages About two weeks ago I was on Facebook. I learn a lot through Facebook, despite what I say. Yet, I was watching this video by this conductor called Alondra de la Parra. I was so taken by this video that I saw on Facebook that I went to YouTube. On YouTube, there she was directing the Paris Orchestra. One of the songs that really got to me, one of the pieces that really got to me was “Huapango.” I started listening to “Huapango,” and then to another piece, and another piece, and another piece. Before I knew it, I had three albums of Alondra de la Parra. Of course I was driving Renuka crazy because I was playing this music all day long. Now the interesting thing about this music is it’s classic music, and like a lot of classical music, it requires an orchestra. An orchestra is complete confusion if you let it be. That’s what a conductor does. A conductor has to stand up there and somehow know that music in advance, and push and pull so that instead of cacophony we have music, we have this beautiful-sounding orchestra all playing together, but somehow separately at the same time. Your sales page is not difference. It’s got to have all of this information, but it’s got to play something louder than the other. This is why you have to first find the confusion, because when you find the confusion you know exactly what’s driving the sales page crazy. The answer is usually with the clients. When you ask your clients questions about why do you choose our business, they will tend to use a single word or a single phrase. Theygive you a line that you then try to put on your sales page, and of course it’s total confusion. Let me read you a line from the Running Coach. Now we’re talking about head coach Ken Rickerman, and he runs 5speedrunning.com and he teaches people how to run faster and better and with fewer injuries. Of course help go and help speak to a client, and help ask them, “What is it that drives you to come to 5speedrunning.com?” Of course they’ll give their response, and it sounds like this: “I want to move more freely. I want to go longer on the runs, and I want to improve my form.” The question is, does that help? It doesn’t help, because when you look at it, there are three points there. One is move more freely. Second is longer runs. The third is improve form. It sounded like a single sentence, but there are three whole topics in there, and that’s what we have to do. First we have to find the confusion. In that single line, there is enormous amounts of confusion. You can’t write a sales page or you can’t write an email if you’re trying to cover three points at the same time. You have to cover one point, just like this podcast. We’re going to cover three points, but hey, let’s start off with the first point. Let’s go into a lot of detail with the first point. Then we’ll go to the second point, detail the second point. Then we go to the third point. This is how we do stuff, or we should do stuff. Instead, we end up like those Mexican free-tailed bats, and there’s all this confusion because we’re trying to cover all of it together because it seems like one sentence. We take that sentence and we break it down into bullet points. That’s how you sort out any confusion. Take the sentence from your client, whatever that might be, and then break it up into bullet points. Once you break it up into bullet points, you will see very quickly that hey, there are four or five points here, or there are two or three points here, but there is almost never one point. That’s where the confusion lies. First step: make sure that you break up the sentences into bullet points. Part 2: How To Use The Pebble System On Your Sales Page That takes us to the second step where we start using the pebbles. As you know, we take three months off every year. We work for three months, and then we take a month off. For at least two of those months, we travel internationally. We’ll go to places like The Netherlands, or Japan, or Sardinia. When people ask me, “Which is your favorite city?” that’s not a fair question to ask because every city is completely different. The people are different and the food is different and the experience is different. Even so, you could specifically ask me, “Here are three cities, like three bullet points. Now, can you allocate pebbles to them?” If we took three cities like Amsterdam and Kyoto and Cagliari, then I could allocate pebbles. Because when you rank cities, it’s very difficult. You could say Kyoto is one, Cagliari is two, Amsterdam is three. But that doesn’t give us a sense of weight. What gives us a sense of weight is the pebble system. The pebble system is very simple. If you said, “Now allocate ten pebbles. You’ve got ten pebbles and you have to allocate them to these three different cities,” and then Kyoto would get maybe four or five pebbles. Because Kyoto is old Japan. It’s got temples and shrines and gardens. It’s got lots of ramen, lots of it, great food, great people, and these amazingly sublime gardens where you can sit there for hours and do nothing, just like you would imagine Japan to be, this very quiet, non hustle bustle place. In my ranking, Kyoto would get five pebbles. Now we have just five pebbles among the rest of the cities. Now we have Cagliari and Amsterdam. Amsterdam is amazing. It’s got lots of cheese, and Renuka loved that place more than any other place. But I would give Cagliari three pebbles, and then Amsterdam two pebbles. Now we have a weighted system. We have this concept of Kyoto, five pebbles; Cagliari, three pebbles; and then finally we get to Amsterdam, which is two pebbles. Now, if we have those three bullet points, we’re clear which one is the most important. When look at what Ken had, he had move more freely, longer runs, and improve form. Longer runs got five pebbles. What we’re going to do is we’re going to start off with longer runs. The next thing was improve form; that got three pebbles. Finally, move more freely got two pebbles. Now, what we have with this pebble system is clarity. We know that the most important thing for that runner is for longer runs, so we’re going to deal with longer runs on our sales page. For now, we totally abandon the other two, which is move more freely and improve form, and we focus on the problems that runners have with longer runs: the injuries it causes, all that stuff, but only with longer runs. Then you’re able to get that message across very clearly. You might never have to go to point two and point three. Because, as Ken mentioned, with the longer run you get tired, you get physically exhausted, you lose focus, you get aches and pains, you have oxygen problems, you go out of breath. Then finally, you lose motivation and confidence. There is a lot of stuff to cover with just one topic, as you can see. What we do on the sale page is do the Mexican free-tail dance. We try and put all the points together, when this one point itself could drive half the sales page. Imagine yourself as a client. You get there, you’re having trouble with longer runs, and you see so much information in the form of a sales page about longer runs. That’s when you realize, “My goodness, this guy knows exactly what he’s talking about. This is the stuff that is of interest to me,” instead of all of this confusion and all of these bullet points bouncing back and forth. What we’ve covered so far is we’ve found the confusion. Then we started using the pebbles. Now we’re going to expand the issue. Part 3: How To Expand The Sales Message Yes, we’re on the third and final part of this podcast. Let’s expand the issue, shall we? Let’s go back for a minute to Alondra de la Parra. There she is in front of this orchestra, and there is this accordion. Now this was a different piece altogether, and not “Huapango.” In this accordion we have the analogy that we need to understand how you expand that one point. In the last section we looked at this one concept of longer runs. What we have to ask are three questions. The first is what does the solution look like? When someone goes for a longer run, what does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? The best thing to do is not to answer this question yourself, especially if you’re writing the sales letter. Because we’re hopeless at writing sales letters. It’s better to call up the client, get a recorder going, and ask them: What does it feel like? What does it look like? They will give you two, three paragraphs. Then you ask that client the second question, which is: When it doesn’t work out? How does it feel? What are things that stop you, slow you down? What they’ll do is come up with that list. I get tired, I lose focus, I lose motivation. What they will do as well is they’ll give you the words that you need to use on that page. If you’ve got that recorder going, you’ll find that the client is giving you the exact words and the exact feeling and the exact emotion that you want from them. The most important thing for you to figure out at this point is that you stay one point. Even when we have gone to just longer runs, we still have five subtopics under that, which is get tired, lose focus, aches and pains, can’t catch breath, and then lose motivation. We have five topics, and you have to be very careful. You have to stick with one thing at a time. Among those five topics, which are the most important? Then you drive that. You address that one topic. Then they answer in a paragraph. That paragraph goes on your sales page. Because they will tell you exactly how they feel, what’s happening in their brain, and what’s really important to them. The client might say that the aches and pains are the most critical of all. That’s where you start. Then maybe they go to the fact that the aches and pains make them lose focus. Then you continue down that path. Let them speak for a while. You just have to transcribe. Maybe you have to tweak a little bit here and there, but most of the time you’re just doing a transcription. This is the beauty of the pebble system. Instead of dealing with all of these things, we go down to one point. From that one point, we get another five points from those five points. We still have some level of ranking. In this case, you can have the ranking, all the pebbles all over again. The client will explain to you how they feel. Then you want to take that and put that on your sales page. What about the other points? The move more freely and the improve form? You can put that in your bullets. You don’t have to put that in your main text. You can put that a lot later. What you’re really trying to do is drive home one problem. That is longer runs and what it means not to run that long. What are the consequences of not running that long? Then you bring up your solution: introducing the long run system. Then you explain your solution. How do you explain your solution? The client told you, remember? We asked them what did the solution look like. In effect, the client is writing your entire sales page. The critical thing is to use the pebble system. Because the pebble system allows you to focus. Otherwise, we have all this confusion, too much information. When someone reads your sales page, they don’t get a single message. We often try to write sales pages ourselves, and it’s a big mistake. Even if you’re a copywriter, it’s a big mistake. The client can come up with terminology that you just cannot dream of, because they live it and they breathe it and they feel it. They have this specific information, the specific term that they want to use. You want to use that on your sales page. The best way to do it is to ask them. First you have to clarify. While I’m talking about clarification, let me reiterate what we’ve covered in this episode. Summary The first thing that we looked at was finding the confusion. We saw that it didn’t matter what we’re doing, there were several points that need to be covered. What we’re going to do is isolate them. We isolated them by using pebbles. We then said five pebbles for this place, three for that, two for this. The same thing applies to your website. There are all of these points, but you allocate pebbles. Then you take the one that got the most pebbles. Then you expand on them. That was the third part. When you expand, you ask them, What does the solution look like?” and let them talk, and let them talk, and let them talk. You keep recording. You’re the transcriber. You’re the person asking the questions. Let them talk. Then you ask them what the problem looks like. Then they will give you four or five points. You can ask them more details about those points. Now you have enough content to put on your page. It’s not just content, but emotion-filled content on that one single topic. That is why the pebble system is so powerful, because it helps the client focus, helps you focus, and you’re able to create a much better sales page than just sitting at your computer and churning something out. What’s the one thing that you can do this week? The one thing that you can do is to help yourself find that confusion factor that you’re dealing with every single day. Do this with your grocery list. Just take three items and then allocate those pebbles. This is five, this is three, this is two. Get into the habit of allocating for pretty much everything. Your to-do list looks a lot better when you allocate pebbles, because you know exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. If you have any questions, I’m at Twitter, Sean D’Souza; Facebook, Sean D’Souza; or sean@psychotactics.com. To get this episode, go to psychotactics.com/64, and you will get the podcast as well as the transcript. There are still a few seats remaining for the storytelling workshop both in Amsterdam and Nashville. To find out more, go to psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. This is on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of December; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th of December in Amsterdam. Storytelling is critical. Most people think of storytelling as just telling stories, but no, it’s a branding issue. It gets your message across in a way that is so amazing and so powerful. As you’ve discovered on this podcast, there are all these stories, and that’s why you’re listening to the podcast right to the end. When you read The Brain Audit, when you read Dartboard Pricing, when you read the book on presell, when you go through any of our courses, there are stories. It’s not just about telling stories to sell, but also your books and your podcasts and your webinars, and your pretty much everything. The reason why stuff is so boring is because it doesn’t have stories. This is what the storytelling workshop will do for you. It will show you how to construct those stories for business rather than just telling another story. That’s psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Bye bye. Do you know—Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t? In this free except on—The Brain Audit you will  find out why customers put off buying your product or service.

Why do we learn so slowly? Is it because we're not good learners? Is it age? Or is it something quite different? The problem of learning (and teaching) is dependent on the concept of Teacher vs Preacher. When you're a preacher, you give the feeling of a ton of information, but there's no true learning, no true application. A teacher, on the other hand, is completely tied to getting the student to apply the skills. When you're creating info-products, writing books or articles, this what needs to be kept in mind. Are you a teacher or a preacher? And are you following a teacher or preacher? Here are three benchmarks to watch for! -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/63 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic The Brain Audit: http://www.psychotactics.com/brain -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Responsibility Factor Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark To Teaching Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher? Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources Audio and Transcript: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition Free Goodies: Why Clients Buy And Why They Don’t Audio and Transcript:  Deconstructing Why Bad Habits Succeed (And Good Habits Fail) ---------- The  Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” This is The Three Month Vacation, I’m Sean D’Souza. If you were to step into India today and go to most Indian households, you would be surprised at what you saw at the doorstep. You would see a Swastika. Yes, the very same Swastika that the Germans used in World War II, the same Swastika that came to be hated by everyone who saw it then, and today. What is a Swastika doing on the doorstep of so many Hindu households? The reality is that the Swastika comes from the Sanskrit word Swastik which means good luck. It has been around for thousands of years. While it’s prominently found in Indian culture even today, it was also found in ancient Greece, it can be seen on the remains of the ancient city of Troy which existed over a thousand years ago. The Druids and the Celts they also use the symbol, the Nordic tribes, the Christians, the Teutonic Knights. The Swastika goes back a long way. In modern history, Coca Cola used it, Calsberg used it on their beer bottles, the boys’ scouts adopted it, and the girls club of America, they called their magazine Swastika. It was used on playing cards, and even by the American Military Units during World War 1. It can be seen on RAF planes as late as 1939. And then, Hitler came along. He took something that was wonderful and incredibly powerful and made it something evil. He took something that was empowering and twisted it in his own way to make it work for him. He changed the meaning of the word. That is the kind of thing that happens very often when we look to learn. When we look around we see that people call themselves teachers, but in reality they are not teachers, they are just preachers. When you get this kind of information in the form of video, and audio, and PDF, you think, well, I am being taught by someone, but in reality, all you’re doing is getting a ton of information. You’re getting a preacher instead of a teacher. While it might sound like just words being twisted or replaced, there is a very big difference between a preacher and a teacher. How do we know what makes a preacher thus as a teacher? That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to look at three things, the first is the responsibility factor. The second is the three benchmark system. The third, the ability for the student to become the teacher. Part 1: The Responsibility Factor Let’s start out with the first one which is the responsibility factor. If you try to learn a language like Spanish, or German, or French, it will take you many, many months to get there. In every classroom, you have the bright students and the not-so-bright students, or at least until Michel Thomas came along. Michel Thomas was a language teacher, and he didn’t believe in bright students, and dull students. He believed that the responsibility lay with the teacher. He made a bold claim, he made a claim that you could learn the fundamentals of grammar in any language within 10 hours, and then he set about proving the fact. The BBC followed him around for several days. If you look up Michel Thomas on You Tube, you will find a three part episode that shows you how he taught these students. Students who were told by their teachers that they were not supposed to learn a language, that they were stupid, that they were dull, that they should never bother to try and learn any language. He sat them down in a classroom. In a week or so, they were already speaking the language. This is the language, the very same language that they were told they should give up, they should never try this anymore. What happened? When we ask what happened, we’re trying to solve the problem of the language. What did he do, how do we learn languages like that? We don’t look at that, we look at what was the core of Michel’s system. The core of Michel’s system was responsibility. He felt that the responsibility of the teaching didn’t lie with the student, it lay with the teacher. When you think about that statement for a few minutes, it changes your whole mindset. It means that the person learning under you is not responsible. You think, well, how is that possible, you can’t control what someone is doing. May be you have online courses like we do and they’re sitting in South Africa, or Australia, or the United States, and you can’t control what they’re doing. Yes you can. This is the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A preacher simply gives you information, you get more CDs, more information, more PDFs, more videos, but whose responsibility is it for you to succeed? The teacher on the other hand changes the way they give you information because they realize that if you don’t get these tiny increments, you will start, and you will go few steps and then you will give up. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. A teacher doesn’t believe in stupid students. A teacher doesn’t believe in dull students. A teacher believes that it is their responsibility to figure out how to get across to that student. Let’s say you have a web design company, and let’s say you’re giving instructions to your clients how to set up their websites. Let’s just say for a second that the client comes back and asks you a whole bunch of questions. Are they dull? The answer is, whose responsibility is it. It’s your responsibility. The reason why that client has not figured out what they should do and how they should go about it, is because you haven’t given them precise instructions, you’ve hurried through the process. Or, you just have the curse of knowledge. You know so much that you don’t realize that you’re going through so many steps. Therefore, you have become a preacher. You’re no longer a teacher, you’re not breaking down things into steps that are foolproof. When we see clients doing silly things, what we say is, well, they’re not smart, or they’re silly, or they’re stupid, but, the responsibility lies with you. If they fail you have failed. That’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. One of the best examples I have for you is this yes and yes pricing grid on the Psychotactics website. When you go and you buy any product, or any service, or any course on Psychotactics, you will encounter the price grid which is where you click the button to buy now. We have a regular and a premium pricing there. As the teacher, it is my duty to get that message across. How do you create a pricing grid so that you can earn 10% or 15% more when you have the pricing grid on your own website. People make mistakes, if there is one thing that I’ve seen where clients consistently make mistakes is on this pricing grid. We tell them to put ticks, they put crosses, we tell them to put red ticks, they put blue ticks. This is because everyone interprets your information in their own way, and that’s absolutely normal. They want to be creative but their creativity doesn’t end up being beneficial to them, and clients end up buying the regular instead of the premium. What’s my job as a teacher? My job as a teacher is very simple, my job is to make sure that they get it. If they don’t get the pricing grid right, then I have to take responsibility for that. In the book which is Dartboard Pricing, it goes through steps. One step, second step, third step, then it shows the mistakes you can make, and the mistakes other people have made. What it’s doing there, even with the book, even when I cannot be there, I have to make sure that’s it’s my responsibility for you to get your pricing grid right. It’s very easy to say that people don’t understand. “Look, I told them how to do it and they didn’t do it,” but no, it’s your responsibility. That’s the critical element, the difference between a preacher and a teacher. Two and a half years ago I started coaching my niece Marsha. She wanted to get better at her studies and so we started the coaching. I sat her down on the first day and I said to her, “Marsha, if you get everything wrong at school whose fault is it?” She said, “It’s my fault.” I said, “No, no, no, it’s my fault, if your get everything wrong, it’s my fault as a teacher.” She said, “Cool.” That’s the whole point, that’s the difference between a preacher and a teacher. You have to take responsibility. That’s how you know that you’re picking the right teacher because they take responsibility for you. They don’t just dump information, they make sure that you get it right. Part 2: The Three Step Benchmark This takes us to the second part of this podcast, and it’s called, the three step benchmark. What is the three step benchmark? When I was 12 years old I used to come home from school and I’d very hungry. School would finish at 4 pm and then it will be a long wait until dinner. Dinner in India is a lot like Mediterranean countries and it’s late, so it’s about 8:30 or so. I’d come home and I’d be ravenous, I want to eat something, and no one would be at home. But there in the pantry on the shelves would be a packet of Ramen Noodles, in this case it was Maggi Noodles. This had a masala flavor which you don’t get in other countries, but you do get in India. What I’d so is I would boil some water and add the noodles, I’d add the taste maker which is the masala flavor, and then five minutes later I’d be eating it. Notice what I did, I only took three steps, boil water, add noodles, add taste maker. This is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. They use these three step benchmark system if they are aware of it or not. The preacher will not do that, a preacher will give you a lot of instructions, they will tell you, you should do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and you get lost in that whole sequence of things. I know this because this is what I used to do. I would give people instructions, here’s what you need to do, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, not anymore. You need to solve the problem in three steps. If the client cannot get to the other side within three steps like Maggi Noodles, then you have given too many instructions. If they keep coming back to you and asking you something, then you’ve given too many instructions. There is no other way, the responsibility lies with you. We just finished the headlines course for 2015, and there are many ways to write a headline. A lot of people will tell you to just copy headlines but that’s stupid. You should know how to write headlines just like you know how to speak, how to write. There is a structure, and a system, and a format, to write headlines. The problem is also that there are many ways to write those headlines. If you want your student to get their mastery, then you have to follow these three step benchmark. If you give them an instruction and they can’t get there within three steps, then you have made a mistake. Let’s take an example of the headlines, let’s say I needed to get you to write better headlines in the next few minutes. Well, how I’m I going to get this done on a podcast? Here’s how you do it, you’re restricted to just three steps or fewer. What you’re going to do is going to put either “even” or “and.” You’re going to put this in parenthesis or brackets as you call it. Here’s how you do it, you say, how to raise prices “even” when clients are price-conscious, how to raise prices “even” when the competition is offering discounts. The headline with “even” in it, it creates a contrast. It’s a headline going one way and then it starts to go the other way. Now let’s use “and.” How to consistently raise prices “and” still keep 95% of your clients, or, how to tell amazing stories “and” connect the stories to your business articles. What we have here is “and” and “even.” The “and” moves the idea forward, and the “even” takes it a step back, or, it provides contrast. If you’re thinking to yourself, wait, that was such a small step. That’s the whole point, this is how teachers teach. The preachers will give you 7, 8 different steps to do. In the headline course, we spent a week doing this, and people still make mistakes. Bit by bit we outline it. A very small thing can be interpreted in many different ways and a preacher will just dump information on you. A teacher will take a very small element, just three steps. If you can’t get that client to do what you want in three steps, it’s your fault, it’s your responsibility. When you’re looking for a teacher, look for a teacher that has these tiny increments. That helps you get there to the next stage instead of telling you how silly you are, or how dull you are. Part 3: When Does The Student Become The Teacher? This takes us to the third part which is the most scariest benchmark of all, which is when the student becomes the teacher. When I go to seminars, I notice something very interesting. A speaker will stand up and make this presentation, and then they’ll have all these slides, and all of these information, and all of these statistics. Then at the end of that presentation, they get a rousing applause, they get a lot of [inaudible 15:24] they get all of that stuff, but, what is the benchmark of the presentation? The real benchmark of the presentation is that the persons sitting there in the audience should be able to say what you said in their presentation. That sounds bizarre doesn’t it? Of course it is bizarre, but that’s what a teacher does. A teacher makes sure that you don’t go out there with your head full of information. All this shock and awe that you bring to the presentation, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is what the student can then teach. When that student goes out, can they repeat exactly what you said and often in the sequence that you said it? If you come to a Psychotactics course, or you come to our workshop, or you come to our presentation, one of the most important benchmarks is that you should be able to repeat what I have just taught you. You should be able to tell someone else exactly what you learned, the sequence in which you learned it, and then you have become the teacher. If the person cannot do that, the client there, the person in the audience cannot do that, then there’s something wrong with the way you’re teaching, it’s that simple. If all you have done is given information, then they’re going to cling on to some fact or the other. They’re going to cling on to one fact, or two facts, or three facts, but they don’t have that system in place, because you didn’t put that system in place. That’s the difference between a teacher and a preacher. A teacher will make sure that the student knows how do whatever it is that they are teaching. Their responsibility is to get that student to know what they are teaching. It’s not just information being given out, it is application, and it’s instant application. When there is complication there is no application, when there are too many steps there is no application, and so you start to see the difference between a teacher and a preacher. In fact, let’s summarize because you’ll need to be the teachers. If someone asks you what did you learn on this podcast, well, you’ll need to know the difference between the teacher and the preacher. You’ll need to know how to change your methods, you’ll also need to know how to choose a teacher versus a preacher. Summary The first thing that we covered today was the factor that Michel Thomas taught us, and that is the responsibility lies with the teacher, you are responsible. The student is not responsible, you are responsible. It doesn’t matter how you look at it, you are still responsible. When you take on a task you have to make sure that you formulate your teaching in a way that enables the student to learn. That changes the whole perspective of teaching. You can do this very simply by having the three step benchmark in place. If the student cannot get from this point to that point in three steps, then you have given too many steps, you have to reduce those number of steps. That takes us to the third part which is, how do you know that the student is now smart enough and that is because they have become the teacher. You go from this factor of changing your mindset, responsibility, to then boiling down to just three steps. Then finally, you know that they have reached there because now they can teach what you just taught them. That is the difference between a teacher and a preacher. Whether we are in the service business or a product business, we have to make sure that we get this message across. This is not just about training, this is about getting your clients to achieve what they want to achieve. Most of us will blame the client. If you find yourself blaming the client, listen to Michel Thomas’ words yet again, “The responsibility lies with you, it’s your fault, it’s always your fault.” When you say that to your client, they’ll be like Marsha, they will say, “Cool.” This brings us to the end of this podcast. You can find me always on Twitter or Facebook, I’m @seandsouza. You can also email me at sean@psychotactics.com. However, if you are listening to this podcast in sequence, I won’t be available for the next two weeks, I will be in Uluru which is in the middle of Australia. There is this massive rock there, there is nothing else but this massive rock and three hotels, and that’s where we’re going to be, we’re going to be in Alice Springs. It’s going to be really hot there, I hear it’s about 33 °C, which is 91 °F, I wish it were cooler. But hey, I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, this part of Australia specifically. You can only ever go there in the colder months, and now we have slipped past the cold rainy months and we are into October, so we’re going to have to put up with some of the heat. While we are away make sure that you read The Brain Audit because it will show you why customers buy and why they don’t. There is also the Web Component Series which is website secrets and you’ll learn how to create your home page, or About Us page, your download page, very effectively. You can find it at psychotactics.com/web. If you’d like to join us at Five Thousand B.C that’s fivethousandbc.com, that’s the community of mostly introverts, and there is me, the extrovert. You’ll find that Five Thousand B.C is a membership site like no other because I’m there all the time, 17,000 times a day, except for the next two weeks when I will be in Australia. That’s it from Psychotactics and The Three Month Vacation, make sure you send this over to your friends as well so that they can listen to The Three Month Vacation podcast. Bye for now. One of the biggest reasons why we struggle with our learning is because we run into resistance.  There are hidden forces causing us all to resist doing what we really should do. This slows us down considerably. Find out how to work with resistance, instead of fighting it all the time. Click here to get the free report on ‘How To Win The Resistance Game’. (http://www.psychotactics.com/free/brain-audit-excerpt/)  

Today is Part 2 of my conversation with Sean D'Souza. Tune in to hear his incredible insights on copywriting, conversion, and how to sell successfully.

Sean has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Inside this FREE “First Millionaire Manifesto”, J V reveals the seven steps to seven figures and how to put more money in the bank, enjoy a richly rewarding life, and make a big difference. Subscribe in ITunes Like this Podcast? Help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other business owners and entrepreneurs find our podcast…and make their big difference. They will thank you for it.   Watch this FREE Video to discover the Secrets to getting in your zone, achieving fast results, and building a high-profit conscious business.  Conscious Millionaire Podcast: On his free podcast, Monday through Friday, J V interviews top successful entrepreneurs and business owners who reveal their business solutions and business opportunities on topics such as: conscious business, social entrepreneurship, business online marketing, internet business solutions, internet marketing, team building and culture, goal setting, how to become a wealthy entrepreneur, and developing a high-profit business plan that will change lives and the world.

Sean has always followed his dreams, putting in the effort required to achieve them. He running a successful business as a freelance cartoonist in Mumbai, when he and his wife decided to embark on a completely new adventure moving to beautiful New Zealand. He works just 9 months in a year, taking three months off and leaving work and e-mail behind. And all of this happens via his website at Psychotactics.com. Inside this FREE “First Millionaire Manifesto”, J V reveals the seven steps to seven figures and how to put more money in the bank, enjoy a richly rewarding life, and make a big difference. Subscribe in ITunes Like this Podcast? Help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other business owners and entrepreneurs find our podcast…and make their big difference. They will thank you for it.   Watch this FREE Video to discover the Secrets to getting in your zone, achieving fast results, and building a high-profit conscious business.  Conscious Millionaire Podcast: On his free podcast, Monday through Friday, J V interviews top successful entrepreneurs and business owners who reveal their business solutions and business opportunities on topics such as: conscious business, social entrepreneurship, business online marketing, internet business solutions, internet marketing, team building and culture, goal setting, how to become a wealthy entrepreneur, and developing a high-profit business plan that will change lives and the world.

When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/62 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Concept of Consumption Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources 5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly Goodies: How to design a visual “yes-yes” pricing grid for all your products The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don’t  -------------------- The Transcript “This transcript hasn’t been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we’ll be sure to fix them.” What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn’t pay very well, so I’d just work very quickly through them because well, they weren’t paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, “Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?” Of course I said, “Well, they don’t pay much.” He said, “I don’t really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, ‘This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I’m not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'” This is true for us as well. In today’s world, where we’re giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we’re giving away and we think, “Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it’s going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can’t put in all the effort into free.” My art director friend would tell you, “I don’t see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy.” That’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product. What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Part 1: The Concept of Consumption The first thing that we’re going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let’s cover these three topics. Let’s start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption. In case you didn’t already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they’re going to watch all the rest, or at least that’s how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix. Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here’s what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference. In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical. When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that say just give me your name and your email address, and let’s do this quickly. Well, that’s not how people really behave. When you do the study, people behave differently. They want to consume stuff. They want to spend more time at your site. They want to read a little more before they commit. When you’re creating a product, maybe it’s just a report, maybe it’s an article, a series of articles, maybe it’s a webinar or a podcast, people will take their time. They will give you more than one chance. It’s not like you need to have a sloppy first time, but it’s not like you have to convince them either. Because they take their time. What you have the ensure is that they get from point A to point C at the very least. You have to get them through the stages. This is what we do with the Headline Report. When you get 2 Psychotactics and you subscribe to the newsletter, you get a headline report. It shows you how to write headlines, just taking three easy steps. But there is no hurry. You go through the introduction. It gives you the philosophy. Then it takes you to step one, and you’re able to create a headline, and then step two, and you’ll be able to create another headline, and step three and the third type of headline. In under ten minutes, you can create headlines just reading the report, but it gets you to the end. When you get to the end, you already have this superpower. You have this ability to write headlines, to figure out which headlines are missing those components. It’s complete. What’s happened there is it has been designed for consumption. It has been designed to make sure that the client gets that superpower, that ability to do something. When you look at a lot of the webinars online or the podcasts, a lot of the stuff is based on information. It is more and more and more information, but not stuff that you can directly apply. This is what we have to work at, because we’re not in the entertainment business like Netflix. Their goal is to make sure that you get to the end of the episode, of the next episode, and then right to the end of the series. They’re totally in the entertainment business, and we are in the information business, but we need to make sure that we’re not just giving information but we’re giving that client a superpower. We’re giving them the ability to write headlines. We’re giving them the ability to do something specific at the end of it. We need to start off with the end in mind. That’s probably what Netflix is doing anyway. They’re going, “What is the end point of this series?” That end point is then creating all of the series back to back so that you get hooked. You need to ask yourself that question as well. When you’re creating a report, when you’re creating an article, when you are doing anything that you’re giving away free, the shoddiness comes from the fact that you were just going to give away information, more information. In reality, if you think about it from a perspective of when they finish this, what superpower will they have, that changes everything doesn’t it? That makes your client more likely to binge read, binge listen, binge watch, whatever it is that you’re going to throw. Then the free becomes more important than the product itself because they haven’t paid for anything and they’ve got this value which they just didn’t expect. Consumption comes in very quickly and consumption becomes more critical than attraction and conversion, which gets bandied about all over the internet. You need to know how to attract. You need to know how to convert. Once you’ve gone through that, the third stage, consumption, that’s the most critical of all. You can start off with your free product or your report, or just about anything, as long as you know what is the end in mind and how will it help the customer get to that end and have the superpower. That brings us to the end of this first section. Let’s go to the second section. Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Let’s explore why your free product content needs to look very unhurried, and yet, very unpackaged. On Fridays, something very strange happens at our café. The usual baristas disappear and someone else takes their place. Now it bugs me when baristas get changed on Friday, because you’re starting to settle in, you’re starting to relax a bit, and then your whole routine has changed because of this change in barista. Anyway, this new barista, she’s making the coffee and she places it in front of us. She goes away and the café is reasonably quiet, almost too quiet for a Friday. She comes over and she’s asks for my opinion. She’s says, “How did you find the coffee?” Of course I’m the wrong person to ask for an opinion because I will give it. She’s standing there for about 20 minutes listening to what I have to say, because I’m telling her how I evaluate the coffee. The way I evaluate coffee is I look at the barista themselves and I look at how they’re dressed. Maybe this is just me, but every time I see an untidy-looking barista, I get bad coffee. The first thing I’m looking for is how tidy does the barista look. Then the second thing I’m looking for is how tidy does my cup of coffee look. Is there art on it or is it just coffee in a cup? Before I’ve even tasted the coffee, I have a pretty good idea whether the coffee is going to be good or bad. Then of course there are variables; that can be humidity, the temperature of the milk. There are so many variables in the coffee, but at the very core I’m looking for this unhurried professional cofee that comes out in the midst of a deadline. This is what your client is looking for as well. They’re looking for this report, this article, this information that is unhurried. They know that you’re busy, but they don’t care. They’re the clients. They want this product or this service to look professional long before they open it. Packaging becomes very critical, and packaging needs to look unhurried. It needs to look like someone has spent a little time despite the deadline. You see this a lot in Japan. I have mentioned this before on the podcast, that Japan is probably the best place in the world to buy pretty much anything. You can go to the smallest store and ask for food, and you’ve seen how sushi and sashimi has been packaged. It’s always very cleanly packaged. There’s this design element around it. You can go and buy some sweets. You can go and buy a little pendant. You can buy pretty much anything in Japan and you get packaging. You get this look of unhurriedness. When you have this product, whether it be a webinar or a podcast, you need to feel that packaging. What sets off that packaging? For instance, in this podcast. The story that starts up right at the beginning, that tells you that some amount of research has gone into the whole Netflix story. The fact that there are three points that we’re going to cover, that tells you that’s a very clear outline. This is like the barista. You’ve not really listened to the episode yet, but you get this feeling. You get this feeling that there is a logic and there is work put into this, and it’s unhurried. That is what is critical, because it sets you up for the rest of the binge listening or the binge reading or the binge experiencing. You can tell the difference between a great presenter and a crappy presenter. You can tell the difference between a good writer and a bad writer. There’s always this factor of unhurriedness. We need to get the client to feel this packaging long before they get to the meat of the content. Netflix, their research has shown exactly that: that clients are willing to go the distance before they decide this is really good or this is really crappy. We will walk into cafes and look at the barista, and either stay or walk out. It’s based on this factor of unhurriedness. How do they present themselves? How do they present their coffee? It’s the same thing for your product. You cover your introduction, your structure. That needs to be very clear before I get into the meat of the matter. That’s what you really need to work on. That’s what makes the difference between a free product and a paid product. It needs to look like a paid product. It needs to look like something you paid a lot of money for, and yet you got it free. Now you don’t have to spend months and years working on this free product, but make it tidy. This takes us to the third part, which is the pain that you must feel when you’re giving away your free product. Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain As you know, I like to cook Indian food. Two dishes that make me very happy are butter chicken and a dal. A dal is a lentil, by the way. If you were to ask me to give away the butter chicken or the dal, I would hesitate. Now I like them both as much, but I like one better than the other. Well, not really, but here’s the thing. I still would hesitate to give away the chicken, the butter chicken. That’s the kind of dilemma that you’re dealing with. You’re dealing with a situation where you’ve got this really good stuff and you’re not really that keen on giving it away. You think maybe it would be a good idea to give away something that is not quite so salable. Because when you look at what you’ve done, you’ve spent a lot of time and effort, and somehow it seems like a shame to just give it away. You’ve got to feel that pain. You really have to feel that pain, because when you feel that pain, that’s when you know that the client is going to feel wow, this is amazing. It’s almost too easy to give away something that is not quite up to that standard. You know the standard. It doesn’t matter where you are in life, you know your standard and you know what’s possible, and you know your best. When you’re giving away your best, you feel that pain. I remember the time I went and met a friend of mine. He is a world-class watercolorist. He had just finished a workshop in Auckland. Of course we met, we had a beer, etc. After that, he gave me one of his sketches. He just pulled it out from his bag and he gave it to me. What did I do with the sketch? I look at it, I said thank you, I took it home. Do you think it was his best sketch, his best watercolor? Of course not. It was just something that he was doing, just a rough sketch. It stayed around the office for a while, and then it went under the bed. Then I don’t even know where it is anymore. Now, even if he were listening to this podcast, he would not know that I’m referring to him, because I know quite a few watercolorists. If you’re a watercolorist and you gave me a painting, there’s a pretty good chance that I don’t know where it is right now because it wasn’t your best. This is the whole point. When you give away stuff, give away the best stuff, or at least part of the best stuff. Now we sell a course called the Pre-Sell Course. This teaches you how we sell our courses, how we sell our workshops, how we sell our products. We sell our products faster than pretty much anyone on the internet. Courses that cost $3,000, in 20 minutes the course is full. No strategic alliances, no ads, no joint ventures, no nothing. How do we do it in 20 minutes? The Pre-Sell Course shows you that. It’s not cheap; it’s almost $400. But we wanted the audience, our members, our subscribers, to understand how powerful this course was. What we did was we sliced it up into about a fifth of the course and gave it away. You know someone wrote back to me and said, “You know, I didn’t buy the rest of the course, but just using that one-fifth, I was able to launch a product very successfully.” Are you thinking what I’m thinking right now? We’re giving away stuff that is so powerful that the client might not even need to come back for some more, but they will come back. That’s what we’ve found consistently. We’ve found that when we give away stuff which is useful, that is consumable, that is powerful, the client comes back. Because that’s what happens in real life when you give away a sample. Something that’s amazingly tasty, it’s not like the diner goes away and just doesn’t come back. We’ve found time and time again, and this isn’t the Pre-Sell Course by the way … There’s a whole section on sampling. It talks about how sampling increases sales by 200, 300, 400%. It’s incredible. I didn’t think that sampling could do that, but it does it. There are statistics to prove it. But if the sample itself is not so powerful, not so outstanding, why is the client going to buy a product or service from you in the future? Summary This brings us to the end of this podcast. We covered three things. The first thing was the factor of consumption. You need to get the client from one point the other. Interestingly, as we saw in Netflix, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to speed up the process. You don’t have to get people to sign up right away. They read, you know? They read a little bit. They read the introduction. They look at how it’s constructed. That takes us to the second one, which is your packaging needs to be great and unhurried. It’s like every time we go to the café, we look at the barista and we say, “How are they? Are they neat? How’s the coffee presented? Is it perfect?” That’s how you know you’ve got a great coffee. That’s how you know you’ve got a great product. Finally, you have to feel that pain when you’re giving away your product. If you don’t feel that pain, it’s like giving away the dal instead of the butter chicken. It’s not that the dal is bad; it’s just that the butter chicken, well, you would rather be eating it yourself, right? What is the one thing that you can do today? The one thing that you can do today is to look at whatever you’re giving away and see is it built for consumption. Can they go from A to B to C and then have that superpower? If no, then you’re just giving information. We don’t need more information. We’re done with information. Just give me some skill that I can sort out in the next ten minutes, or 15 minutes, or 20 minutes, whatever, but quickly. We’re done with this podcast episode. I store all my podcast ideas in Evernote, so if you’ve got some ideas, some questions you want to ask me, send them to sean@psychotactics.com, or on Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and Facebook at Sean D’Souza. If you’d like to join us at 5000bc.com, then please do so. It’s a place where introverts gather, and we talk and we discuss, and there’s a huge amount of information. I’m there 17,000 times a day answering questions, writing articles in response to your questions. It’s a cool place to be. If you would like to meet us live at a workshop, then there’s a storytelling workshop in Nashville, Tennessee, and in Amsterdam, which is in The Netherlands. You can find out more about this on psychotactics.com/story-telling-workshop. Be sure to read The Brain Audit before you arrive, because The Brain Audit is compulsory for any course that you do with Psychotactics. Yes, it’s a barrier, and we’re happy to keep that barrier in place. You will find The Brain Audit a tremendous read. It is really fun to read and to understand how people think. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. Still Reading? Now that you understand why free products need to be better than paid products or services, do you know how to price your products? Here is a detailed visual “yes-yes” pricing grid, to help you—Dartboard Pricing: Yes and Yes Grid. You’ll see how to construct the pricing grid (it’s easy), and then you can adapt the concept on your own slides, pricing sheets, or website. And yes, increase your prices! (http://www.psychotactics.com/cb)    

Today I sit down with Sean D'Souza for Part 1 of our 2 part series on Why Clients Buy. Sean is an expert in the psychology of selling and has influenced much of what we know of sales techniques.

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

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

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

If you're looking for help understanding how to price your product or service and raise your prices, then this episode is for you. Banish the confusion, stop second guessing yourself and get down to business. Sean D'Souza was a guest a few months ago talking about what causes people to buy or hesitate and to date, it's our #1 episode. Sean delivers his information conceptually and with specific actions steps you can take for your business.   Sean runs a zany marketing site, Psychotactics where he deconstructs headlines in his spare time. He's a cartoonist, loves dancing, works 9 months a year, and is the author of The Brain Audit and Dartboard Pricing. Sean lives in New Zealand with his wife and 64 million sheep. He also has a binge-worthy, music-filled podcast, The Three Month Vacation.

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

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

Sean is a former cartoonist who started studying marketing to sell his drawings. He read over 100 books in a single year on the subject, and became very skilled at explaining marketing concepts. He started his company, PsychoTactics, and currently hosts the podcast, “The Three Month Vacation”.

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

In this episode of the podcast, Sean D Souza joins us to share is journey from comic artist for India's newspapers to running a wildly successful copywriting business. HIGHLIGHTSWriting comic strips for Indian newspapersHow adversity gives us an opportunity to make improvements in lives The power of persistence in a career pathMaking the transition from cartoonist to copywriterCopywriting lessons from the world of cartooningBuilding a business on your own scheduling Translating the world around you into stories How a daily creative habit can radically transform the quality of your work LINKS AND RESOURCES The Other Sean D SouzaSean's Cartooning CourseSean D'Souza runs a zany marketing site at Psychotactics and deconstructs headlines in his spare time. Learn how to assemble (and audit) your headlines in seconds with Sean's powerful headline report, when you subscribe to the Psychotactics Newsletter. And don't miss his binge-worthy, music-filled podcast, The Three Month Vacation. Download his free report on How to Win the Resistance Game See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sean D’Souza is the founder of PsychoTactics – why customers buy (and why they don’t). Psychotactics is a thought system that’s based on thousands of years […] See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

How many hours do you work on vacation? You don't. But then what about the e-mails? How do you deal with clients? Are you supposed to just close down your business? This episode shows you how we deal with vacations at Psychotactics. We've been going on our "three-month" vacations since 2004 and have had to work out a few "tricks". And you can use them too—and ensure a splendid vacation, instead of just "work by the beach". -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Secret to handling email on holiday Part 2: How to handle social media while on holiday Part 3: How to deal with clients if there is an emergency Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources About Time management—The Carpe Diem Method of Finding Work (And Vacation) Time 5000bc—How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems? Bonus Book—How To Win The Resistance Game Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Products under $50: http://www.psychotactics.com/products/under-50/ So how do you subscribe to this free podcast? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below: iTunes   |  Android   |  E-mail (and get special goodies)   | RSS   The  Transcript 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. This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. In February of 2005 I had no intention of checking any email. That was because we were on our vacation in the South Island. Now New Zealand is a set of islands, as you probably know. There’s the North Island where we live, and the South Island. In the South Island, it’s truly breathtaking. It’s got rivers and mountains and glaciers, and there we were at Fox Glacier. Now Fox is an amazing glacier because it’s in close proximity to both the rainforest and the ocean. Now that’s pretty rare with a glacier, but the ice flow on Fox Glacier is also amazing. It changes as much as three meters a day, so it’s a pretty crazy place to be, and there we were walking on the glacier. When we had done that walk, we came down to check email. I didn’t check email for several days, and there was this little hut right next to the glacier. Yes, there’s email everywhere these days. I switched on the computer expecting nothing much, and there it was: an email telling me that our entire membership site was non-existent. This is the power of email. It can take a perfectly good day and make it an absolutely rotten one. In today’s episode we’re going to cover this topic of no work on vacation. We’re going to look at email and how to deal with email in vacation mode, and then how you deal with social media, and finally what do you do about clients while you’re on vacation. Let’s start off with the first thing, which is dealing with email. Part 1: Dealing With Email Imagine you’re having a great day and then you get a phone call. It says a child is in hospital, your child is in hospital. It doesn’t matter how happy you were at that moment. Your mood changes. Immediately you want to take control. Immediately you want to be with that child. Immediately you’re transported right back to that situation that in a way you can’t control, but need to be there. Now email isn’t quite the same situation, but it still has that power. It still has that power to pull you back into that work mode. You’re sitting somewhere having a margarita enjoying the sunset, and then you read email and your mood changes. You’re back in work land. It can be a good email, a bad email, a frustrating email. It doesn’t matter. You’re no longer where you are and you’re some other place where you shouldn’t be, which is back at work. How do we deal with this at Psychotactics? Remember that incident at Fox Glacier where I read that email? It made me feel terrible. I’d just gone up the glacier. I was in this absolutely stunning mood. Then I had to read that email. The point is that I couldn’t do anything. That website was down. They had erased it down to zero pixels. Then they did a backup of that website, the one that they erased, so we had nothing. Then clients started writing in telling us that the website was down. Then I had to write back to clients. I spent several hours at that little hut responding to email. How do you deal with such a situation? How do you control this so that you’re not completely dealing with work the whole time that you’re away? Because you need to leave email at home when you go on vacation. Here’s how we do it. For one, we don’t check the primary email. We get someone else to check email while we’re away. Here’s how it works. When that someone else is checking email, they’re getting rid of all the stuff that really takes up a lot of your time, so any spam, any offers, all that just goes in the trash straight away. Now on a day to day basis I probably read it because it’s valuable and I’ve subscribed to it and I want to read it, but while I’m on vacation I don’t need that email. All of that goes trashed right away. What else is left? There are emails where someone has not got a download or someone needs some kind of help. Usually there are canned messages, so there are messages where they can get their downloads or things that come up on a frequent basis. It’s very rare that you’re going to get new episode all the time. Most of the emails that you’re responding to, they are old matters, and if you have canned messages, and I use Text Expander on my computer, and those canned messages go out and the matter is resolved. This leaves us with the urgent email, the email that simply cannot be ignored. There are two ways to handle this. The first way is to create an email address like, say, vacation@psychotactics.com. Then you instruct that person to send email there only if it’s absolutely critical, that it cannot be put off in any way. If it’s super critical, than they should have your phone number and they should get in touch with you. Then again, let’s assume you want to keep it just to email. You have the special box with a special email address, and you notice nothing is showing up day after day, because after all, the box is for urgent stuff and there isn’t any urgent stuff. You don’t give up. You just and you check that email repeatedly several times a day. Then you realize there’s nothing there after all. You wait for the phone call, and the phone call never comes. We have been going on vacation since 2004. We work for three months, then we take a month off. In that month we almost never have to deal with email because all of it is taken care. The stuff that needs to be attend later is put in a box. When we get back, we deal with that. And so you remain email-free. But email isn’t the only way that people can get in touch with you these days. There’s also this menace called social media. Let’s talk about social media, shall we? Part 2: Social Media In May 2015, after doing an infoproducts workshop in Washington D.C. and speaking at an event in Denver, we headed off to Sardinia. We moved from the south of Sardinia right up to the north. There was this wonderful hotel called Hotel Cuncheddi, or Cala Cuncheddi. I had 500 megabytes of data, so guess what? I was going to use it. Except there was a small problem. This data was connected to a satellite. You only got 500 megabytes, and if you exceeded those 500 megabytes you had to buy more data. I went outside and I took some pictures of the beach. It’s a glorious beach and beautiful views, and I uploaded three pictures. Instantly, my 500 megabytes was exhausted. I couldn’t surf the internet anymore. Now if you know anything about the internet and technology, that’s impossible. Anything uploaded to Facebook is probably going to be a few megabytes, maybe four or five megabytes. You can’t use up 500 megabytes in about 30 seconds, but there was a glitch in their system. Because of the glitch, I couldn’t access the internet, I couldn’t check Facebook, I couldn’t go on any kind of social media platforms. And so I didn’t. I found the beach. I found that I didn’t have to look at my phone, I didn’t have to look at the iPad. I did what my grandfather and my father did. I actually went out and enjoyed myself. Just because you’re not checking email doesn’t mean that you’re not connected. When you get into this whole deal of Facebook or Twitter or any social media stuff, you get involved in something. Maybe someone is going to talk about global warming or gun control, or something about some politician or something, and immediately it yanks you back into this frustrating situation where you’re either for it or against it and your mood is spoiled. You’re not looking at the beach. You’re looking down at your phone. You’re looking down at your iPad. It might not be work, but it still takes you away from where you should be. It still messages to ruin your mood. It still creates that state change. That’s not usually for the better. I hope that I’m going to take Cala Cuncheddi with me wherever I go, where I can upload three photos and then I’m done and then I can’t access the internet anymore. It is a price to pay because we’re so tied to our phones and our iPads and our mobile devices. Yet it’s so critical that we step away from it, because somehow it pulls us back. Remember that clients can still contact you. They can send messages to you through Facebook Messenger or through some method like Skype. Immediately you’re yanked back. I know that asking someone to get rid of their internet while they’re on vacation is like asking them to get rid of one of their arms. But I can tell you from experience that it’s good. I say this with a lot of reluctance because I want to hold that phone, I want to take the pictures, I want to upload them, I want to do stuff like that. The moments that I’ve not done it, the days I’ve not done it, they have been truly splendid. So no email, and definitely no social media. That takes us to the third part, which is how are we going to deal with clients? What if there’s an emergency? Part 3: How Are We Going To Deal With Clients? I remember the year that Renuka and I got married. We told clients that we were going on our honeymoon. It was amazing, because everyone said, “We wish you all the best.” One thing that they made sure was not to contact us in any way. How about making it a honeymoon every single time? How about staying away from clients while you’re on vacation? This is what your parents did. This is what our grandparents did. They went on vacation. No matter how rich they were or poor they were, they just left their work and in the summer they would go to some place like a village or their hometown, and they were completely cut off from work. We live in a different world and we think we should be connected to our clients all the time. Really this depends on you. It depends on how you set up things. When we have courses we make sure that the courses end a week before we go on vacation, so we can tidy up everything and then we can go on our vacation. In fact, before going on vacation we pack our bags three or four days before we have to get on the flight, and then the vacation starts while we’re still in Auckland. Then we leave. No one contacts us about the courses. No one contacts about products that they can’t download or can’t get, because someone else is handling that. Only while we’re away someone else is handling that. Then it’s the third thing which is the membership site. I go into 5000bc.com, that’s our membership site, and I go there, I don’t know, 15, 20 times a day. If you ask a question, I respond with just the answer or sometimes I’ll write a series of answers, do an audio or video even just to give you the answer. Our clients, they get used to this level of response, but the moment I’m away they know I’m away. If I were to pop in, and it’s not like I haven’t tried, they instantly tell me I should leave. That I need to go and enjoy my vacation, because that’s what vacation is all about. What you’re doing is you’re actually setting up the client’s so that they tell you to go away. That’s what our members do. If I try to check email or if I try to get back into the membership site, they tell me to go away. What we’ve done from the very start is inculcated in our clients the fact that our vacation is sacred, so they treat it like that. They treat it like as if we’re going on honeymoon. Every time we try to get back, we get a rap on the knuckles and we’re back in Margarita land. We’ve made a big deal about the vacation, and I think that’s what you need to do as well. You need to tell clients that while you’re away you can’t be reached. Of course they don’t reach you, but are there any exceptions to this rule? Of course there are exceptions to the rule. The point is that you are checking email. I’m checking email 270 days in a year. When I’m at work, I’m checking email, I’m go to the forums, I’m go to the membership site, I’m going on social media. It’s very hard to just slow down and go okay, I’m not doing this anymore. I’ll try, but it’s nice to get booted out. It’s nice to go and enjoy yourself and have a good time. Even when I got that email at Fox Glacier it wasn’t like I could do anything. I couldn’t bring the website back up again. In fact, the website was down for 17 days. When we got back, we apologized to our clients. Then we got back to work. We got to building 5000bc. That’s where it is today. Many of those clients, they’re still with us today after all of these years.Vacation time should be sacred, should be a place every go to where you can re-energize and relax and learn stuff about cultures, and then come back and get back to work with full gusto. Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast. Three things that we covered. The first thing is if you need to have email attack you, then create a separate email address and only the urgent stuff goes there. Even better, just don’t get any email. If there’s something utterly urgent, they’ll then call you. Otherwise, get someone to deal with the email with canned messages. You want to stay off Facebook and Twitter and any kind of social media. You want to put yourself in a situation where you’re just disconnected. Finally, you want to train your clients right at the start. You want to let them know that vacation is a time when I’m going to be away. You will be surprised at how they respect this almost like it’s a honeymoon, every single time you go on vacation. It’s 5:59 AM and it’s time for that walk and to listen to some audiobooks and podcasts. I hope you’ve been enjoying this podcast. If you have been enjoying it, please go and leave a review on iTunes. If you haven’t already subscribed, it’s that big purple button. All you have to do is go and click it. If you’re on Android you can go to Stitcher and download the Stitcher app, and you can get all the downloads. I’m on Twitter @seandsouza and on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. You can email me at vacation@psychotactics.com. No, just kidding. I’m at work right now. Email me at sean@psychotactics.com. This episode, for instance, was a response to someone asking how do we deal with work on vacation. The answer is you don’t. We’ve got to cartooning course starting off shortly. I don’t know when you’re going to listen to this podcast, but if you don’t get the cartooning course this year, then it’s all the way into 2016, so the cartooning course, which is thatwww.psychotactics.com/davinci. At the end of the year in November, we’re going to have the first 50 words course. This is a course that shows you how to start a podcast or webinars or write stuff in your articles. The first 50 words it drives us absolutely bonkers, and the first 50 words course shows you that. You’ll never have to struggle with the first 50 words ever again. You’ll become an amazing storyteller. That’s the first 50 words course. You have to be on the Psychotactics newsletter list so that you can get the notification when the course is due. That’s pretty much it for this episode. Thank you for tuning in. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: #50:The Early Years-Psychotactics-Moving to New Zealand

How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is?and with some cool music too.  How did you get to New Zealand? That's the question I get most of all from clients. And there's a story, a very interesting story behind our move from India to New Zealand. Here it is—and with some cool music too. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What I was looking for, when I was 13 years old Part 2: Getting to New Zealand Part 3: What were the early years at Psychotactics like? Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links The Power of Chocolate: The Power of Psychotactics Chocolate Marketing Episode #8: The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don’t -------------------- So how do you subscribe to this free podcast? To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below: iTunes   |  Android   |  E-mail (and get special goodies)   | RSS   The  Transcript 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. This is The Three-Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. One of the questions that I get most of all is how we got to New Zealand. What caused us to leave India and to get to New Zealand? What were the early days like? These are questions that subscribers at Psychotactics want to know all the time. This is the 50th episode and so I thought that’s good idea. Let’s puts in the Psychotactics story here so that you can listen to it and enjoy it. Part 1: What I Was Looking For, When I Was 13 Years Old When I was 13 years old, I had a thought. I wanted to live in a place that was half-city and half-country. Mumbai or Bombay as it was called back then, was very polluted and noisy, not good enough for me, obviously, and I wanted to move to a place that was half-city and half-country except I didn’t know about New Zealand. I’ve never been to New Zealand, probably never even seen any photos of it, but in my mind, I was clear that it had to be half-city and half-country. I say half-city because I love the city. I like people. I like going out and seeing people, and I like the energizer level of the city, but I love the country as well, and I thought if I could find a place that was half-city and half-country, that would be great. I wasn’t thinking of New Zealand. I wasn’t even thinking of leaving India. I was thinking of moving to a place like Bangalore which is in South India. It’s called the Garden City. As I grew up, Bangalore got more congested and busier, and it became just another city, so we started looking out for other countries. We looked at the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These are mainly the immigrant countries. Canada was very cool. I went to the Canadian Embassy and they said, “What’s your profession?” I said, “I’m a cartoonist.” In that documentation that they gave me, there were six different types of cartoonist to choose from, and I thought, “Wow, this is a very sophisticated place,” because when you go to most of these places, you don’t find cartoonist listed as a profession. We didn’t go to Canada. We didn’t fill out any forms. We didn’t do any of that stuff. We did the same with Australia. We went to the embassy. We got some forms. We didn’t do anything. Then, eventually, a lawyer came from New Zealand. He was an immigration lawyer and he looked for our papers, and he said, “No.” He said we didn’t have enough points to get to New Zealand. He said that we needed to try later, but it didn’t look good, and so, we gave up. We just gave up just like that. Part 2:  Getting to New Zealand Then, I was walking down the street several years later, grocery shopping, and I ran into this friend of mine. Her name is Joan. Joan says to me, “What are you doing here?” I said, “I’m grocery shopping.” She said, “No, no. What are you doing in India? Weren’t you supposed to go to New Zealand?” I said, “Oh, yeah. We were supposed to go, but we did all these paperwork and they said that we couldn’t go.” Then, she said, “You should try now.” She gave me a card and I contacted the immigration lawyer, and that was the start of our merry dance with Indian bureaucracy. I don’t know if you’ve been in a bureaucratic country, but Indian bureaucracy is way up there. You have to go to the police and to the passport department, and you’re going back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and spending enormous amounts of time just in this back and forth movement. Anyway, nine months passed, suddenly, late at night, almost midnight, we got a call wherein we have 12 months to make that trip to New Zealand. That’s when something amazing happened. Everything became lopsided in our favor. I know this sounds crazy to say lopsided in your favor, but it was almost like there was a design to stop us from leaving. Everything that came our way was amazing as long as we stayed in India. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we had a rough life in India. The Renuka’s company was a Swiss company and it is the largest fragrance company in the world, and they used to pay for everything; for our stay, our car, we had a chauffeur. It was good life, but the moment we decided we wanted to move was as if a force came in, trying to keep us back. At that point in time, Renuka’s boss, he didn’t know that we were leaving. Almost at the moment we decided we’ll be leaving, he decided to put her in charge of the entire Asian region, which was a big job. When he found out that we were going to New Zealand, he offered to pay the entire airfare. He said, “Go to New Zealand. Have a good vacation. Come back and take your job back,” and we said, “No.” It was the same for me, I had an office. I had staff. I have three-hour lunches. We used to go bowling in the middle of the day. It was a very good life and we had to check up that life and then go into this complete uncertainty of New Zealand. When we left the country, I had just a handbag full of clothes. Not because we didn’t have clothes, but because I wanted to bring all my computer equipment along, so instead of the usual baggage that people bring with all their staff, I had my huge monitor, and then the CPU which weighed a ton, then a scanner, then a printer, and that was what I brought to New Zealand. Everything else was coming in bags later on, but that was the stuff that came with me on the flight. When I’m talking about New Zealand, I often say that we didn’t know anyone in New Zealand, but that’s not quite true. We knew one person and that was Wayne Logue. Wayne was someone that I had met on an internet forum. I was part of a cartoon forum called the Wisenheimer, and Wayne, he was part of that, too. I said I’m coming to New Zealand and he said, “Oh, I can help you.” This was the amazing part. It almost seemed like, “Wow, where did Wayne come from?” We didn’t know whether he was just a crazy guy, a serial killer, and I think that it crossed his mind as well because that’s what … We had a conversation one day and that’s what he said. He didn’t know anything about me. He didn’t know whether I was going to show up, but Wayne actually got my mobile phone, he got my P.O. Box, he got a rental apartment, he did all this stuff not really knowing whether I existed or whether I was just pulling one big April Fool’s Day joke on him. Then, he showed up at the airport and I was able to stay at his place for a week. He had got this rental apartment. He moved me to the rental apartment. He had a hamper full of goodies for me like Kiwi stuff, red socks. When I say “red socks” I mean red socks because we were doing this whole America’s Cup campaign and those are the red socks that they were selling. There were all these things that were essentially very New Zealand-based in that hamper. The landlord’s name was Barry. Barry showed up. He said, “Do you need anything?” I wasn’t quite sure I needed anything. Barry shows up later with half-a-full of forks and spoons, and iron and ironing board, and he just leaves it outside the door so that I can get started. This was New Zealand for me. It was full of friendly, wonderful people that just went out of their way to do stuff. This was a fairy tale start to New Zealand, but it got even better before it got worse. Within a week, I was calling up people from the phonebook. I called up maybe 200 people. These designers and marketing agencies and advertising agencies, and I had a job. I had a job as a web designer. I’d studied a bit of Flash. I didn’t know much of it, but the company that hired me, they didn’t know any of the Flash stuff, so it was very new, very interesting, until I got the job. By day two, I was sick of the job. I wanted to quit. I emailed Renuka. Renuka was still back in India at that point in time. She was going to follow in month or so. I said I wanted to quit the job. She said, “No, no, no. Hang in there.” Renuka has always been this person who had a job and I’ve always been this person who never had a job. I always ran my own business freelance. This job, I don’t know what it was, but it just drove me crazy. I had nothing to do. The whole time I was there, I probably built one website, which if you know me, that drove me absolutely crazy. It was like being in prison. Then, I got made redundant, and that was the second happiest day of the entire year. The first being the day I got to New Zealand, but this was fabulous. There was just one little problem though. We had just bought a house the week before and we had a mortgage for over $200,000, and now, we both didn’t have jobs and we had to pay that mortgage. Part 3:  What Were the Early Years at Psychotactics Like? What were the early years at Psychotactics like? For one, it wasn’t even called Psychotactics. It had this very embarrassing name called Million Bucks. As you probably heard before, I was headed back to India and I had this book called “Good to Great” by Jim Collins, and it asked a question, what can you be the best in the world at? I was a professional cartoonist at that time and I couldn’t answer the question. I thought that Calvin and Hobbes was the best cartoon in the world and I couldn’t beat that, and so i wanted to do something else. I don’t know why. Maybe it was a new county, but I wanted to do something else, and so I just decided to jack up everything I was already doing, and then, throw myself into this crazy crevasse. One day, I just decided I was going to get into marketing. I don’t know what happened. It was as if I took a billboard and put it up on Main Street, and said “Sean D’Souza is not going to do any cartooning anymore,” because all the work I was getting, book covers and magazine covers, and illustrations, and advertising agencies, stuff to be done, and it all stopped. Just overnight, it just stopped. It was as if I’d made these announcements all over town. It just stopped. Then, I had to go out and find some consulting work to do. Now, I was part of a networking group, but would you trust a cartoonist to then advise you on your marketing? Plus, there was this terrible name called Millions Bucks. Even so, I remember what Wayne had told me when I got to New Zealand. He was talking about the cartooning stuff and he said, “John found the pavement. Just go and meet people.” That’s what I did. I just founded the pavement. We used to go to all these events to speak where there were two or three people, or people who were half-asleep, and the amount of mistakes that we had to make along the way were phenomenal. As you know, the Brain Audit itself came about from this very, very bad episode where I stood before an audience of about 20 people and started speaking about the Brain Audit, and then I forgot what I had to say. Then, Renuka had to come and take me aside and we have to have a break for 10 minutes, but from that came the Brain Audit, and from the Brain Audit came our entire business. Along the way, we had all of these little speaking engagements at this rotary and what they call SWAP here, which was sales people with a passion, I think. We’d go to these events and it was this drill over and over again, and this is what I tell people, “You sit behind your computer and yo expect things to happen, but there is a lot of ground work that’s happening, a lot of ground work, and we had to do all our ground work.” The years just flew by until one day, I was sitting at this restaurant called “D-72″ with my friend Eugene Moreau. We were talking about this whole badly-named company called Million Bucks. He said, “You send out a newsletter and you call it Psychological Tactics, and you call the newsletter Psychotactics, so why don’t you name your company Psychotactics? I thought that was a good idea, and so, we named it Psychotactics, and that is how Psychotactics came about. It wasn’t like Million Bucks was totally hopeless. We had millionbucks.co.nz. If you know what a frame-base site was, it was a frame-base site, that means Google couldn’t index it, and yet, we had 1000 subscribers to that website. Now, if you go back to archive.org and search for millionbucks.co.nz and go back in time like the year 2000 or 2001, you will find this terrible-looking site with very small fonts, probably 5 or 6-point. Then, right at the bottom, you had to read all the stuff and then get right to the bottom, and it said, “Subscribe Here.” You literally had to read every word before you subscribe. Today, I sound very confident, but at that point in time, I wasn’t feeling confident at all. I always felt like a fraud. I always felt like someone was going to tap me on the shoulder. Even when opportunity was thrown in our face, we were reluctant. At one point in time, a guy called Joe Vitale, he decided that he was going to promote our book, the Brain Audit, which was just a PDF. It was just 16 or 20 pages. We didn’t have any credit card facility. New Zealand was way back then anyway. It was like you couldn’t get any facility and we’d been looking for three months, and doing the research and spinning, and spinning, and spinning, which is what a lot of people do, and that’s what we did anyway. He gave us a week, and in that week, we had to figure out something and we found ClickBank. Sure they charged over 7.5%, but it was wonderful for us. It was fabulous that we could actually take a credit card. We got back to Joe and said, “We are ready.” He said, “Oh, this week, I’m busy.” Then, the next week, he was busy. The next month, he was busy. Several months passed, but in those months, someone found our website and they started buying the Brain Audit, and that’s how we started selling copies of the Brain Audit online. We didn’t change that 20-page book for ages, for probably over a year, and we sold about $50,000 worth of that book before we even made a single change. By this point, we started speaking at events and getting more confident about selling the book at the events. People will buy the book just on the enthusiasm. Back in 2002, the whole concept of any book was like weird. Some people didn’t even have an email address back then. They would ask for the book on a CD. We kept pushing and we kept going to events, and we kept contacting people on the internet, and we still do that today. After all these years, we’re still doing exactly what we did back then. When I started out, I always believed that things would get less busy, and yes, they do get less busy if your goals are very limited and you want to earn just as much as you did before. We earn a lot more than we did before, but now, the money has become less a focus. Now, just writing books that nobody else is writing, doing them in a way that nobody else is doing them, all of that takes a lot of time and effort, and that’s why I wake up at 4am everyday. In fact, as I’m doing this recording, it’s now 5:52am, and I enjoy every moment of it. Auckland is half-city and half-country. It’s an amazing place, and New Zealand, no matter how much you read about it or look at it in the pictures or in the movies, it is absolutely astounding, and you should visit. I hope you’ve enjoyed this little, mini episode on the Psychotactics history. If you’d want more of this, how we started up our workshops, how we started up our courses, the kind of trouble that we went to, and these personal history stories as it were, write to me and let me know so that I can give you some more stuff. If you haven’t already subscribed to this Three-month Vacation Podcast, then make sure to go to iTunes and hit the “Subscribe” button. Every subscribe really helps the rating of this podcast. If you’ve already done that, then, make sure that you tell your friends about it. Two or three friends that you tell today make a big difference to this podcast. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye-bye and do write in.  You can also listen to or read this Episode: #49:How To Get Better, Higher-Paying Clients With Testimonials

How do you avoid losers as clients? How do you completely sidestep the clients that don't pay, cause trouble and push you around? Surprisingly, the answer lies in testimonials. There are elements of testimonials that cause clients of a certain kind to get attracted to you. So how do you harness that latent power of testimonials? And how do photos, details and tone come into play? Find out in this podcast. -------------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about The whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. He covers: Part 1: How photos act as a mirror on your website Part 2: Why you need to explore the detail in your testimonials Part 3: What is tone and how does it affect your testimonials Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer.  -------------------------- Useful Resources and Links 5000bc—How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems? Learn more about Testimonials—The Secret Life of Testimonials Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter-------------------- To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:   iTunes   |  Android   |  E-mail (and get special goodies)   | RSS The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. African elephants are one of nature’s most amazing communicators. They rumble, they roar and snort, scream, and they trumpet. Yet most of their communication is never heard by humans because it is on the level of infrasound. Infrasound is an extremely low frequency rumble that falls way below the hearing range of human, and yet humans can feel t sound. Michael Garstang, a meteorologist at the University of Virginia explains how elephants communicate. Many of the rumbling calls occur at the level of infrasound. This is a very low frequency rumble that’s below the audible hearing range of humans, he said. Humans can hear the upper end as a rumble, although you’re not hearing it in your ears. It’s more like feeling the vibrations in your diaphragm. This feeling, rather than hearing, is what we encounter when we run into the concept of testimonials. Today we’re going to look at this whole concept of testimonials and why we are more like elephants. We’re communicating through this infrasound, this low level. We can see the testimonials but we’re not exactly paying attention to what’s written there or what’s presented to us. Instead, we’re kind of communicating in a completely different way. What are the way that testimonials communicate that we’re not aware of but we can feel? The three elements that we’re going to look at today are the photo, the detail, and the tone. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the photo. Part 1: The Photo If you were to go to a dating site today and start to look at the photos, you would find that something very interesting starts to fall into place. That is you are choosing some people’s photos over other people’s photos. Why do we do this? It’s because we recognize something within the photos, and that something draws us to that person. Now this doesn’t just occur on dating sites. If you go to a marketing site, and let’s say you look at the site where you have all these promises like become a millionaire overnight or get these results very quickly, look at those photos. As you scroll down to photo after photo after photo after photo, you find that you don’t really like many of those people, but you haven’t read any of the testimonials. You’ve scanned them but you haven’t really read the detail in the testimonials, and yet the photo is sending this low frequency message. This photo is telling you these people aren’t like you. They are different somehow. They’re more greedy or they want quicker results. They don’t want to work for it. Even if you had not a single word of text on that page, you would still feel uncomfortable. Then you could sense someone who wanted that kind of result, who wanted to be that millionaire overnight, who wanted all those quick results. They would find those photos very appealing. This is what happens with photos. Photos send out this message, which means when you’re putting your photos of your clients on your website, you can’t just take the clients that give the best testimonials. You’ve got to put clients that are very, very reliable, clients that are ethical, clients that you like, clients that you want to work with in future. Those are the photos that you want to put on your website. Why? Because it’s like a mirror. There is a message that’s coming out from those photos. That’s why on Psychotactics we have photos of people that we like, clients that we’ve worked with, clients that we’ve gone out with, clients that we would love to have all the time. The results have been very clear. People often get on our courses and they say, “How do you get such great people in your courses?” They come to our workshops and they go, “Wow, this is amazing. What kind of filtration system do you have in place?” When you look for that answer, at the very core it is the photographs. Whenever we put up a photograph of a client that we didn’t like just because we needed a testimonial, we start to get other clients that are similar to that client. If you want to try an experiment and put all the bad clients, all the clients that don’t pay you on time, they give you a lot of trouble, put their photos and you’ll start to see that low frequency rumble going through, that communication going through, and you get more clients just like that. You put in some good clients, clients that you like to work with, and you start to see the clients that you want to work with show up time after time. It’s a simple filtration system, and yet it works amazingly well. But photos alone will not do the job. Of course they’ll attract clients that you want but they still need some more information. What is that more information all about? The more information is the detail that is in your testimonials. This takes us to the second part where we start to explore the detail in your testimonials. Part 2: Explore the Detail in Your Testimonials What is this detail all about? Let’s take a look at one of the testimonials at 5000bc.com, which is our membership site. The testimonial reads like this: 5000bc is one of the few sites I’ve been a member of that has so little drama. There are no huge fights, no negativity. Everyone tries their best to be helpful. Then it goes on to talk about how he’s been a member of several membership sites over the years and how they’ve charged over $100 a month. They were big and crowded and scary. Some had just a handful of members and some were strictly moderated, and some were just overtaken by promotion from the members, and how 5000bc is the only membership site that he’s stuck with year after year after year for over nine years. As you’re reading that testimonial, what you’re getting is a feeling of safety, of being in the safe zone. That when you’re in 5000bc you don’t feel overcrowded and pushed around and all these promotions coming at you. You suddenly feel that you can ask a lot of questions, that you can get the answers, that the people out there are people like you, because that’s what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re looking for in the photos. That’s also what we’re looking for in the detail. The testimonials start to reflect what you want to be, where you want to go, how you want to be. A lot of testimonials don’t do this. They don’t explain that experience or they don’t give out that experience. What they do is talk about how great they are. It doesn’t come from a user experience. It comes more from how great that website wants to be rather than how safe you need to be. When a customer comes to your site and starts to read the testimonial, they need to read the experience from the user’s point of view. When they do that, then they feel that mirror effect. They can feel that low rumble coming through and they know this is the place where they would thrive and succeed and move forward. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, what you’re looking for first are photographs, because photographs form that first mirror. But then the second thing you’re looking for is the user experience. It’s not so much about how great it is but how the user has gone through that feeling of feeling insecure and now you’re feeling great. Or they needed some questions answered, and how the questions were answered. Or how they weren’t expecting to find such a fun group, and then how they ran into an honest, fun-loving group. All of this becomes the experience. It becomes the mirror. Immediately you feel I need to be part of this place. I need to be part of this experience. As you ask the six questions that I mentioned in The Brain Audit, you start to get this response from your clients. You start to get the response that you’re looking for, which enabled them to give their experience. That is what others get attracted to. Suddenly 5000bc is filled with all these happy, friendly people and you have a great experience. This is true for your own product and your service as well. When you have your workshops, when you have your training, when you have your courses online, when you sell your products you will find that most of the people, if not all the people, are remarkably similar. Their ethics are similar. Their behavior is similar. You don’t have trouble. Or you can have a lot of trouble if you start to put in photographs and experiences that are not congruent with what you really want to achieve. This takes us to the third part, which is the tone. Part 3: The Tone We looked at photos and we looked at detail, but what is tone? This part we cannot control. I don’t know what it is, but when people speak like right now I am speaking to you, what kind of feeling do you get from me? That’s the kind of question that cannot be answered. You feel this at a diaphragm level like the elephants feel … You feel their energy at a diaphragm level. You can’t hear it. You don’t know what it is but you feel there’s something happening. The tone comes from clients as they answer your testimonials. The testimonial tone is not something that you can control, but you need to know that when you appeal to those first two elements where you put the right photo and you ask the right questions and you get the right clients in, you will definitely start to get a tone that is consistent. The tone you find with most Psychotactics lines is one of warmth and helpfulness, and it’s right through the website. You can look at all the products and all the services, and the membership site, and the workshops, and the courses, and it’s there. It’s warm, it’s friendly, it’s helpful. Where did that tone come from? The tone came from us, and the tone can come from you. We tell people to be kind, be helpful, or be gone. When that message goes out on a consistent basis like it is right now on this podcast, then the people that are interested in being kind and being helpful, they join our courses, they come to our workshops, they deal with us. The rest of them just go away. They go to other sites where probably they’re promised riches or quick results or whatever. It becomes a filtration process. You wouldn’t think of testimonials doing such a fabulous job, and that’s what they do. When you get those testimonials, you get that warm helpful tone in it as well. You can’t control it, except to send out that message on a regular basis. Let’s just summarize what we’ve learned today. Summary We looked at three elements. The first was the photo. We found that the moment we put in photos that don’t appeal to us, rather photos of clients that have given us trouble, we’re going to get clients that are going to give us a lot of trouble in the future. You want to pick photos of clients that you like, clients that have worked with you and are enjoyable to work with and pay on time. You will start to see that mirror effect almost immediately. The second thing is one of detail. When you ask those six questions that you get in The Brain Audit, you will get that detail. In that detail people will talk about warmth, the friendliness or fun. Someone else reading that information also gets that feeling, that user experience. Finally, it’s a factor of tone, but how do you get that tone? You get that tone by first sending out a message that we’re kind, friendly, helpful, whatever message you want to send out. Then you get that same feedback. It comes through in the testimonial. It’s not something that you can control except to send it out in the first place. Now, every product or service is not going to have testimonials right at the start. We’ve been in business since 2002 at Psychotactics, and yet when we bring out a new product or a new service we don’t have testimonials for that product or service. You’re always the new kid on the block no matter how long you’ve been around. The trick to getting those testimonials is to ask people that you like. Now you can’t always control this when you’re just starting out, but find people that you like. Don’t go for people that you don’t like. Even if you’re looking through forums or Facebook or Twitter, any place, look for people that you already like because that will have the mirror effect, that will have that elephant-like low intensity rumble that other people get. Yes, it’s always going to be trouble finding testimonials, but this is how you go about it. Then once you’ve got it up and running, you’re going to get testimonials from people who bought your product, and then you don’t have any trouble anymore. When we first started out, it was very hard for us to get testimonials for The Brain Audit, which was our first book. Then we got over 100 testimonials, and then 200 and 300 and 400. At one point we had 800. Today there are over a thousand testimonials. The same applies for all the other books and the products. It’s just a system that you have to keep following, and you get more and more testimonials. If you would like to learn more about testimonials you can go to www.psychotactics.com/testimonial. There is a book there, The Secret Life of Testimonials. It shows you a world of testimonials that you didn’t know existed. It’s not a very expensive book but it changes the way you respond to things and the way your clients respond to you. At the end of the day, all of us want is to do our work well, to get great clients that respect us and trust us and work with us, and to be able to take the break and go on our three month vacation. Really, getting the clients is the critical part. If you go to psychotactics.com/testimonial you can read up and you can decide for yourself whether you want the book. I think you’ll like it a lot, so go there and check it out for yourself. On another front, I’m still working on the stock cartoons. They’re turning out to be a lot of fun. I listen to a lot of music and podcasts, and we’re turning out these very elaborate cartoons that you’re going to love to put in your blog posts, your website, your books, pretty much everywhere. It’s going to be a lot of fun, so get on the Psychotactics list if you haven’t got there, because when I announce this I promise you there will be a bit of a stampede. These cartoons are absolutely stunning. I might even give quite a few away. Get on the Psychotactics list. Yes, also, psychotactics.com/magic. That’s where you get information about the podcast so that you can keep on top of them, but you also get some bonuses from time to time. Either psychotactics.com where you have to subscribe. If you’re already already subscribed, go towww.psychotactics.com/magic. That’s pretty much it. I’m on Twitter @Sean D’Souza. Send me your questions there, or at sean@psychotactics.com. Yes, also on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Bye for now. Still listening? One of the best testimonials that you can ever get is the unasked-for testimonial. We were at this workshop in Washington D.C. when one of our clients stood up. We didn’t ask him to stand up and give a testimonial, but he stood up and he started talking about the cartooning course that he had done with us. Then he went out and he got his books and he showed the cartoons that he had done. He showed it to the entire audience. Then some of the group had also done the cartooning course with him, and one of the terms in the cartooning course is “circly circles,” which of course, circly doesn’t exist as a word, but it’s part of the cartooning course. You learn it and you say it. Suddenly there was this kind of little rumble going through the room and people were interested in the cartooning course. You can see this at psychotactics.com/davinci, because we were recording at that point in time so it’s on video. You can feel the enthusiasm. You can see what is happening there. You can see the person themselves, the tone. It’s just amazing, that detail. There you go, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archives. You can also listen to or read this episode: How To Build A Cult-Like Following By Using An Adjective In Your Branding  

Is it really easy to build a cult-like following for your brand? Yes, but the core of that branding lies in the "adjective". Yes, that very same grammar lesson you had at school. When you look at the biggest and most well-defined brands in history, you find they are defined by a single word. Let's take Volvo, for example. The word "safety" came to mind, didn't it? That's the power of the adjective. Let's learn more in this episode of the Three-Month Vacation  Details To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/48 Email me at sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What is the adjective and how one little adjective can define your business? Part 2: How we get to this adjective and the biggest mistake you can make Part 3: How do we expand it further so that it becomes your whole DNA Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer. -------------------- Useful resources and links Free Uniqueness Series: How to find your uniqueness Uniqueness Stories: Why Uniqueness Stories Are Better Than Slogans Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. When I was growing up in India, all plywood was sold the same way. You went to a store and you picked some plywood. Then you took it home. There was no branding; it was all very, very generic. At some point, a company called Kitply, they decided that they didn’t want to be generic anymore. They decided they wanted to charge a premium on this plywood. Now why would you go and pay a premium on plywood when you could just enter the store, get your plywood just like everybody else? Well, Kitply, they wanted to do something different. That is exactly what they did. The Indian coastline, it’s about 7,000 kilometers; that’s about 4,500 miles. When you have a coastline that is so extensive, it also means that you have a lot of water around you. Water means humidity, and humidity means disaster for plywood, at least the plywood that you were getting in the store at that point in time. After you spent all this money on a carpenter, which is what most people did, they got a carpenter across and they built cupboards and they put the plywood in the cupboards. Then the rains would come. In India, you don’t just get rains; you get rains in June, all of July, all of August, and a bit in September as well. That plywood would get all the moisture sitting in it. After a while, it would start to warp. Your beautiful cupboard, all your furniture, it would have this warped plywood. It would drive people crazy, but there was nothing that you could do until Kitply came up with a solution. They made their plywood waterproof. But Indians are a skeptical lot, and rightly so. If you’ve got a monsoon that goes on for several months, you want to be sure that the plywood is exceedingly good. So, Kitply not only said that their plywood was waterproof, but that it was boiling waterproof. Now no one was going to take boiling water and throw it on the plywood, but it made a point. What is the factor that caused Kitply to stand out? Incredibly, we have to go back to a grammar lesson, because what we’re doing here is just looking at the adjective. What we’re going to cover in this podcast are three elements. First is what is the adjective. Second: how to pick it. Third: how to refashion your product around it. Let’s start off with the first one, which is what is the adjective. Part 1: What is the Adjective Now, I don’t have to tell you what an adjective is. You did that in grammar class. But here’s the point. When we started out the article writing course it was very difficult for us to position it against other article writing courses, because ours is almost $3,000 and, well, the others are $400 and $500. Some are even free. What we did was we put one little adjective. We called it The Toughest Writing Course in the World. That changed everything. Because not only did it change us, but it changed the perception of all the customers that were going to buy into that course. They knew that it wasn’t a stroll in the park. They knew that they were to expect a lot of work and effort going into that course. That one little adjective made all the difference. This is what you need to do for your business as well. You need one little adjective to define your business. What is this business all about? When we look at a brand like Volvo for instance, immediately an adjective comes to mind, doesn’t it? It’s safety. Now Volvo hasn’t really pushed this concept of safety for a long, long time, and yet we remember it. We remember it because of that one adjective, which was safety. If you go and read any of a dozen books, you’ll find another case study showing up, which is Domino’s Pizza. Now Domino’s Pizza has not advertised its speed for a very long time. That is because every pizza parlor will deliver it very quickly. But it still helped them make it a billion dollar brand all on the basis of one adjective, which was speed. Adjectives play an extremely important roll, and what we’ve got to figure out is how do we create our adjective. This takes us to the second part, where we’re going to explore how we get to this adjective. Part 2: How We Get to This Adjective One of the big mistakes that people do when they’re coming up with their adjective is they sit down with their company, their brand, and they try to come up with an adjective for the company. At this point in time, that’s not really what you want to do. You want to come up with an adjective for a product or a service and not for your company, because your company has so much ego, so much of your ego invested in it, that it is difficult to nail down an adjective. You want to start off really simply by working with a product or a service. When we started out, we didn’t do Psychotactics. We started out with something like the article writing course. What you need to do next is to make sure that you sit down and write about ten adjectives for that product or service, whatever it is. Just write down those ten adjectives, and then you cross out seven. This is not going to be easy, but cross out seven. You’re left with three. Out of those three, you cross out two. This is going to be extremely difficult because you think it’s this and that and that, but you want to cross out two. That leaves you with just one adjective. That defines your product or your service. Now most people go through this procedure in one of two ways. One is absolute fluke, and the second is this organized system of ten and three and one. When we did the article writing course, we didn’t go through this whole system of ten and three and one because a customer, she suggested that it was the toughest writing course in the world, so we adopted that adjective. It became that pivotal point, that pivotal turning point where the course started to get more customers simply based on that one adjective. They wanted to sign up because it was difficult, not because it was easy. This gives us a good chance to actually compare one course with the other. We also have a copywriting course. Now the copywriting course doesn’t have an adjective. When you describe the article writing course you say it’s the toughest course in the world. When you describe the copywriting course, you go, “Um, uh, wait. I … ” You’re lost for words. This is what the adjective does. It boils it down to one single world, but it does so much more because everything extends from there. This is what we’re going to do in the third part. We’re going to look at how it becomes the DNA of your product or service, and how you can build out from there, how it creates this whole structure, this whole ecosystem around your product and service. Let’s go to the third part, which is how do we expand it further so that it becomes your whole DNA. Part 3: How Do We Expand It Further So That It Becomes Your Whole DNA When we just look at the adjective like safety or speed, it doesn’t mean anything. When we look at safety and we look at how do we make this car really safe, then we get to what Volvo has done over the years. They’ve created seat belts and crumple zones and crash test dummies and a whole range of safety devices for your car. So they are known for their safety, and the kind of people that buy a Volvo are those who are obsessed with safety. The whole ecosystem grew around that one adjective. When you look at brands around you, you start to notice that it’s not just Volvo and Domino’s and the article writing course, but when you look at the Benjamin. This is the Benjamin Hotel in New York. They are focused on a good night’s sleep. It’s restfulness that’s their adjective. They have all kinds of pillows. They have a sleep concierge. They have cakes and stuff that help you sleep better, and they’ll even give you a guarantee if you don’t get a good night’s sleep, even if someone else is drilling in the building next door. Everything they do is built around that one concept of sleep, that one adjective of restfulness. When I was growing up in India we had a television. It was called Onida TV. When they launched that TV, the slogan was “Neighbours envy and owner’s pride.” They didn’t talk about the features of the TV, the size of the TV, nothing. It was just this devil the whole time, this sneaky little devil. He showed up on the screen and he did all kinds of antics. At the end of it, it was just about envy. They didn’t talk about anything. That one adjective made Onida one of the largest-selling televisions in India. We live in New Zealand, as you know. If you think of New Zealand, what do you think of? You think of beauty. You think of purity. That’s what New Zealand is all about. It’s 100% pure. That’s what their advertising and marketing is all about. That’s their adjective. But that’s not what New Zealand had about a hundred years ago. Their slogan was about cure, not pure. You came here for health benefits, not to go around and look at the waterfalls and go over the mountains and do all those fabulous things that you can do in New Zealand. That adjective can change over time. Funny, no one even noticed, did they? In fact, some adjectives are under the radar. You look at Facebook for instance, and you think what could be the adjective for Facebook. But it’s very obvious, isn’t it? It’s sticky. Everything they do is designed to make you get back to Facebook. Recently they even made you, forced you to get the Messenger app if you wanted to get some of the messages that friends would send to you. Why did they do that? Because if you didn’t go to Facebook, you’d probably miss out on the messages. If you had the Messenger app, that would pop up on your phone and you’d see it, so it would pull you back to the site. Facebook is all about stickiness. It’s about going there several times a day, being addicted to it, communicating with your friends, doing whatever you have to do, but you have to go back to Facebook. It’s an addiction. When you think of Amazon, you think wow, that’s a great selection. Maybe that is their adjective. But no, it’s below the radar. Amazon’s entire business is built around speed. They have two-day shipping, one-day shipping. This time I was in the United States and I was in Washington D.C. I had bought this mic that I’m using right now. Well not quite, I had ordered the wrong mic. It got shipped in and then I wanted to return it, so I did. I packed it up and I was waiting for the courier to come in. By the time the courier came in, the new mic had already been delivered. There’s an adjective in place even though we might not see as part of the slogan. Sometimes you can have an adjective that is defined by the title. For instance, when I wrote Dartboard Pricing, the concept of dartboard itself talks about something that is unusual, that is kind of random. That gives it that adjective. It gives it that curiosity factor, and it attracts you to that product or to that service. Now, the question does arise: can this adjective last forever? In most cases it can go for a very, very long time. In Domino’s Pizza’s case, it didn’t last forever, but they’re still a billion dollar brand. When you are selling your products or services, it’s critical to have this adjective because this is what we do in normal life. We describe other people. We describe places. We describe movies. We describe products. When you have that adjective in place, it not only helps to create that description, but it becomes the DNA for your product or service. The reason why you see so many products and services without any game plan is simply because they don’t have this simple grammar lesson in place: the adjective. Once you have the adjective, everything builds around it. That is really what we’ve covered today. Summary In part one we just looked at the fact that our grammar lesson was very important. We needed to have an adjective. In part two we looked at the fact that we could probably list ten adjectives and then get rid of seven, and then get rid of another two until we had a single adjective. Finally, we looked at all of these products and services like the Benjamin, and Onida, and New Zealand, and Amazon, and Facebook. There are dozens of examples of very successful brands. At the core of them is the DNA. At the core of them is this factor of the adjective and how the whole ecosystem is built around this one adjective. If you’re wondering what is the adjective for Psychotactics, well, there is an adjective for the brand itself. The adjective for Psychotactics is elegance. When you buy a product or a service from Psychotactics, you experience that elegance. There is an elegance int system which goes with very tiny increments. There’s an elegance in the cartoons. There’s an elegance in the way the text is written. The same thing applies to the podcast. There is the music and the way the whole podcast is recorded. We’re always working towards that elegance. But on a ground level, every product and every service is going to need their own adjective as well. Yes, your company is going to need some kind of adjective. It’s not critical right now but it’s going to need it over time, and you’re going to have to bring out that adjective in your marketing material. Which we haven’t done, by the way, but we will once the new website is up. Companies need the adjective but every product and every service is going to need the adjective as well. That brings us to the end of this podcast. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you do enjoy it, then share it with your friends. Talk about it on Twitter or Facebook. That will really help. Leave a review on iTunes; it really helps us. What’s happening in Psychotactics land? Well, you can still get the Dartboard Pricing at whatever we launched it at. We’re going to have the sales page up, so if you want to get it quickly, go to psychotactics.com/ttc. You can also join the headline writing course or become a headline trainer. That’s at the end of this month, so you want to be on the Psychotactics mailing list if you want to get these notifications, because the courses fill up pretty quickly. You can find me at sean@psychotactics.com or Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and at Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Very, very sticky place, but I’m getting out of the sticky zone and I’m going for my walk. That’s me from the Three Month Vacation and psychotactics.com.   Also listen and read: #47: How We Sold $20,000 On Stage (In Under An Hour)      

Imagine you got on stage and you had an eager audience ready to buy. Of course there are a few obstacles. The first obstacle is that you have just an hour to convince the audience to buy. The second is you're not the only one selling products?there are others. The third obstacle is that a good chunk of the audience doesn't know you that well and aren't on your list. So three big problems to deal with. Now you may never have the desire to get on stage, but the issues are similar when you're selling a product or service. You have very little time to convince a prospect. You're battling it out with others selling similar products and services. And you're a bit of a stranger to the audience. / / So how do you overcome these issues, and win? Notes: To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/47 Email me at: sean@psychotactics.com  Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Art Of Preparation And The Importance Of Pre-Sell Part 2: The Importance Of The Document Before The Event Part 3: The Whole Factor of Urgency Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.  Useful Resources and Links Black Belt Presentations:  When you make a presentation, wouldn’t it be amazing to completely control the room—without turning anyone off?Special Bonus: How To Win The Resistance Game Psychotactics Newsletter: Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing business newsletter The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. I was speaking at a conference in Chicago to about 200 to 300 people. I had just finished my speech and I met this guy in the corridor. He was rushing. I asked him, “Why are you in such a hurry?” He says, “I have to go upstairs and get my credit card.” I said, “Why do you have to get your credit card from upstairs? Why don’t you have it in your pocket?” This is the story of how we sold $20,000 worth of product at a conference. This is digital product. This is not physical product. This was The Brain Audit and the membership to 5000bc. I was asked this question by Alison Beere from Cape Town, South Africa, and you want to know the answer. You probably think that the answer lay in the speech. There might have been some triggers in the speech. There might have been some information that caused them to act. Sure, there would have been some urgency, but what was it that caused all these people to buy? What caused them to trust me after speaking to them for just over an hour? Why did we manage to sell more than all the other speakers on that day? These are the questions that we need to answer, and not because you want to go out there and sell 20,000. Of course you want to do it, but you have to understand that sales is not a one-time hit. That’s what it looks like. If I put this on a sales page, that’s exactly what it looks like. It looks like a one-time hit. It looks like I went there, made the speech, and they bought everything. As we’re about to find out in this podcast, it is a matter of preparation. Whether you’re selling a very small item off your website, a course, or in our case, this $20,000 day that we had, it all involves preparation. What are the steps that you have to get all of these ducks lined up in a row? How do you make things work for you? Let’s find out But wait, wait, wait. Let’s not go into how we did that just yet. Because we have to go back in time to 2003 when I was in Sydney, and I bombed in a big way. I sold very little, just enough to cover the cost of the airfare. What was the difference between the two events? Why was that guy so eager to get his credit card? Okay, enough teasing. Let’s go into the main section of today’s podcast and let’s cover the three points. What are the three points that we’re going to cover? The first is the preparation. The second is the document before the event. The third is the very tight deadline. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the preparation. Part 1: Preparation If you had been a subscriber of Psychotactics you would have run into a statement that almost sounds like hype. That is that we sell out our courses maybe within half an hour, sometimes 20 minutes. Now these aren’t just $20 courses. These are courses that go up to $2,000, $3,000, and yet they fill up in 20 to 30 minutes. We do with this without any joint ventures, without any affiliates, without any publicity, without any advertising. It’s done with a very small group of people, and yet time after time, all the way since 2006, the courses have been consistently filling up. Not that it doesn’t make me nervous every time I launch a course. I still think somehow this time it will be jinxed, but it just keeps going. What’s really happening? The first thing is the prep work. It’s what I call presell. When I went to this event in Chicago it was completely different from the event in Sydney. When I went to Sydney, I had great slides, I had a great presentation, and I give that presentation. I did exactly the same thing in Chicago. What a big difference. The difference was the preparation. Before we went to the event in Chicago we had done some prep work, some ground work. Before the event, Ken McCarthy, who was hosting the event, he had done some interviews. What did I do in those interviews? The first thing I made sure was that I was empowering people. When we did the interviews, instead of answering a question, I gave away almost the complete system. When you give away a system, what you do is you empower people. You don’t cover a lot of points. You cover just a few points. I cover three points as you know. There are steps. You do this and you do that and you do the third thing, and you get to an end point. When we did those interviews, people were listening at the other end. Now frankly, I don’t know what the other interviews were all about. Ken was interviewing a lot of folk, but I made sure that when someone finished my interview they had a task so simple that they could apply it. You see this in the free headline report that we give away, or you see this in the books that we write. You see this empowerment factor, and it’s very critical. Because there are several other speakers and they’re all going to make their pitch. You somehow have to stand out from it. How do you stand out? You start right at the beginning. You start before the event. A lot of people don’t realize this. They don’t realize that people buy long before they pay. I’ll say that again. People buy long before they pay. What we were doing is getting them into the buying process. We were giving them information that was empowering that they could take right after the call and use it. Immediately, instead of just being another interview, instead of just being another speaker, now we were getting them to buy into our system, into our method, into whatever we were offering them. We hadn’t got on stage yet and people already buying into us. Then you’d think that was enough. That if you just gave away that information, which is a system, a small system but a system nonetheless, that would be enough. But we gave away further goodies. We gave away information that we could easily sell. Of course people go through it. Not everyone goes through it but enough people go through it. Now we’re working on a second level where people are buying through us. What is really happening here is when people encounter you for the first time, you’re a stranger. When you go back to 2009, there were already a whole bunch of experts in the marketing field. Now when you look around you, it has increased exponentially, whatever your field is. When you get that opportunity you have to take that opportunity with both hands. You have to create something that’s empowering, create something that’s a system, create something that your audience can immediately use. Then on top of that you give away further goodies. Again, the goodies are empowering. They’re short, they’re powerful, they get the point across and they now create this connection with this audience that didn’t know you at all, and you haven’t even stepped on stage. Now this podcast is about what we did on stage, but it applies to pretty much anything. We’re going to have some cartoon stock, which means that you can use these cartoons anywhere. How do I go about that? I have to empower you. How do I empower you with cartons? Because I’m not teaching you to draw cartoons. I’m actually selling you the cartoon. I empower you by giving away a cartoon. When I give away a cartoon, now you’ve got something. You don’t know me but now you’ve got something, and something that is extremely good. Now the connection has been made. You’re not going to buy all of those cartoons, not 100, or 200, or whatever you offer in the end. You get just one, but that one is so good that it empowers you. It’s isolated, it’s small, it gets your attention. That’s the first point: that you have to do the prep work well in advance; four, six, eight weeks in advance. Some people do it a year in advance. You might not have the time. You might have very little patience, but you’ve got to start off with the prep work because people buy long before they pay. This takes us to the second part, which is the document before the event. Part 2: The Document Before The Event What is the document before the event? When you go to any event, what you get is a badge. Then you get some kind of bag with lots of goodies in it. Then you take that to your hotel room, and you might look through some of it, but most of it gets tossed in the corner because you’re more focused on the event. You’re more focused on what you have to learn. What if you get something that is not connected to the bag, not connected to that registration process? Now that’s what we did at that Chicago event. We were speaking on the second day of the event. On day one we got the organizers to announce that everyone who was coming to my presentation would need to read about six or eight pages of stuff. This was just photocopied and given to everyone. Now when you go to an event you obviously want to get the best out of it. You’re not considering that bag and the badges and all the goodies. You’re now focused on those six to eight pages. Again, those six to eight pages were directly linked to what I was going to speak about. Now this may sound really odd. If you’re going to give away the information that you’re already going to present, won’t they get bored? Won’t your whole presentation fall flat? As it turns out, the answer is no. First, let’s backtrack a little bit. Those six to eight pages, they had information on pricing and how to increase your prices without losing customers. In those six to eight pages, what you’re trying to create is a report. You want to go back to episode number 46 and see how you create a great report. That report was something that hit you between the eyes. It was still about the presentation I was about to make, but it was now getting the customer completely absorbed. Now they had been through two or three levels. First it was the interview, then the goodies. Then we give them this third thing, which was wow, I never thought of it this way. Now they are primed to listen to you. They read those six to eight pages and some of them are reading it just before they enter the auditorium, but they’re reading it. All of them are reading it. That sets you up nicely for when you get up on stage. The people, the customers, they’re buying before they pay. You are setting up all these little bits of information that are empowering them, so that even if they buy nothing from you, they will buy in the future. Can you take that risk? No, you shouldn’t take that risk. That takes us to the third part, which is the whole factor of urgency. Part 3: The Whole Factor of Urgency That’s part three: the tight deadline. I had finished my speech and I had stepped out in the corridor. That’s when I ran into the guy, the guy who was running upstairs to get his credit card. Why had he kept his credit card upstairs? You know the answer. He knew that he would get swayed by some of the speakers. He knew that he would buy something that he didn’t need. Yet, when we gave that presentation, he found it so useful that he decided he was going to buy, so he was running up to his hotel room to get his credit card. He said, “Hang on, I have to get the credit card and I can’t speak to you right now.” What did I do before that that caused him to get his credit card? I was on the podium and my wife Renuka was at the end of the room. We didn’t have anybody else. It was just the two of us. You have to have someone else at the back of the room. Even one person handling 300 orders, not a problem. I said to the audience, “Here’s the thing. This is a great offer. It’s not a discount. You’re getting this great bonus.” We gave them some really good bonuses. “When Renuka leaves the room, it’s over. You don’t get any of the bonuses. You don’t get anything that we’ve offered in the room.” Some people think it’s a bluff. Who’s going to turn down money? Yet, when we leave the room, that’s it. That guy was running up to his room to get his credit card so he could stop Renuka before she left the room. Now it does take some time to go through 200 or 300 orders, so she was in that room for at least 20 minutes, but we had prepared everything. There were sheets with details. Back then they had to write out their credit card details on a sheet of paper and sign it and give it in. All of that ground work, all of that prep work was in place. The sheets were on their seats before they sat down. Again, they were going through another step. Eventually what they had to do was just fill in the form, step up to Renuka, give her the sheet, and it was done. Then we left the room. Then someone came up to me and said, “Are you Sean D’Souza?” I said yes. He had been to another presentation, and he said, “I want to buy what you just sold.” I said, “You don’t even know what I was selling.” He said, “Yes yes, I know, but my friend told me just buy whatever he’s selling.” You know how the deal was. The deal was that once we left the room, the offer didn’t exist. You would think it’s a bluff, and it’s never a bluff. You should always have this. It’s a tight deadline. When this happens, it doesn’t exist anymore. The offer doesn’t exist anymore. That creates an urgency that you will not find otherwise. You see this urgency on Christmas day for instance. People will not buy on the 28th of December. They have to buy everything before Christmas day. There is an urgency. You have to use the same concept of urgency. Once people leave the room, who knows what happens. Some people run into other people, they change their minds. Yes, there is pressure. You might not like this pressure. As a person selling something you’re always a little unsure of this pressure, but this is how we buy everything. We don’t fix the roof because we want to fix the roof. We fix the roof because there is pressure. It’s leaking. We don’t buy a new phone because we need it desperately. We do it because there is external pressure, maybe social pressure. You may not admit to it, but the pressure exists. This is what Apple does as well. They create that momentum towards that event, and this is what you’ve got to do as well. It’s not easy. It’s not easy to be a speaker there, to do all these steps and then finally to go through this sales process. Because what I used to do and what I did in Sydney was I didn’t really think through the last bit, which was the sales process. You have to be extremely calm and very enthusiastic when you’re selling your products or services. You get very nervous. You speed through it. You miss points. I had everything on slides so I didn’t miss anything. That is the way you go through the whole process. Summary To summarize what we’ve just covered, we did three steps. The first was we did all the prep work. I did the interviews. We gave the goodies. We had the sheets on the seats. We had everything in place. That was the first hit, because we know that people buy long before they pay. The second thing was that you need to have one little trigger before the event. We had this six to eight page document that people were reading, and they were reading just before they got into the event as well. Finally, there was a tight deadline. That deadline is sacred. You can’t say I’m going to change my mind. Hey, we’ll take your credit card. No. That’s what we do for all our courses as well, for all our products as well. I said this in another podcast. Who’s going to know if three or four extra people sign up for a course? Who’s going to ask you? Those three or four extra people would be another $12,000 in the bank, but we say no. There is a tight deadline. You meet the deadline, you get in the course. It’s first come, first serve. At the event, it wasn’t first come, first serve, but it was pretty close. It was 20 minutes. She leaves the room, you’re toast. This brings us to the end of the podcast and the one thing that you can do today. I think the one thing that you can do today is plan. What are the steps before the event? What are you going to give away before the event? What are the things and the goodies, and what are the little bits that you have to prepare? When people get on stage, when speakers get on stage, there are so many things that they have to do before the event and they never do. They just stand up and speak and they think everything is going to be all right. It’s never all right. You have to do all the little bits in advance. That’s what makes for a great event. I would say sit down and draw a line from left to right. Then put in all the little bits that you have to do. Because when you get on stage, that is like the middle of whole sequence. Then finally, you have to still sell, which is the end of your sequence. You have to be very careful about that as well. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Now, there is a book on this at Psychotactics. I wrote a book shortly after I came back because people wanted to know not just about this event and how we sold $20,000 worth of stuff, but also what goes into the slides. How do you control the slides? Because the slides also create this enigma factor. It creates this factor where people say wow, this is so well designed. It’s so well structured. You’ve got to have the structure for the slides. You also have to have great visual appeal. You have to have control of how the slides look, how the presentation rolls out, and finally how you control the audience. All of this is in the Black Belt Presentation Series. If you’re really interested in how to create a great presentation, then that becomes very critical. These elements that we talked about, these help to create that $20,000 moment, but all of the stuff in the book, that helps you understand all the other elements that you have to do. It’s a lot of work. No one said that this was easy. This podcast is not about easy and outsourcing and all that stuff. It’s about doing the hard work and getting the rewards. That’s what takes you to a three month vacation. When people say, “I can’t get to a three month vacation,” it’s because they don’t have the time, the money, and the resources. You have to put in the time and the resources, and yes, some money before you can get to that three month vacation. You have to start somewhere and put in the work. That’s how you get the results. Now for some presell. We are having the headline course and the headline trainer course, and for the first time ever the headline trainer course. I don’t know when you’ll get to this podcast, but if you get to it on time, then get to psychotactics.com and look for headline course or headline trainer course. The courses fill up very quickly. You want to move quickly. I mean really, really quickly. We’re also going to have the first 50 words course at the end of the year. That’s in November somewhere, so you can prepare yourself for that. This is about writing the first 50 words of, say, a podcast or an article. This is where we slog the most, struggle the most. The entire course is about the first 50 words. We probably have The Brain Audit trainer program around that time as well. That’s more expensive. It’s about $10,000. It’s more detailed. It goes over six months. We’ll go into more detail in the future, but for now it’s just the headline course, the headline trainer course. I’ll also be bringing out those cartoons that I talked about in this podcast. Expect to see some of that soon. A lot of stuff happening, a lot of stuff happening. If you want to ask me more questions, email me at sean@psychotactics.com, also at Twitter @Sean D’Souza, and yes, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza. Yes, we give away goodies, as you know. If you want to be on the goodies list, you go to psychotactics.com/magic. That’s www.psychotactics.com/magic. You will get those goodies from time to time. That’s it from Psychotactics and the Three Month Vacation. Still listening? I’m giving you this advice, but recently what we’re in Denver and there were about 400 or 500 people in the audience. How many subscribers did we get? 20. Why did we get 20? We got 20 because we didn’t follow the advice that I’ve just given you. We didn’t do as much prep work. We didn’t have the sheet before the event. Of course there was no tight deadline. We goofed up, too. You can do it too if you don’t take your own advice or don’t listen to this advice. Then failure is always around the corner. That’s a little snippet from the archives at psychotactics.com. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode:  Why Identity Helps You Surge Ahead In Work (And Life): Episode 46

We're all pounded with the whole concept of success. We think that it means more money, more fame, more power. And yet when confronted with defining our own success, we realise there's something we haven't quite defined. In this episode we explore why feeling like a fraud is normal; why seemingly successful people define themselves differently when the spotlight is removed; why space is so critical to creating that identity. / / Identity is what holds us back. Identity is what can take us further. You'll love this episode! Links: To get the special "Resistance" PDF (It's cool, so get it) http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance To get some magic, go to magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To get The Brain Audit, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit To leave reviews at iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2  To leave reviews on Android http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=57686&refid=stpr ------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why It Is Okay To Feel Like A Fraud Part 2: How We Define Success And How It Becomes Your Identity Part 3: The Factor Of Space And Why It Is Critical To Your Life Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing Why Headlines Fail—The Report Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter Audio and Transcript—Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) The  Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I’m Sean D’Souza. The Cherokee elder stood before his students and he told them of two wolves that live and battle within each one of us. One of these wolves, he explained, is ill-natured. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, jealous, arrogant. It’s full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others. One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed. Whichever one you feed, that is your identity.” When I started out in marketing, it was very easy for me to get fed by a lot of stuff around me. When you’re on Facebook, when you’re on the internet, there is a whole lot of junk out there. That junk makes you feel small. It makes you feel insignificant, and you’ve got to build an identity with the situation around you. How do you do it? In today’s episode we will cover the three elements of what was my journey. Also, it’s going to be your journey. The first element is one of feeling like a fraud. The second one is just one of success. What does it mean? Finally, the third one, which is one of space and why it’s so important. Part 1: Feeling Like A Fraud When you look at January of 2001, I didn’t really feel like a fraud, but by December of 2001 I was feeling more and more insecure. What happened between January and December to create all this insecurity? For many years, even as I was a kid, I used to draw. I was extremely shy, and I’ve been drawing my whole life. I became a cartoonist. I became a writer. That’s what shy people do. As I moved into the world of marketing, that completely threw me. I didn’t know that much about marketing. I didn’t know how people think, what they do, how they buy, the prices that they decide on. But I read this book by Jim Collins, which was called Good to Great. It asked what can you be the best in the world at. I thought I love the cartooning, I love the writing, but I want to do something different. The answer lay, strangely, in marketing. I was not into marketing. I just didn’t understand it. In all the years that I had run the cartooning business, I had done very little organized marketing. It was a good thing, because we moved to New Zealand and the public library was accessible, which was different from India. I stepped into the library and I picked up ten books. Then I picked up another ten books. Then eventually the librarian realized that I was picking up a lot of books so they gave me an allocation where I could take 30 books at a time. I read those books. The more I read it, the less confident I got, the more I felt like a fraud. But because I had no choice, I went out there and I spoke with clients. I spoke at small little events. The feeling of being a fraud didn’t go away. It always seemed like someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Okay, your time is up. You’ve been talking nonsense for quite a while now and it’s time for me to get in here.” Six months passed, and a year passed. That tap never came. Then I did a trip to the US and I met with other marketers and I spoke with them. An interesting thing happened. I realized that these guys don’t know that much more than I do. In fact, I know quite a few things that they don’t know. That’s when that fraud label just slipped off and fell into the drain. It never came back again. It never came back again for me as a marketer but it came back again in different ways. When I write a book, for instance, I just wrote the book on Dartboard Pricing, again, that whole fraud feeling came out. I have made this presentation in Chicago. I made another presentation in Denver. I’ve written so much about pricing. It’s all on the website. It’s on the blog. It’s in our membership site at 5000bc. I’ve explained it at length. The feeling of being a fraud comes out because you feel what else is there to say. If I write this book, people will have read all of this information. They will think wait a second, he’s just rehashing everything. Then when I send out early copies of the book to clients just so that they can read and send out some testimonials, and they come back and go, “I’m so excited,” and I think what, I already said all this stuff. It’s different. They haven’t experienced it from the concept of a book, a system, step by step going through the whole logic. Even though I may feel like a fraud when I’m writing the book or putting it out there, that’s just a bit of my own insecurity coming in. They don’t feel that at all. They feel this stuff is really cool. This feeling keeps coming back. I remember when we were in Washington D.C. and we did a workshop on The Brain Audit. I was very nervous. I didn’t sleep that night simply because when I stood in front of that audience I thought they’ve already read The Brain Audit. These were people who bought the first version of The Brain Audit, version two, version three. Now they’re sitting in the audience and I’m going to say the very same thing. I’m going to tell them exactly what they read about. I should have paid attention. They bought version one, version two, version three. Obviously every version was bringing them a different angle, a different perspective, and my presentation was going to bring a different perspective. That’s not how I felt. I felt like a fraud. I felt like something is going to go wrong. Someone is going to tap me on the shoulder. No one did. In fact, when we came out after the first break, everyone was going, “Wow, I didn’t know The Brain Audit was like this. I perceived it to be different.” That’s it. You start out in life feeling a little insecure. You change professions, you feel insecure. You change your system. You write a book. You give a presentation. It doesn’t matter what happens. The moment you change midstream, it’s like being in a strange city and you’re not very confident. You’re completely lost. Your GPS is not working, and your soul needs to be a pilot, as Sting would say. But Sting isn’t sitting in my chair, is he? I didn’t feel that way, and it comes back. What you’ve got to understand is that part of your identity is always going to be that you’re unsure, and that’s great. This takes us to the second part of today, which is the whole feeling of success. What is success, and how do you cope with it? Part 2: The Whole Feeling of Success When you ask people what is their definition of success, they come up with various definitions. The thing that shows up is a lot of philosophy. People get very philosophical about the fact that success is this and success is that. When you look at the books and you look at the awards, the success parameters become very claustrophobic. In New Zealand we have an award for the Fast 50. On Forbes you have maybe the top 100 companies or the top 100 CEOs. Their success is all benchmarked by how many dollars they have in the bank or how quickly they got to the top. When you look at so many blogs, what you find is the definition of success becomes one of taking shortcuts, of things like the four-hour work week. Four hours? What kind of genius can you create in four hours in a work week? Sometimes you’ll get the contrast. They will talk about quick meals and then slow cooking. Mostly success is benchmarked by money, by speed, and by shortcuts. That becomes our identity, because it’s all around us. This is how it’s always been. It’s not just something that showed up yesterday. When we go back 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, 1,000 years, success has always been about money, speed, and shortcuts. And power, let’s not forget about power. The point is, as human beings this makes us very happy: the money, the speed, the power. All this stuff makes us really happy. Fair enough, because we can’t really do without it. But we can also change things a bit and we can set a different benchmark. When I started out Psychotactics I didn’t know how to set this benchmark, but I knew that I wanted to be different in some way. Over the years, this difference has morphed. Suddenly our books, the ebooks, are different from everybody else’s ebooks. They’re different because they have less information but more depth of that information. Instead of pummeling you with endless amounts of data and more data, they cluster around a few important elements. For instance, if you read Dartboard Pricing you would find that when we deal with sequential pricing, only three points are being covered, but those three points are being covered in-depth. When you cover this in-depth, what you have is the power to empower. No, yeah, power to empower. Empowerment is really what happens there. Over time, this has become one of the more important elements of what we would define as success. It’s not the ability to sell more books or courses or workshops, but to be more like a pilot that takes all the passengers across. It’s very easy to start a course or a workshop or have a book and not have everyone consume it. Our goal has been different. Our goal is how do we get them to the endpoint. That becomes a benchmark for success. On a personal scale, the Three Month Vacation becomes a benchmark for success. How can we run our business so that we can get away, that we can eat the food that we want, travel the way we want, relax, and then come back refreshed so that we can do better work. That has become a benchmark for success. Now invariably, the money and the shortcuts and the power and all that stuff has got to sneak in, but it doesn’t become the whole reason why we do stuff. When I go to events, I meet with a lot of speakers. They’re all hanging around the corridor. They’re not essentially speaking to anybody else but the other speakers. All of them are saying exactly the same thing. They want to be home with their munchkins and they want to spend time with them at the swimming pool. They want to go to school with them. They want to do all this stuff. Yet when they present themselves to the world they’re talking about I did three million miles. I made so much money. I spoke at so many events. They present a completely different view to the world, yet when you’re backstage, when they’re in the corridor, they’re talking about being home, about not wanting to friendly, about being sick about getting on another plane. What they seem to present as success is not really what they feel is success. Going to that school event, going to that pool and jumping in the pool with the kid, that’s success to them. I thought that the Three Month Vacation was kind of normal. I thought that people needed breaks. Maybe not three months, but I thought that they needed breaks. When I meet with a lot of my friends in marketing and they talk about wow, it’s amazing that you’re able to do this … These are people who are extremely, what we call, successful. That’s when I realized that setting these benchmarks for myself, setting this identity of who I really am, is critical. This is what you’ve got to do as well. What is really your identity of success, other than the money and the power and the shortcuts, which are fine. It’s just that you’ve got to have that other identity that you know wow, I’ve reached this goal. Maybe that benchmark, that identity is just to get to the beach 300 days in a year and that’s it, and then you know. This is measurable. I can do it and it doesn’t involve that other stuff that other people are portraying. Our identity is almost restricted to being a fraud at some point right through our career. The second thing is one of success and how we define success, and how the world defines success. The third one, and this is something that a lot of people don’t talk about, is just the factor of space, how space defines who we are as human beings. Part 3: The Factor of Space What is this factor of space? I was on my way back home after a walk. I always listen to the podcast on the way back home. I was listening to this writer, Pico Iyer, speaking on the TED stage. He came up with a statement that I had to stop and I had to write it down, because it was so interesting. He was talking about home and movement. He said it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. It’s only by steeping out of your life and your world that you can see what you most deeply care about, and then you can find a home. To me that has been home, that peace, that pause, that stop for refuelling. That has been the most critical element of my life. It’s what gave me identity. It’s what allows me to come back refreshed and do stuff that I want to do. This resonates with me at a different level as well. Because, several years ago I listen to philosopher Wayne Dyer. He used to say it’s the silence between the notes that make the music. I heard it a dozen times and I couldn’t really figure out what he was saying. Then one day I rushed out to the car and I was telling my wife, “Do you know what that means? It’s the quiet. It’s the quiet that makes the music, because when there’s just note after note after note, we get cacophony.” She gave me that look that wives often give you, like what took you so long. Even if you go back in time to one of the greatest masters of our time, Leonardo Da Vinci, he said you have to step away from your work to get perspective. Without space, it’s hard to have an identity that you’re really looking for, that you want to create. It becomes what people call the dream. They’re always searching for it, but to create a real identity instead of a dream, you have to step away and you have to look at yourself from a different space. Then you come back a changed person. You’re not completely changed but somewhere some of those notes have changed. That makes for beautiful music. The Cherokee elder stood before his students and told them of the two wolves that live and battle within each of us. One of those wolves, he explained, is ill-nature. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, and jealous, and arrogant, and full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others. One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, “Whichever one you feed.” You’re going to be fed with this concept of being a fraud. You’re going to be fed with this concept of imaginary success, what the world defines as success, not what you define as success. The wolf that you really need to feed is the one that brings you peace, that brings that space so that you can create your own music. Summary That brings us to the end of this podcast, but before we go, let’s see the one thing that you can do today. Personally, I think it’s hard to get over that feeling of being a fraud. It comes back no matter how confident you are. Believe me, I’m a very confident person. Yes, we’ve got to create that space. We have to say let’s not take a three month vacation right now but let’s take a weekend maybe two weeks from now, just a break. No email, no phone, just a break. Definitely no Facebook. What’s the one thing you can do today? What you can do today is to define your benchmark, your identity of success. What is it that brings you or will bring you the most happiness? That will make a huge difference. It will make a difference to who you are and where you’re going to go tomorrow. That will determine which wolf you’re going to feed. I appreciate all of you who’ve been writing in about this podcast. If you want to reach me, I’m on Twitter@SeanD’Souza, on Facebook at Sean D’Souza, and then at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re listening to this podcast it’s more than likely that you’re a subscriber at psychotactics.com, but if you haven’t gone there already, go topsychotactics.com and subscribe. Yes, one very important thing: I struggle to get to iTunes and leave a review because every time I’m listening to this I’m away from my computer, but I am on my phone. If you look below your phone, there is a little I button, especially if you’re on an iPhone. If you click on that I button you’ll get more information and there a link to the iTunes site. If you can leave a review, that would be really, really cool. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, from the Three Month Vacation, saying thanks again and bye for now. Go feed that wolf. You’re still listening? People often ask me: Have you ever skipped a vacation? The answer is yes. We did that once. We thought it was more important for us to work and complete some projects and stuff. We did in four months what we normally do in three. That time that we should have been spending away, we were working and getting more and more tired and frustrated. Then eventually we just got on a plane and went off to Sydney for a week. It was terrible. Not Sydney, just the week. It was like you just did something for the sake of doing it. It wasn’t planned or interesting. Then we came back and we were different but not as different as if it were planned. Yes, we have skipped it. There you have it, a little snippet from the Psychotactics archive. Bye for now. You can also listen to or read this episode: #45: The Secret To Getting Your Report Read (From Start To Finish)

When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out—and more importantly—get read. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What makes a report powerful? Part 2: What are tiny increments? Part 3: How to empower your reader Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park The  Transcript Back in the year 2003  I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let’s make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report. This is the interesting part. The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We’re going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You’ll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let’s explore those three elements. What makes the report so powerful? The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we’ve done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we’re doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn’t thinking of this. I wasn’t thinking of empowerment. I wasn’t thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let’s explore each one systematically. Let’s start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments. What are tiny increments? About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it’s very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don’t want to look at the manual because that’s really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you’re supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It’s a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment. You don’t have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed. You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we’re teaching, we don’t understand that the client doesn’t get what we’re saying. Let’s say you’ve come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we’re doing an experiment. We’re saying we’re going to take steps now. I say, “Okay, let’s take a step.” Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, “What I meant was take a step to the left.” Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we’re on target. When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake. You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they’re lost, they’re intimidated, and intimidation doesn’t create a safe zone, and when you don’t create a safe zone then of course you don’t get empowerment. The first factor you have to look at when you look at the headline report is this concept of tiny increments. You only have to take a very tiny step to get from point A to point B. When you’ve taken that step, you can go from point B to point C. This is what struck me when I stepped into an Apple store many years ago. It’s one of the reasons why I bought an Apple even though I’d been using a PC for ages. When I got into the store, I just had to do one thing. That one thing led to the next thing, and that next thing led to the next thing. This is very cool. You see it on the iPad where you just have to press a little button, and that one thing leads to the next thing. This is the concept of tiny increments. You see this in the headline report. It’s what you’ve got to do in your report: just one little step. Now this takes us to the second one, which is the concept of length. Length really helps in empowerment. Every time I speak to someone about this podcast, I will say, “The podcast is only about 15 to 20 minutes long.” But what if were to say, “It’s only two to three hours long’? There would be a very clear difference. When you say 15 to 20 minutes long people think, “I could go for a little walk and I could listen to the podcast.” This principle of length is critical, especially when a customer doesn’t know you that well and you have to get your message across without going crazy on them. It has helped me when I was trying to work out that audio hardware. I just had to deal with three minutes, and then after that the next three minutes, and then the next three minutes. Every one of those three-minute capsules, they empowered me. They moved me forward. The headline report does this in a really fascinating way. It moves youforward. Within ten pages, you’re done. Now the question arises: Is that it? Is that all you could write about headlines? No, of course not. You could write 300 pages or 500 pages. There is a wealth of information in the world of headlines. But do you have to put in the report? The core of empowerment is simply one of length. When there is not too much of it, someone is able to consume it. Once they’re able to consume it, you have empowered them. You know that because you can get them to teach you what you’ve just taught them and they will do that spectacularly well. We take the first concept, which is tiny increments, and we take the second concept, which is length, and that leaves us with just the third one. What is the third concept? The third concept is simply one of examples and case studies. When you listen to this podcast, you got a whole bunch of examples about the recording device and how I had to fiddle with it. You also got the example of how the iPad worked, and of course my visit to the Apple store for the first time in 2008. Those were examples. Why were those examples there? They weren’t just random stuff. For one thing, the example lowers that intimidation factor. Immediately you’re taken on a little side journey, a little detour. That helps you to focus on the idea, but it also helps you understand the concept in greater detail. When you look at the headline report you’ll find that there is an example of how the headline is being built stage by stage. If all you had was a concept of how to write a headline without the example it would be so much more dreary and harder to achieve the same result. As a teacher, that’s your goal. Your goal is to empower. Examples empower. Case studies empower. Stories empower. Go down that path and put it in your report. Whether you’re reading The Brain Audit, or Pricing,or any book, you will find that we use this concept. That’s what clients read and go, “Wow, I should delve more into this stuff.” The biggest problem that we have is we know too much. We try to put all that too much into our reports, into our books, into our presentations. Does it empower? It’s easy to give information. A lot of people are giving a lot of information. It’s all stuff coming at you left, right, and center, and you don’t know where to go. Your client doesn’t know where to go either. Have this little guiding light of empowerment and everything changes. We started out with a report. We started out with just a little article, but that article had steps, and it went from one step to another to another. When it got into the report stage it was clearer because of the graphics, because of the layout. That’s how you should go about writing your report. Think about empowerment and think about the three things that we’ve covered today. The first thing that we covered today was tiny increments. Remember that even if you say take one step, people can steps in all directions, show you take very tiny steps. The second thing is one of length. A three-hour podcast, a 300-page report, very interesting but no one’s going to read it. You want to keep it simple. You want to keep it within ten or 12 pages. Finally, you want to reduce that intimidation factor. It’s very hard to understand the new concept. Having examples, having stories, having case studies, this really makes it easier for me to figure out what you’re saying. Which brings us to the end of this podcast. What is the one thing that you can do? I think the one thing that you should do is to just boil it down to three things. You’ve seen how this podcast just covers three elements. If I wanted to write a book on how to create a great report, I could write 200 pages. But this podcast, it’s a report. It’s just got three points, three simple points, and you’ve been empowered. I think you should do the same. Just jot down three points. I know there are 700 points on the topic. Just focus on three and you’ll have a report that someone actually consumes. Now isn’t that a novel idea? What have we been doing in the past six weeks or so? If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that we went off to Washington D.C. to have the information products workshop. It’s just 25-30 people in a room. Everyone gets to know each other. Everyone works with each other. It’s an amazing event. We don’t do the Psychotactics workshops very often, so if you ever get a chance to get to a Psychotactics workshop, you should come. It’s empowerment at its very best. You’ll see it at the workshop. From there we flew to Denver and I presented at the Opera House in Denver and lost my voice, got it back, struggled through the whole episode. My wife gave me an eight on ten. She has given me a -2 in the past, so I think I did a pretty good job. That comes down to practice and getting all your act together. During the event, some things went wrong for speakers. The video didn’t show up at the right time, or it didn’t sync with the audio. The way to solve this problem is to do all of the groundwork. I was there a few days in advance, getting over the tiredness factor, making sure that I knew the length of the stage, looking for any light distractions. Because when you’re on a stage a lot of lights hit you, especially on a stage of that size. You need to know where you need to stop before light hits you in the face and you can’t see a thing. You also need to speak to the audio and the video people, because they recommended stuff to me that ensured our whole presentation was absolutely flawless. There’s a lot of background stuff that you have to do, and that marks you out as a professional. I was completely hampered on stage there. I was sniffling and I could barely speak, but that eight on ten, that was because of all the groundwork that went before. As much as I would have liked to get full marks from my wife, at least I was able to struggle to an eight. You know it goes well because when you step out of the auditorium, people come up to you and go, “I’m going to make this fix today. I’m going to make this change today.” You have empowered them. Once we finished with all of the work and the presentations, we went on to Sardinia. We had a great time. Sardinia is this big island off Italy. You’ve probably heard of Sicily. If you look to the left, there is Sardinia. The food is absolutely stunning. We go on vacations because of the food. We really don’t care that much about the monuments. The food has to be good. We gorged a lot and we walked a lot of slopes. That’s how we keep our weight in check. Three weeks in Sardinia, a stopover in San Francisco, and now we’re back in New Zealand. I have to admit it’s been hard getting back to work, even though it’s been a week. This nasty cough that started in Washington D.C. followed me through Denver, through Sardinia, through San Francisco. It’s okay now but it’s been a long run. Nonetheless, it was worth doing the info products course in Washington D.C.. If you missed that, then I would strongly suggest that you get the home study. It’s not cheap but it helps you construct that book. You go from this report and you can create audio, video or webinars, but not just any old webinar or any audio or book, but stuff that empowers and empowers in a big way. You can find that in the product section of the Psychotactics site. If you’re not looking for something quite that big, you might want to check out Dartboard Pricing, because if nothing else you want to increase your prices without losing customers. You can find that at psychotactics.com/ttc. If on the other hand you want to send me a message, I’m at @SeanD’Souza on Twitter, Sean D’Souza on Facebook, and of course on Psychotactics at sean@psychotactics.com. If you’re wondering how you can deconstruct the headline report, you can go to psychotactics.com and subscribe, and you will get the headline report. If you’ve already subscribed, go to psychotactics.com/psychoheadlines.pdf, and there it is just for you. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now.   You can also listen to or read this episode: #8:The Power of Enough—And Why It’s Critical To Your Sanity

Vacations are like a project. There's a before-vacation and an after-vacation period that needs to be carefully managed. After years of taking vacations?and that too thrice a year, we have to do a lot of planning. So how do we make sure everything works when we're away? How do we make sure we don't get tempted by e-mail and work while on vacation? And how do you manage a smooth re-entry back to work? These super-duper secrets are yours for the taking in this super-duper episode. Contact Me: On Twitter: seandsouza On e-mail at: sean@psychotactics.com http://www.psychotactics.com (For all notifications and super-duper newsletters). In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to handle the recurring elements of a business—newsletters, podcasts and membership sites Part 2: Finishing of projects Part 3: How to handle coming back to work. Right click here and ‘save as’ to download this episode to your computer.   Useful Resources and Links How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing Why Headlines Fail—The Report Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter The  Transcript This is 3-month vacation and I’m Sean D’Souza Right after Renuka and I got married, we decided that we’re going to go to many places and we did go for a honeymoon because that’s what I was told, you don’t go for your honeymoon, and every time you have a fight, that’s the one thing that comes up. Anyway, we went for a honeymoon and then a year passed and we didn’t go anywhere, and the second year passed, then we did a trip to Australia simply because there was some kind of discount on Qantas, but then the years ticked away and then we moved to New Zealand and we realized that 4 and 5 years had passed and we weren’t going anywhere. That was a real problem because inherently, the reason why I quit my job in India in the first place was because I couldn’t go on vacation whenever I wanted to. Even when I got to New Zealand, it was a problem because every time I went on holiday, I’d be very hassled about someone else taking my work, that I was not getting paid, and so holidays or vacations became a very important part of our life. What lots of people don’t realize is that a vacation is also a project and you have to plan if you want to make it successful. One of the things that you have to plan is what you do before you leave and what you do when you get back. This episode is dedicated to the vacation. In this episode, I’m going to cover recurring elements like the newsletter and the podcast and the membership site, and then from there, we’ll go to the next thing, which is how we get closure before we leave, and then how we hit the ground running when we get back. Those are the three things that we’ll cover today.  Let’s start with the first one, which is how we handle recurring responsibilities. Part 1: Handling Recurring Responsibilities of a Business—Newsletters, Podcast and Membership Sites At Psychotactics, we are mainly into consulting, training and product, which is really a complete business by itself. Consulting would mean speaking with clients one on one and I definitely don’t speak with clients while I’m away. I don’t make any exceptions to this rule. When I’m on holiday, I’m on holiday. The second element is one of leverage, which are products, and again, we don’t work when we’re on holiday. We might take a trip that is specifically designed to do some work but while we’re on vacation, there is little work. That just leaves us with the other recurring elements like newspapers and podcasts and membership sites. The newsletter goes out every week twice a week and the Tuesday newsletter, that is about an article about marketing, about business. The Saturday newsletter, that’s the sales biz newsletter. It’s our products, our services, courses. That has to be queued well in advance. Let’s start out with the Tuesday newsletter, which is the article-based newsletter. Let’s say we’re going to be away for 4 or 5 weeks. Now what we have to do is we have to make sure that we don’t just cover for 5 weeks but that we cover 8 weeks. The reason for this is very simple. Before you go on any trip, chaos invariably knocks at your door, so what you’ve got to do is make sure that your newsletters are being worked out before you leave, while you’re away and then when you come back, because when we get back, it’s not like I’m keen to sit own and write articles. In fact, when I’m away, I lose all momentum and then when I get back, I’m not really in the mood to write any articles. What I have to do is in the 12 weeks that we’re back, I have to make sure that somehow, I double the number of articles in some of the weeks. Even so, I may not finish the requisite number of articles that I require while we’re away. What we do is we run some of the articles from the archives, and they do this on TV shows as well. When the presenter is away, they just pull out old stuff and they run it again, and clients don’t mind. They don’t mind reading the same stuff again and that’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to have a mixture of old articles and new articles. If I can manage to get all that quota completed before we go, well the clients are going to get just new articles, but if I can’t, then we have the old articles as well. With the podcast, we don’t have such a big bank. We’re only up to episode 42 now, but let’s say we go up to episode 200 or maybe 100. At that point in time, it would make sense to recycle some of the older podcasts and this makes sense because articles and newsletters and reports and podcasts, they are not stuff that is like today’s news and it’s still tomorrow. It can be read again the second time and the third time and we can monitor how many people are reading the articles or downloading the podcasts. You get a good feel whether your re-run is actually a good thing or a bad thing and it is usually a good thing. We also have to prepare what’s going out on Saturday, which is the sales letter. Sometimes, we will just send out sales letters while we’re away, but often, we will give away stuff, like now, as we’re headed to Italy, we’re giving away the Brain Alchemy Masterclass. This is a complete course of a workshop that was held in Los Angeles. Even so, everything has to be planned and everything has to be within place before we leave and then it just goes out like clockwork. That’s the first thing. We have to make sure that all the articles and all the sales letters and any kind of promotion or giveaways all need to be in the system for before we go, while we’re away and for at least 2 or 3 weeks after we get back. This is crucial because then, you actually enjoy your vacation instead of just rushing there and rushing back and then going right back to work. This takes us to the second part of today’s episode, which is finishing of projects. Part 2: Finishing of Projects We tend to do courses like article writing or copy writing or headlines. We also do books like web components or pricing and then we do things like training, which is workshops. All of these are considered to be projects and all the projects are complete before we leave, so when we look at products like the pricing book, well all of that was completed 2 weeks ago and that’s done. We finished the article writing course, that’s done. We had a Photoshop course for cartoons and that’s done. Now we’re headed to Washington, DC, where we’re doing the info products course, and that’s done. Once that is done, everything is closed and now we’re going on vacation. A lot of people take some of their work on vacation and that’s really bad planning. That’s terrible planning. If you’re going to go on vacation and you’re going to take your work with you, that’s not really a vacation. That is just work in a different place. All those stupid ads you see where people take their computer and go to the beach, that’s just fooling yourself. If you really want to have a break and you want to rest your body and you want to rest your mind, you have to switch off. We switch off completely. Everything is closed down. We don’t deal with email. We get someone else to look at the email. We have a separate email address where if there’s an urgent issue, which there never is, but if there is an urgent issue, they can write to us. All projects are completely closed, email is closed and I don’t take any calls on my phone so that’s that. Also while we’re away, we will meet with clients but only as friends. At first, we didn’t meet with clients at all but over the years, we’ve gotten to know people and so we will meet them in a social setting. One rule is very clear, they’re not going to bring up any work, not even the slightest bit of work. Even in Italy, we’re meeting with a friend of ours. Last time when we went to Hungary, we met with a friend of ours. We went to Portugal, we met with a friend of ours. In Washington, DC, we’ll meet with friends and these friends are also our clients but no discussion about work. That’s very clear. This brings us to the third part. In the third part, it is about coming back. Part 3: Coming Back When we get back home, the last thing you want to do is work. You’re nice and relaxed if you’ve not been checking email and not been looking at any work. You don’t feel like doing anything for a week, 2 weeks, sometimes longer than that. In previous years, we have taken vacations for as long as 6 weeks and that’s probably too long because when you get back, you want to relax for another 3, 4 weeks. You’re so much in that vacation mode that you don’t snap out of it. We found that 3 weeks away and 1 week travel is a great amount of time to be away. It’s not too much and it’s not too little. Supposing we were going to Sardinia, which we are, then we stop over at, say San Francisco. We spend a couple of days, then we fly to Sardinia. On the way back, we stop over again maybe at San Francisco, and then we come back. We break the journey as well. That takes about a week and then 3 weeks away, so 4 weeks away in all. When we get back, sometimes we hit the ground running and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we’ll take a couple of weeks but we always have a list of what we have to do and when we have to do it before we leave on vacation, so that when we come back, we’re not blank, which you usually are. You come back and you don’t know where anything is on your computer and you don’t know what you are supposed to do, so having that list while you’re in work mode is really cool because you’re completely alert at that point in time. We keep that list and then we go away, and when we come back, everything starts to flow again until the next vacation. That brings us to today’s summary, so what did we cover today? Summary The first thing you have to have all your newsletters, all your podcasts, everything in advance. On this particular trip, I haven’t organized it as well as I should have, and so I’m slogging here doing a ton of podcasts this week but this is not a good situation to be in. This is not a situation I ever want to be in, so when we come back, I’m going to have to organize it a little better. The newsletters were ready but the podcasts were not ready and I’ve had to put in extra time just to make sure that the podcasts are ready. Now they are, this will last all the way to middle of June I expect. With the membership site, www.5000bc.com, I can’t show up there everyday so what I do is I have vanishing reports. I create these reports in advance. A lot of these reports also come from the articles themselves, so sometimes I will write fresh reports and clients know that and at other times, we take articles related to one topic like pricing or headlines and then we put them together in a book and they become reports and when we’re away, those reports go week after week to the clients. The second element is one of closure. We don’t take any work with us. We make sure that all the projects, all the workshops, all the courses, everything is done, finished, and we will not check email on vacation. There are people that say they only work 2 hours on holiday. Well that’s their choice but I don’t think you can ever tune out if you check email, if you go back to work. You’re always on alert and you really want to relax. You want to get down to a point where you’re completely relaxed, just like a child. Finally, we have a list of all the projects that we’re going to do when we get back, because when we get back, we’re completely blank, and having that list enables us to ramp up, if not hit the ground running. What’s the one thing that you can do? The one thing that you can do is to train yourself to add a little bit more to your output, so if you get really good at article writing or you get really good at creating reports, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to put away some stuff and create a bank. When you’re too tired or you have a medical emergency or you want to go on vacation, all of that information is going to come into really good use, and you don’t get so stressed out and everything goes according to plan. As for the concept of doing your own 3-month vacation, you might think it’s very hard but remember that when we started doing the 3-month vacation, our business was not even 2 years old. We just started at the end of August of 2002, that was Psychotactics, and by 2004, we had decided that we were going to do this. You might not be feeling that brave but you can take 2 or 3 days off and when you do that, you don’t want to check email and you don’t want to have any projects and you don’t want to have any work. That’s when you’re going to get a really good break. The people who call themselves workaholics, they’re workaholics only because they are permanently connected to their phones, their computers and their work. Once they’re taken away from all of that, they become like kids again. People may call themselves workaholics today, but when they were kids, they didn’t think about their studies while they were away. They enjoyed themselves, and the reason for that is that complete disconnect. You can have that disconnect and you should have that disconnect and that’s the only way you can relax, but for that, you have to prepare. That’s what we do. That’s why we have fun on our vacation. While I’m away on vacation, I’m not on Facebook and you can’t get me on Twitter and you can’t get me on email, but someone will be checking email so if you have something to say, please email me. I will get to it eventually. About the pricing book, if you’ve already boughtDartboard Pricing, I would recommend that you start reading the first chapter, just the introduction. That’s 3 or 4 pages, and then go to book 3 because book 3 has the sequential strategy. Book 3 is not a very big book but it’s a very powerful book. It shows you exactly how to build your business and how to price in a way that customers want to go to the next step and the next step and the next step. It’s a really cool model so go to book 3. If you haven’t already bought the pricing book, that’s Dartboard Pricing, go to www.psychotactics.com.ttc, that is Trust the Chef, TTC, and you will be taken directly to that page and you can buy it. The link is at the bottom of this podcast as well if you click on the little I button, which is the information button, you can see those links but you can also go to www.psychotactics.com/43 for all the resources, the transcript and the links to this page. That’s me, Sean D’Souza, saying bye for now. Bye bye. You can also listen to or read this episode: #42: The Crazy, Amazing Trip From FREE to FEE

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

Why do some customers buy—and more importantly what causes them to hesitate? That's what Sean D'Souza spends most of his time digging into. And it's this deep understanding of what causes customers to buy and keep coming back, that has created an enviable life for Sean. He works nine months in a year, and takes three months off every year, yes every year.

Chatting With Champions Podcast Interview #91. Tyler Basu and Sean D’Souza “Understanding The Psychology Behind Why People Buy” Over 15 years ago, Sean D’Souza started working for an advertising agency The post Sean D’Souza: Understanding The Psychology Behind Why People Buy appeared first on Chatting With Champions.

Adam Franklin chats to Sean d’Souza about the marketing psychology, why you only want customer who consume your material and the Bikini Principle of content.

For most of us life is about work, work and more work. And no matter whether you have a small business, are in the online marketing space or in consulting, you feel rushed and hassled. This podcast is about how to slow down using the three concepts of "meditation, relaxation and vacation".   Sean: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 you work and enjoy your vacation time. Did you know that “medication” sounds a lot like “meditation”? Well, I didn’t know that, and I’ve been playing around with it in my head, “Medication, meditation. Medication, medication, meditation.”   When we talk about the three-month vacation, it’s very easy to just think of going away; but as you know, we don’t have to leave the desk to go away. We could just be here. Should we go away, or should we stay? Do we really have to choose? As you know, it’s summer in December here in New Zealand, and there’s a lot of time because we take time-off around December the 20th, and then we don’t get back to work till almost February, and this is pretty much the whole country. Imagine the entire country going on vacation.   As you walk around on the streets of Auckland, well, there are no people around or very few people around. My wife, Renuka and I, we never go away when everyone else is going away because what’s the point? Everything is more expensive, there are bigger crowds, you have to wait a long time in restaurants, so we stay back and we sit on the deck, get some beer. We have a good time, and we read. When I was reading, I ran into this book by author/speaker Pico Iyer. First, just to backtrack, before I ran into the book, I ran into his TEDTalk.   In the TEDTalk, he was talking about how he started to meditate, how he started to relax. In his talk, he gets you to imagine gong to the doctor, and the doctor is saying, “Well, your cholesterol is up. Your blood sugar is up, etcetera, and you’ve got to exercise.” He says, “Most of us will go to the gym. Most of us would go for a walk. Most of us would do stuff like that, but imagine the doctor said, ‘You need to slow down. You need to take time off and meditate.    Take about half an hour, maybe meditate.’” It’s unlikely that any of us would feel the urgency to meditate, would we? I mean, we have so many things to do already. Really, that’s what I’m going to talk about today. Three things, meditation, relaxation, and vacation. All the “tions” together.   Now, of all these three, mediation is probably the only stuff I know of because it seems like you have to sit in one place or stay in one place, and then just be quiet; and so what I’d do is I’d go for a walk, and I’d hum the same song over and over again, almost like a chant. I was happy doing that, and I thought, “Well, that’s meditation;” and it probably is. I don’t know, but I found that with TheEndApp, it was much easier to do this, and that is to just clear your head of all the thoughts. I’m not very ambitious to begin with, and I don’t suggest you get too ambitious because it’s very, very hard to meditate.   If you’ve ever tried meditating, you know exactly what I mean. It is extremely hard. The moment you decide, “Well, I’m going to be very quiet and clear my mind of all the thoughts,” every single thought comes rushing through. It’s like as if you opened the door and started screaming, “Come on, guys. Bring in all the thoughts.” That’s how meditation is. It’s so weird, and yet time and time again, you read about it, and you’re not sure how to go about it. I ran into this website at Calm.com. That’s C-A-L-M-.com. They had a lovely app. It’s free, and they also have a website.   You don’t need to have the app. You can just have your computer on, and they take you through a guided meditation. It’s very hard at first. It’s just this emptying out of your brain. Not sleeping, not dreaming, not doing anything, just completely blank. Just like looking at the clouds, one cloud after another, after another. Just completely blank, and so I’d recommend that you start there. What I started doing was every day, before I go for a walk, I meditate for 10 minutes. I just lie on the floor, and I go for 10 minutes. Then, I go to the café, and my wife started this. She says, “Okay, let’s be quiet for two minutes.” We close our eyes and sit at the café, and you can hear the coffee.   When your mind is that quiet, you can hear everything. It just screams through, and it filters out those thoughts. It’s very cool because in a day that’s completely chaotic, we need to have these moments of meditation, and it’s good for your brain. I mean, this is about business, but it’s also about taking that time off, just those few minutes in a day. That brings us to the end of the first part which is mediation. It takes us to the second part which is relaxation.   When you think of relaxation, you probably think, “Okay. I’m just going to lie on the bed, or I’m just going to lie on the safe, and read a book, and relax.” That’s nice, but what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t take you out of the house. What I found is that as long as you’re in the house, you’re not as relaxed as you could be. What we started doing was taking a day or two away. We don’t go very far. We could go just half an hour away from where we live, but we go away from our home, and this is very important.   Once you go away from home, everything about your home is left behind like the clothes that needed to be folded, the garbage that needs to be taken out, the coffee blender that needs fixing, the … Whatever issues you have, and there are many of these issues. The moment you leave home, those issues stay behind. Suddenly, you start to relax, and you find that this level of relaxation starts the moment you head away from home. What we found is that in about 24 hours, we feel like we’ve been away for a week.   By the time you’re away for a couple of days, it seems like you’ve been away forever, and most of don’t do that. In fact, right after we got married, we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t go anywhere for a long time, and then we decided that’s what we’re going to do. A lot of these comes from planning. All of your work comes from planning, but even the vacation, the time away, the meditation, the relaxation. Everything comes from planning. It doesn’t just show up like that. We have to sit down at the start of the year and work out when do we have these bouts of relaxation away from home and when we do we have the vacation which is a long way from home and for …  Along the previous.   The thing about relaxation is that those 48 hours can change the way you continue to work, the way you work with your clients, the way you deal with issues when you go back, and so having those little spots makes a big difference. Like for instance right now, we have the article writing course, and this is the toughest writing course in the world. It is very demanding for both the students and for me. You can be sure that once four weeks have passed, I’m going to need a couple of days off.   It’s very easy to say, “No, no, no. We don’t have that kind of time.” Just like we do with meditation, “We don’t have that kind of time. We don’t have two days off. We have to do this, and we have to do that.” The moment you allocate that time, it changes everything. The funny thing is that it changes your mindset even if you’re on vacation. This summer, we started out not checking email, not doing all those kinds of things, and you would think, “Well, it will take a few days, and you’ll be fine.” It wasn’t fine.   A week passed, and I was still waking up at 4:30 in the morning. I like to sleep a lot in the afternoons, especially on vacation. I’ll sleep two, three hours even, and I wasn’t able to sleep more than half an hour. I was still wound up, and it’s only when I got to Waipu, which is about a couple of hours from here that I relaxed. Two weeks into a vacation, the moment I stepped away from home, and I think the same thing applies to you as well. What we need to do really is stuff for ourselves because we’re always doing stuff, but it’s not stuff for ourselves, and it’s definitely not this relaxation that we desperately need. This takes us to the third part which is vacation.   Vacation has always been a big part of my life, but planning the vacation was what I learned from my friend Julia. What Julia would do was she’d book the vacation at the start of the year, and then they had to go. Everything was booked. I remember the year that we went to Japan, the year they had the tsunami, and I wasn’t keen on going there even though we were going several months after the tsunami; but it was booked, so we went. We had a really good time. We learned so much about a different culture, ate different foods. Something I might not have done if we hadn’t booked everything in advance.   Here I am, preaching to the choir as it were. We already know that mediation, that relaxation and vacation are good for us. We know that, so why doesn’t it work for everyone? Why don’t we end up feeling on top of the world? Why is it that we feel like we’re more tired than ever before? There are reasons why it doesn’t work, and the first reason and probably the most important reason of all is email. I have a friend, and she goes on vacation, and she say, “Well, I only check email and work for three hours in a day.”   No, no, no, no, no. You can’t do that. Vacation is nothing. It’s like mediation, nothing. It’s like relaxation, nothing. No email. Get someone else to check your email. You’re not that important. That brings us to the second point, of course, which is, “I’m the most important person here. Nothing can happen without me.” I have a very simple philosophy, and that is, “I can spend time at the beach or spend time in hospital,” and I choose to spend time at the beach. Sure, you’re important, but why are you earning all these money? Why are you doing all these stuff? It is to enjoy yourself.   If you’re going to have this self-importance that no one else can do the job you’re supposed to be doing, well, you’re a bit in trouble, and you need that vacation. Of course, the third one is the most obvious of all which is too much activity. You can’t go on vacation and see 300 cathedrals. You just cannot. They’re boring after a while, and they all will start to look the same. We have a vacation philosophy, “We’re called the five-monument people.” That means we look at five monuments or five places we’re interested, and we’re done.   If we go to Istanbul, five things, and we’re done. If we go to Washington D.C., five things, and we’re done. Friends who know us, they will drive us fast on some of these monuments and go, “There you go. One, two, three, four, five. We’re done. Let’s go to eat.” Of course, that is crazy, but you get the point. You don’t want to have too much activity. If you have all of these stuff packed back to back, you never get relaxed. You never get to nothingness. Nothingness is amazing, but only once you start to get a hold of it.   To me, a three-month vacation, not all three months together, one month at a time is part of my work. It helps my work get better. It helps me relax. It makes me want to do better stuff. I think that if there’s one thing that we could do today is to meditate. That’s one thing you can do at your desk. Go to that website, Calm.com, C-A-L-M-.com. Download the app or just listen to it on your computer. I think that will make a big difference. Five minutes, you can start off with five minutes. You can go with 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It’s up to you. It’s a much easier way to meditate.   I think the second thing, and here I am breaking my own rules saying one thing and telling you about two things. The second thing is just book a couple of days somewhere close by, 20 minutes away, 30 minutes away. Just go. Leave home. Leave the garbage. Leave the coffee grinder. Leave all that stuff home. Of course, leave your email for two days. I’m sure someone can manage it, and you will find that while you may not, at least at this point, make a three-month vacation a reality, that’s where you’re headed. You want to start right now. You want to start today, and you want to relax.   That brings us to the end of this podcast. Before we go, where are we headed for our monthly vacation? We’re going to Sardinia, Italy. We’ve been to the mainland before, and I know Italy is a big place. You can never get enough of Italy, but Sardinia seems to be a completely different space altogether. We’re going from one island to another island. We hope the coffee is good. Before that, we have the info-product workshop, and that is in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, D.C.   It’s about information products. It is how to create powerful information products, whether it’d be a webinar, or a workshop, or a presentation, a book. The reason why it’s so important today is because there’s so much junk out there. This workshop isn’t about showing you how to write or create that presentation. It is the structure of what makes compelling information, how do you put everything together, so that customers go from one end right to the other end, and then come back for more.     That’s why it’s different. It shows you exactly what you need to do to make information structure compelling, so that you can take whatever you know, all of that knowledge, and package it in a way that customers consume from one end to the other because once they do, they come back. This has been brought to you by Psychotactics.com and The Three-Month Vacation. Now, if you haven’t been to iTunes and left us a glowing testimonial, then this is your chance, so please leave that testimonial because I’d really appreciate it. Bye for now. Bye-bye.