The Three Month Vacation Podcast

Envy isn't something we talk about, or even to admit to openly. And yet it's the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us. So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success.

The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap.

Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare. What if you're wrong? What if the name isn't well received? However, there's a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It's not the title that matters. It's the sub-title. Find out why we've been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done.

Most of us know of the concept of the "guardian angel". They come into our lives and they take care of us. The "kicking angel" is quite different. The angel shows up just to push us over the edge and then he/she disappears from our lives. How do we know when we're being kicked? And what "kicks" do we pay attention to and what do we ignore?

Can you really double your sales of a product you've created a while ago? And why are satellite products so very useful to clients and profitable to your info-product business? In this episode we look at info-products as we'd look at a piece of software like Photoshop. Find out the magic that already exists within your info-product and why you don't have to keep crazily searching for newer clients all the time. Read it online: Double Your Sales With Versions and Satellite Products ----------------- Most people have never heard of the Knoll brothers, but they've certainly heard of the program the brothers invented. That program was Photoshop Developed initially in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll, it wasn't the sophisticated program like the modern version. Back then it wasn't called Photoshop, but was named "Image-Pro". It was only when the Knoll brothers decided to sell the program in 1988 that they changed the name to Photoshop. As the story goes, no one was really interested in the program, except for Adobe. Adobe saw the potential and purchased all the wholesale rights, and by 1990 the first version of Photoshop was released. Today, Photoshop has gone through thousands of changes and 27 versions. Every time a version appeared on the market, two sets of customers bought the product: new clients and existing ones. And in that version history is a lesson for almost all of our information products. Photoshop is no doubt, built by its programmers, but who comes up with endless suggestions for the improvement of the program? A large portion comes from the users themselves. And who buys the newer version of Photoshop? Once again, it's the existing users of the program. Today, Adobe has a subscription model in place, where all upgrades are automatic, but for at least 20+ years, the newer versions of the product were purchased by existing users. A similar concept can be used to sell your own info-products It's not common in the information products world to think of books, videos or courses as they do in the software world. Most information product creators write a book or create a course and it stays in its original format. Yet your target profile is always looking for an improvement. At Psychotactics, we create newer versions of info-products as often as we possibly can. As you're probably aware, the Article Writing Course is now in Version 2.0. So is the First Fifty Words course and The Brain Audit has seen many versions since we first released it in back in 2002. Bear in mind that not all courses or info-products need constant revision, but instead of simply dashing madly into yet another information product, you might want to take a look at how versions will help sell info-products to an existing, as well as new audience. Listening to the target profile can also help you create more in-depth versions of your products Take the Article Writing Course for instance. It's an extremely comprehensive course and clients love it—they really do. At first the course existed as a standalone, but the target profile—or clients, in this case—kept asking for in-depth sub-courses. For instance, writing headlines is already covered in the Article Writing Course, but now we also have a separate eight-week headline course. The opening of the article, or the First Fifty Words as we call it, is also part of the Article Writing Course, but it's also a separate 8-week intensive course. What you're learning from the above example is that even when you have like what seems to be a complete info-product, clients are more than happy to buy in-depth versions of the components of the products. To make this clearer, let's break up the Article Writing Course into components – Headlines – First Fifty Words – Connectors – Subheads – Sandwiching – Objections – And so on. When you look at the list above, every component could possibly become a separate and more detailed information product or course. Some might be shorter, or take up fewer pages in a book, but they all have the propensity to break off from the mother ship called the "Article Writing Course" and become satellites of their own. And clients tend to want more of the same good stuff you're putting out. If you go deeper into the satellite info-products, clients are more than happy to buy into your offering. We know this to be true because of what we see at Psychotactics. A client will do the headlines course and then do the Article Writing Course and possibly the First Fifty Words course. Or they may start with the Article Writing Course and then move to the headlines course. The satellite courses don't cannibalise the main course. And this concept applies to any sort of info-products whether audio, video or text. And you know this to be true because of the music industry At some point, we've all bought music in some shape or form. Some of us may have had the pleasure of buying cassette tapes, CDs, DVDs and then signed up to Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music. The fact that we already ha

When creating an information product is the client important? It might seem that a client is extremely important when creating an information product. After all, you're getting them to tell you exactly what she needs. However, more often than not, this method is a recipe for disaster. Even so, the client is extremely useful in another phase. So when do you include the client? And when do you leave her out? Let's find out in this two part series on info-product creation. Read online: Info-product Creation Part 1: When to Leave The Clients Out ------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to create an information product and when you need the target profile Part 2: How to go about pre-selling your book Part 3: How to use the target profile to create info product versions ------------------ Did you ever wonder why evergreen trees don't shed their leaves even in freezing winter? The moment autumn rolls along, most trees in temperate and boreal zones shed their leaves. Every tree has chemical light receptors—phytochrome and cryptochrome. These light receptors can sense a loss of light. Which is precisely when deciduous and broadleaf trees shed their leaves. However, the evergreen trees hang on to their leaves even in the dead of winter, because their foliage is coated with a wax. This wax helps fob off the cold. Plus their cells bear an anti-freeze sort of chemical that enable it to avoid it having to drop its leaves. When creating an information product, we have to mimic trees Sometimes it's best to drop the client out of the creation of the product, because they're likely to get in the way. At other times we have to make sure we hold onto them like the evergreen tree does with all its leaves. But when do you get the client involved? And when do you drop them? In this series we'll look at the client—who we call the target profile. We'll have a closer look at three core elements: – When to leave the client out – When to bring the client in—and specially when pre-selling the info-product – Why the target profile plays an important role in creating versions or additional satellite products. Let's start with the first one. 1) How to create an information product and why you need to leave the target profile out of it What's the worst way to cook a great dinner? Let's assume you ask the guests to drum up a list of their favourite meals. Were you to go down this path of asking guests for their recommendations, you'd quickly get swamped with a mishmash of dishes. Dal makhani, fried chicken, broccoli, couscous—just about any dish would show up on the request list. And that's no way to cook a dinner, Instead a better way is to have an overall view of what the clients need—and then completely avoid asking them for any advice while you're prepping dinner. A similar process plays itself out when you're creating an info-product Many years ago when I sat down to write an info-product on membership sites. My idea was simple: I pre-sold the book on membership sites. I then asked clients to give me the topics they wanted me to cover. As you'd expect, I got a list of questions that seemed to go on forever. While at first it seems like topics given by clients are a goldmine, the requests turned out to be incredibly debilitating. As you'd expect, I was unsure where to start or how to go ahead. When creating information products, leave your client out of the planning stage completely. The goal of the information product—a great information product—is to get a client from Point A to Point B and to enjoy the ride in the process. Think of yourself as a GPS. The GPS has access to a tonne of information, but do you see that information on screen? Instead, what the GPS does is show you only what's valid for your journey. And should there be delays along a route, that very same GPS may take you down a longer route, but eventually get you to the destination as quickly as possible. Take for instance the series called 'Black Belt Presentations' The goal of the book series isn't just to create presentations. Instead it helps you create presentations that the entire audience can recall, and repeat, long after you've finished speaking. When creating this series, I had to think of the three elements that would help get the client to achieve this level of simplicity and elegance. Yet, if I were to ask clients what they wanted to see in a series on presentations, I'd have got a massive list. So I did what you should now do. You should play GPS. What three steps can the client take to get to the desired end point? Three steps? What if you have seventeen? Well, cut it down to three. With the 'Black Belt Presentations' series, the focus was on slide design, structure of the presentation itself and finally crowd control. With just three big steps, you should be able to take the client from one point to another. And just for good measure, let's take another example. Let's say you're writing about how to take good photographs. Surely th

When you create your business, product or service uniqueness, do you need to test it? Incredible as it seems there's little point in doing any testing at all. In this episode you'll find out why testing is practically impossible and how instead of wasting time on research, you should follow three steps to make sure your uniqueness occupies a permanent part of your client's brain. In this episode Sean talks about Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out. Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition. Step 3: You have to state your own position. Read it online: How to Effectively Test Your Uniqueness ========== When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it? What is likely to happen to a woman's bikini, when she's surfing? "If you're a woman, surfing with a bikini was slightly out of the question.You'd be out in the waves, walk out of the water and literally you've lost your bottoms," said the business owner, Anna Jerstrom. So Jerstrom decided to create sexy, bright bikinis. And the uniqueness? Bikinis that stay on, no matter how rough the surf. And with this single-minded pursuit, investment banker, Anna Jerstrom started a business called Calavera. Wouldn't she need to test the uniqueness before she began? In almost every case, testing a uniqueness is completely unnecessary. One of the biggest reasons why you shouldn't be bothered with testing a uniqueness is because you're unlikely to have any competition. Let's take the uniqueness of Calavera, for example. Why did Jerstrom start the company? Surely she should have been able to find some bikinis that didn't slide off in the surf. Even with the power of the Internet at her disposal, she was still running into dead ends. It means that there will be hundreds, if not thousands of customers who are also finding it hard to get a decent product. That line of thought may not sound reasonable to you, but let's look at the alternative, shall we? Let's say you decide to sell a product. Maybe it's an information product that's based on presentations. When you look on Amazon.com, you're likely to find at least 5,000 books on presentations. Do you really want to go through every sales page trying to find out what's unique about the presentation product? Clients don't care about doing such extensive research either. They just want to show up to your business whether online or offline, and they want you to explicitly tell them why you are different from the rest of the competition. Whether you have a product, training or a service, your uniqueness doesn't need testing, simply because it's impossible to do a test. But there's another good reason why you shouldn't bother to test The biggest reason why you should just go ahead and run your uniqueness is because the competition is lazy or confused, or both. Most companies are clearly at sea when asked what makes them unique. If you have a uniqueness factor in place, that puts you way ahead of your competitors. However, there's also another reason why you can go ahead quite happily. Even if your competition has a uniqueness, it's not much use unless they use it on a frequent basis A uniqueness itself is not enough for clients to remember what is being said. Volvo is known for their safe cars because they ran endless ads about safety. Dominos made a billion dollars selling pizza because of their "30 minutes or it's free" slogan. Think for a second about your competitors right now. Can you quickly bring up their uniqueness? It's not enough to have a uniqueness, you have to do so much more In fact you have to take three steps to make sure the uniqueness does its job properly. Step 1: You have to consistently get the word out. Step 2: You have to state the position of the competition. Step 3: You have to state your own position. Let's go through the steps—To Getting Your Uniqueness Recognised Step 1: Get the word out This means a uniqueness can't just sit around. It has to be repeated in some form or the other, over and over again. If you've listened to the "Three Month Vacation" podcast, for example, when I talk about 5000bc, I will repeat the same thing almost ad nauseam. I will say, "5000bc is a place where introverts meet because they feel safe". The same message will be sent out in articles, in books—in just about every medium possible. And the message never changes much, if at all. Keeping that message consistent is what is critical. If you keep changing the message simply because you're bored of it, you've lost more than half the uniqueness battle. You want to make sure you get the uniqueness as simple as possible and then continue to mention it everywhere. When you consider that you may have more than one product or service, you have to pick your battles For instance, the uniqueness of Psychotactics is "tiny increments". But often the overall company uniqueness is of little value to the client, because they are more focused on the product or service, instead. However, at Psychotactics, we

How do you position your products and services? Finding your uniqueness is incredibly difficult, yet some companies do it consistently well. How do you learn from their ability to position their products and services? Also, do you really need a uniqueness for every business product and service? The answer is "yes" and this episode will reveal why that's the case. ============ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service? Part 2: Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses? Part 3: When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it? Read in online: How To Quickly Create Your Uniqueness ============ A patch of grass, is a patch of grass, is a patch of grass, right? Take for instance the patch of grass near the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai in Tanzania Every year around February, the wildebeest calves are born, all at the same time. If you look at where the calves seem to graze, it's on one patch of grass—while completely ignoring the rest of the think. This particular grass, which stretches for miles, has nine times the phosphorus and five times the calcium as the next patch. The enriched grass nourishes the young calves and gets them healthy for the great migration that is to follow. In other words, you could easily call this grass unique, right? In business we rarely have this luxury of inbuilt uniqueness Instead we have to go out and find our uniqueness, or create one. And this is where we seem to run into a lot of trouble. When we look at our products or services, they seem remarkably similar to what the competition is offering. We too could do with a bit of phosphorus and calcium in our offerings, we believe. Contrary to what we think, we all have an incredibly powerful ability to distinguish ourselves from any competitors. Yet, the moment we decide to work on our uniqueness, we paint ourselves into a corner We don't know if we're supposed to find a uniqueness or create one. The pressure builds until we convince ourselves that the exercise of uniqueness is much too tedious, and it's better to use our energy in other areas of marketing and sales. Even as we're veering away from uniqueness, we realise that we pick products and services precisely for their uniqueness. Running away from the issue isn't going to help us move ahead. We have to turn and face it head on. And here's how you do it. Let's cover three elements: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service? Do different products/services need their own uniquenesses? When you have settled on your uniqueness, how can you test it? Element 1: How do you go about finding uniqueness for your business/product/service? Back in 2003, we started a little membership site called 5000bc. It wasn't meant to be a membership site, but so many clients wanted to discuss business issues that it made sense to have a site. At first, it had almost no content, and I spent a good few weeks putting in a dozen articles or so. It was the early 2000's, remember? I was able to get in touch with almost anyone on e-mail and get their permission to use their content. So I contacted billionaire, Mark Cuban, best-selling author and speaker, Wayne Dyer and other such personalities. And so, 5000bc began on its journey. But 5000bc had no clearly-defined uniqueness When you're starting out a business, it's hard just to figure out what you're doing. You're trying so hard to find yourself that finding the uniqueness for a product or service seems implausible, if not impossible. Nonetheless, over the years, as 5000bc grew, we went through the process of interior design. We'd add something here, something there and soon it became quite distinct in itself. Even so, we couldn't figure out what was unique. This is the part where you turn to the outside world We sent out a bunch of e-mails to clients and time, and time again they'd come up with the same response. They'd say something like this—and this is an actual quote: My favourite part about 5000bc is the character of the community. From knowing that you will personally answer my questions to knowing I can post my own answers without getting ridiculed is really nice. I'm just getting started, but once my business is rolling, I will certainly pay it back to the community. I've never seen anyone put anyone else down in the Cave. But then they might add something like this I also like the depth of content. Before I came to 5000bc, I was very confused about the direction I want to go in for starting my business. Ever since joining 5000bc, and reading the content I've been getting a lot of clarity and confidence. I'm no longer running in circles, but moving towards my goals. I really appreciated the members sharing tips and comments on my post about "getting rid of negative thoughts". I also like that people hold you accountable to what you have entered in Taking Action Forum. See the problem yet? In that answer, there are severa

Information product sales don't always increase with promotions alone Often they increase by giving away content that you could easily sell. But shouldn't you stick to giving away tiny reports? What if you were told to give away a big product instead? Would that reap any rewards? Find out in this episode on giving as a strategy. ---------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Small value giveawayPart 2: Big value giveaway Part 3: How to structure the giveaway and how often Click to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/giveaways-increase-sales/ ---------------- n South Africa, there's a flower that only one insect can access. Orphium flowers don't contain nectar. Instead, they provide bees with pollen. Yet, not every insect can access the pollen. If you look closely at an orphium flower, you'll find the stamens are twisted and this, in turn, prevents the pollen from being stolen by visiting insects. Only one insect has access to the pollen in the Orphium flower. That insect is the female carpenter bee. When she approaches the Orphium flower, her flapping wings make a particular buzzing sound. Yet that sound won't make a difference to the flower. The stamens remain locked. At which point the bee changes the beat of her wings creating what we'd call the C note. That simple act gets the flower to seemingly unlock and shower the bee with pollen. In our business, we often seem to be like the other insects. We don't appear to be able to hit that C note and unlock greater products sales. Yet just like the wing beat of the carpenter bee, you can achieve a consistent level of success. So what's that note that you have to hit? And how often? Let's find out: 1) Small value giveaway 2) Big value giveaway 3) How to structure the giveaway and how often 1) Why Small Value Giveaways or Products Work If you were a rooster, would you be able to crow at any time? You'd think so, wouldn't you? After all, it seems like roosters cock-a-doodle-doo at any given time. In the journal, Scientific Reports, a study showed that roosters crow in order of seniority. First, the top ranking rooster initiates the crowing, followed by subordinates, all in descending order of social rank. In fact, when the top ranking rooster is removed from the group, the second-ranking rooster initiates the crowing. At all times the social rank has to be adhered to maintain the hierarchy. Fortunately, such a hierarchy doesn't have to maintained when trying to increase product sales. You can start off with a small value giveaway. So what's a small or low-value giveaway? When you get to the website at Psychotactics.com, you're likely to have run into a giveaway called the "Headline Report". It's why headlines fail, and how to avoid that failure. To date, over 55,000 copies of that report have been downloaded. That report isn't a top-ranking, highly complex document. Back in the early 2000s, when we first launched a pre-Psychotactics site, I wrote an article about headlines, which turned out to be very popular. And by this point you're probably thinking, "Ah, it's a report, there's nothing new about a report." You'd be right if you thought that way because the report itself doesn't do much. However, if you take a report that gets a client from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible, then that report becomes pretty magical. Which is what the Headline Report does. In under 10 minutes and in about as many pages, it takes you from not being very confident with headlines to getting a pretty good understanding of the working and the implementation of the headline. All over the Psychotactics website there are tiny reports of this nature They're all small value giveaways, but they do one thing and do it well. They get you from A to B in a big hurry. The hurry part is important because people are swamped with information. If you're able to create change quickly, they're more likely to decide to take the next step and implement what you've shown them. Once they implement, they're hooked. I remember a client who came to our workshop, spent $3000 for himself and his wife, purely based on the strength of the report. But it's not just reports that matter; videos or audio can do the same task Last week I listened to a podcast about a book by Tim Harford. To date, I've read one book and am in the process of going through the other. The podcast isn't high value, is it? It's free, but the same concept of the podcast can be used on your site. The short video, the short audio, the tiny report, even a string of slides that explain a concept. Your starting point should usually be an appetiser, not a full meal. At Psychotactics we have appetisers all around the place It might be an excerpt of a book or some reports that are extremely useful. They all serve to get clients to show up, then sign up on a consistent basis. In fact, our goal—and pay close attention—is to have a report that's suited to every type of article. It's a pretty extensive exercise but think about

How do you maintain a high productivity level when switching tasks? How do you get the brain and body to handle the transition? And how do you manage the transitions with a minimum amount of fuss? Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/high-productivity/ =============== I was asked in e-mail: I am curious to know, since you do so many tasks in a day, how do you deal with context switching? I can do a task for 60 minutes, but doing something different immediately, requires some time for the brain and the body to handle the transition. How do you manage these transitions? The approximate formula is: High Intensity > BREAK > Low Intensity Notice how it goes? High, BREAK, Low. Then BREAK > High > BREAK > Low. When you first see the switching formula, it seems like it's just a transition from high to low. But as you can tell from the emphasis above, the break is pretty critical. If you just go from high to low or even low to high, the brain doesn't get time to recover. And recovery is what's important when you want to keep your attention and focus. Without recovery you get a factor of tiredness, that may also spiral downwards to exhaustion But with recovery, your brain and body get a chance to relax and come back to take on the next battle. It's at this point that the high to low bit also matters. Taking on high-intensity tasks one after the other just wears you out and having the high to low allows your brain to make a decent transition—and relax even more after you've had the break. But how long are the breaks? The breaks depend on the time of day. During the day, while at work the breaks are short. However, at around lunch time, it might be about 30 minutes or more. At tea time I will take another 30 minutes. It seems like a lot of down-time, but that's the reason why you can achieve more. A simple alarm or timer that does a countdown enables you to take that break. But there are days when I'll ignore that timer (as we all do) and that's the day when I get more tired. Instead, at the point of the timer going off, I can give my brain and body a break. I lie on the floor (yes, on the floor) and have two books to rest my head in a semi-supine position. Look it up. It sounds totally bizarre that taking time off gets you to achieve more, but that's precisely the crux of higher productivity The more you work, the longer stretches you work for, the less productive you're likely to be. And of course, the more tired you'll get. If you're younger, you may brush this off, because you seem to have boundless energy, but in tests, young tennis players were matched against each other, and the top players were always the ones who recovered better. The recovery period forms the core—if that were not obvious by now already. And it helps in switching tasks as well. My day starts with high intensity. I will either be writing a book, or be answering questions on a course, or in 5000bc. A lot of these activities involve not just reading, but analysis and giving precise direction. It's mentally draining and after 90 minutes or so (with rest periods in between), I'll go for a walk. That's a longer break. When I get back, I will make breakfast and watch some comedy on YouTube (while cooking up some yummy dosas). Then it's time to paint for a while. That's all high to break, and now it's time to get back to low intensity, which would involve something like e-mail or something that doesn't require a tonne of resources. The day moves on from there to writing scripts for the podcast and answering 5000bc posts, before it's time for lunch and another break. The day is filled with breaks, high and low-intensity tasks, which enable me to write, draw, and do many other tasks like recording podcasts or doing interviews, etc. To be productive pay attention to the formula and do the semi-supine. If you don't have a great floor, get a yoga mat and relax on the ground. The more you fight your brain and body the harder it is to switch. It also doesn't allow you to reach your highest productivity level. And that, in a nutshell, is how to go about your day. Next Step: Read—How High and Low Tasks Apply To Projects (How To Be Productive And Not Burn Out)

Even if you have the best business idea in the world, analysis-paralysis can stop you in your tracks You feel frozen, not sure what to do. So you research. Then you do some more research and educate yourself even more. But that doesn't get you very far, does it? Even famous people like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would get stuck in this mode, just like you. But they still went on to create great art. So how do you create great "art" as well? Find out and beat the analysis-paralysis once and for all. ----------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Two ways to validate your business idea Part 2: What makes a viable product? And how do you validate it? Part 3: How to deal with analysis paralysis? Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validating-business-idea/ ----------- How do you go about validating your business idea to give yourself the best chance of success? Can you think of a TV series that's generated over US$ 3.1 billion so far? If you answered, Seinfeld, you're perfectly right. Except for one little fact. Seinfeld almost didn't get off the ground. As author Adam Grant mentions in his book, "Originals", two entertainers got together to create a 90-minute special. Despite their abilities, they couldn't find enough material to fill the 90-minute special, and so they decided to create a half-hour weekly TV show. And that's precisely where all the trouble began. The TV Network folks looked at the script and thought it was terrible Undeterred, they went on to create the pilot for the series. A hundred viewers dissected the strengths and weaknesses of the show. The majority of the test audience decided they wouldn't watch such a show. But a test audience in one city may hate the show and others may love it, which is why the pilot got screened at four diverse cities. Six hundred people in all saw the show, and the results were dismal. They all thought it wasn't something they'd ever watch again. And at that point, Seinfeld should have simply died. And it might have if it wasn't for one network executive who doggedly campaigned for them to make and air four more episodes. The drama didn't stop there, and Seinfeld lurched back and forth, always threatening to tip itself into oblivion. Johannes Sebastian Bach is considered to be one of classical's virtuosos He wrote over a thousand pieces of music in his lifetime. Not far behind was Beethoven and Bach who composed 650 and 600 pieces respectively. And yet, despite their voluminous body of work, they were as unsure as you and me about what would work and what wouldn't. Beethoven, for instance, trashed the final movement of his most celebrated work in the Fifth Symphony. Only later did he decide to put it back. Could he not tell right from the start that it was an amazing part of the musical piece? Throughout history, experts have failed to spot the superstars. J.K. Rowling, the Beatles, Elvis Presley. History has hundreds of examples of bad calls, and it's not as though the crowd does better. Despite what you hear about the wisdom of crowds, the crowds are pretty hopeless at it as well. Which is why Seinfeld's early episodes got panned so badly. 1) If everyone is guessing, how would you ever be able to validate an idea? There are two ways to validate an idea, and they're both reasonably bizarre. —The first way is not to do any testing with audiences at all. Instead, there's another group that can help you with greater accuracy. —The second way is to create whatever you jolly well please, but then link it to an existing problem. Let's start with the first point and figure out which group tends to be more accurate than others When we sit down to create a product or service, we instantly realise that we're not alone. If you're in marketing, there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of books on marketing. If you're in health, fitness, nutrition, programming, illustrations—it doesn't matter what you pick—it's all been covered. It's at this point we feel the need to stand out and fit it as well. There's a reason why we need to fit in If we go too far away from what everyone else is doing, it might just not be viable. Novelty is hard to cope with because we don't know what to make of it. If you ask an expert, they don't see the world the way you do. Back in the early 2000s as we started an earlier version of Psychotactics, there were already solidly entrenched marketers such as Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and Brian Tracy. They were well-established in the field of seminars, delivered their content through massive bookbinders and cassette tapes. If all of these methods of delivery sound archaic to you, it's only because you're looking back in time. Almost no marketer wanted to explore the Internet. It's the very entrenchment that causes you to see something new as a novelty. It's a blind spot. If you were to ask the experts or the audience, you still wouldn't get the validation you seek. But there's another group that seems to understand t

How do you know whether your business idea is good or bad? Is there a system of validation for your info-products, courses and workshops, or do you just go with the wisdom of the crowds? This episode shows you exactly what causes one business idea to fail and the other one to succeed. This series is about the validation of your business ideas. We will explore what is important when you're about to embark on a new business idea. ------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason Part 2: Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away Part 3: The big picture is usually the biggest problem Click here to read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/validate-idea/ ------------- Imagine if you invented a set of tyres and they were ridiculed. That is precisely what happened to a vet from Belfast, Ireland. This vet, named John Boyd Dunlop, watched with a bit of angst as his son, Johnnie, as he bounced madly while riding on a bike on a cobblestone street. The solid rubber tyres were clearly not suitable and he set about inventing the first commercially viable pneumatic tyres. But then they made fun of him. They called the pneumatics, "pudding tyres". What would you do if you were in Dunlop's place? We know that Dunlop didn't give up. He didn't give into the ridicule, but partnered instead with Irish industrialist W. H. Du Cros to create the Dunlop tyre factory both in Ireland and across the world. But what if Dunlop backed away? What if he wasn't so sure if his invention would be a success? This series is about the validation of ideas. And in three parts we explore three chunky bits that are important when you're about to embark on a "pudding sort of idea". And here's what we'll cover: -How to distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason -How to go about validating your idea to give yourself the best chance of success -Tips for getting over analysis paralysis Part 1: How do you distinguish between your own voice of fear, and voice of reason? If you buy really well-made bread, it goes through a cycle. At first, it's delicious. It's likely to be crusty on the outside, soft on the inside. But keep it on your kitchen bench for a few days, and it starts to get hard. In a week, it's likely to get rock-hard and possibly get mouldy. The question to ask yourself at this point is: Did you buy bad bread? And the answer is self-evident The bread wasn't bad, was it? But if you take the best loaf of bread, made by the most dedicated baker, and you keep it outside for days, you're going to get an almost identical result. This is true for good ideas as well. No matter how great your idea happens to be at the start, the hardness will set in and so will the fungi. Good ideas can't be left on the bench; they need to be consumed right away However, this is where things start to go horribly wrong; only we feel like it's going just right. The way things unfold is through testing, research and working out if the market needs our product. Once we've gone around the research block many times, we then wonder if we have anything new to bring to the table. And as we're doing all of this evaluation, the market marches on. The more we research, the more we get stuck in your own trap to the point where the only thing we can do, is to scout for yet another idea. Fear takes over, and we don't know what to do next. But why are we fearful in the first place? We're fearful because we can't see the big picture. When you look at most business owners, they don't look confused and composed. They seem to have all these projects going; they appear to be attending events, speaking, turning out courses and books. In short, they seem to have everything well under control. You, on the other hand, aren't able to see so far into the distance, let alone figure out a way to get there. And this lack of the ability to see way into that future, plus the ongoing intimidation from seemingly successful people, puts you in a position of great angst. The big picture is usually the biggest problem Entrepreneurs who succeed rarely see the big picture. They're not entirely clueless, either. They know where they want to go, but it's still, at best, a hazy view of the future. What they tend to look at closely is what's in front of them. To understand the analogy, think of yourself in a car. Let's say you have to drive from Auckland to Wellington, a route of almost 8 hours of hard driving. Do you know what Wellington looks like at this moment? It would hardly hassle you because you're focused on the road right in front of you. Your only piece of research is a sort of GPS system that will more or less ensure you don't get lost along the way. But wait, you already have your GPS system You did the research; you read the books, you know how to move forward, so why are you still stuck? If we were to go back to the road analogy, you wouldn't be stuck. And that's becau

How does tolerance play a role in small business? It might not seem like tolerance is the root for success, but if you dig deeper, you'll find that small businesses struggle without the core concepts of tolerance. So how does tolerance play a part in something like a successful artwork, or music, or the next product or course you produce? Let's find out in this podcast. ------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure Part 2: The Tolerance to Learn Part 3: The Tolerance for the Long Haul Read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/lack-tolerance-effect/ ------------- In September 2013, Renuka and I were headed to Cape Town, South Africa. Whenever we leave, we always ask our nieces, Marsha and Keira what they'd like as gifts. Keira was pretty clear about her gift. "Bring me an elephant", she said emphatically. Now Keira was just four at the time, and an elephant seemed like a pretty plausible gift. She wasn't taking no for an answer, even when we told her that the elephant might not fit in her house. But then I brought up a point that stopped her cold in her tracks. After she had heard what I had to say, she wasn't keen on the elephant anymore. So what did I tell her? I said, the elephant is a big animal and all animals poo. The larger the animal, the greater the volume of poo. Keira didn't need much convincing She wanted nothing to do with the elephant or the poo for that matter. And this is the battle we have to deal with every single day. We all want our businesses to grow bigger than ever before. What we don't always think of, is poo. The bigger the business, the bigger the poo And in business terms, you could call the poo, tolerance. You need an enormous amount of tolerance to keep the business going. Which is why people struggle so much when they get into a business. They don't see the factor of tolerance needed to keep the business going. Let's look at the factor of tolerance in three shades, shall we? —The Tolerance for Success and Failure —The Tolerance to Learn —The Tolerance for the Long Haul Part 1: The Tolerance for Success and Failure In August 2015, a musical made its debut on Broadway It wasn't just any old musical. A few months earlier in February of that year, the off-Broadway engagement was totally sold out. And in 2016 itself, it received 16 Tony nominations and won 11. That musical goes by the name of Hamilton; a hip-hop musical is about the life of American founding father Alexander Hamilton and the American Revolution. And the musical's producer, Jeffrey Seller is passionate about the need for tolerance. "People don't have the tolerance", says Seller who's seen more than his share of failures. "The tolerance for anxiety, fear, bewilderment and pain. In the book "Originals" by Adam Grant, there's a list of high profile failure You're likely to have heard about William Shakespeare's work in plays such as Macbeth, King Lear and Othello. But it's normal when you fail to recognise names of plays such as Timon of Athens or All's Well That Ends Well. Those two in particular rank among the worst of his plays and have been considered to be completely underbaked. But that's not unusual, is it? A writer does bad work and then produces better work as time goes on. What's interesting about these plays is that he produced them in the same five-year window as some of his best plays. Shakespeare is known for his amazing plays, but most people fail to realise that he turned out a grinding 37 plays and 154 sonnets. His tolerance for getting into the heart of failure and getting out of it, was, as it turns out, consistent with any other successful person. Hamilton basks in incredible success today, but its producer Jeffrey Seller clearly defines success through the eyes of failure. Success feels good. Success is in its own way easy. It's easy on my stomach and in my heart. It is also true that failure; the feelings that failure evokes are so much worse than the positive feelings that success evokes. I've heard of tennis players who say, "I never feel as good winning as badly I feel when I'm losing." "You can't cherry pick" We must not cherry-pick because it will never get it right. If I lose money in one show and then say, "Oh, I better not do it in the next," I'm going to be in big trouble if the next one's the hit. I'll give you an example. I did an Opera on Broadway in 2002. We did La Bohème on Broadway in Italian. It was a beautiful production conceived and directed by the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. I had persuaded this group of Korean investors who I've done some other business with, to invest a whopping million dollars. They lose 900 of the million. I asked them to invest in this little show with puppets called Avenue Q. They passed. Avenue Q goes on to make over $30 million of profit for all of its investors. They cherry-picked. They used the fear that losing money in La bohème generated to guide their next decision. Picasso didn't cherry pick We look at

"I wasted too much time getting angry". So said world-famous tennis champion, John McEnroe. McEnroe and arch-rival, Jimmy Connors had similar temperaments on the court. Both were easily provoked. Yet both of them managed to get to the No.1 ranking in the world for many years consecutively. Yet McEnroe was gone from the tennis scene by the age of 34. Connors, on the other hand, was still around at the highest level, even at the age of 40. So what happened? ============= In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Work-Rest Ratios Part 2: What Depletes EnergyPart 3: The Power of a Backup Battery Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/increase-energy/ ============= Performance psychologist Jim Loehr was on a particularly difficult mission. He wanted to understand what kept the world's top competitors head and shoulders above their competition. He watched hundreds of hours watching live games and followed up by poring through taped matches. Despite the rigour he put into this research, he ran right into a brick wall. He noticed that during points, high calibre players appeared to be remarkably similar to each other. There seemed to be little or no difference in the way they went about their game. Then Loehr looked closer and began to look at what players did in between points. That's when he had his Eureka moment. The best players, it seems, had consciously or subconsciously built up a routine. As they headed back, they had a type of walk; they held their heads and shoulders in a certain way. And most importantly, their breathing seemed to slow down. These players were playing their shot and then, amazingly, going through a recovery method while getting ready for the next shot. To dig deeper, Loehr hooked up the top players to EKG telemetry and was able to monitor their heart rates. To his astonishment, he found their heart rates dropping by as much as twenty beats per minute, in between points. Lesser ranked players seemed to have no recovery routine at all. As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz write in their book: The Power of Full Engagement, the key to being super-productive is to have enormous amounts of energy. To drive home this point, they give the example of two players of relatively equal talent and fitness. The players have given it their all as the match has progressed, but as the game reaches the third hour, who's going to be less fatigued? Who's going to get more angry and frustrated? Who's going to push his heart rate even higher resulting in muscular tension and drop in concentration? The one who has been recovering in between points is clearly far ahead because he's got far more energy. When you think of energy, nothing quite fits the analogy like an electric car. A petrol-driven car is a car with no fear. You can put $5 worth of fuel in it, and sure enough, you will find a petrol station along the way when you need one. At least at this point in time, in most countries, you can't do expect the same level of topping up for an electric car. To get to your destination, and back, an electric car requires the driver to move forward without sudden acceleration. Brakes are applied only in an absolute emergency and most slowing down involves a generous amount of anticipation. In short, the electric car has a fixed battery and few, if any, charges along the way. If you manage your drive well, the car even recharges even while moving ahead. An electric car and Loehr's research align almost perfectly. Energy needs to be used to propel us forward, but we have to make sure we not only recharge, but also avoid energy depletion. Which is why it's a good idea to look at three core elements of energy so that we too can ditch time management and work on energy management, instead. Here's what we'll cover: 1- Work-Rest Ratios 2- What Depletes Energy 3- A Backup Battery 1) Work-Rest Ratios 1972 was a scary year for Southwest Airlines. They had been battling it out on the ground for years, just to get the right to fly. But right alongside their legal battles, there loomed a threat that was promising to put them out of business. They were haemorrhaging on cash and in order to pay the bills, they had to sell one of their four planes. However, Bill Franklin, former Vice President of Ground Operations and others in Southwest made a bold calculation They came to the conclusion that three planes could to the work of four. There was just one tiny problem to overcome. The planes had to be in and out of the gates in 10 minutes. Getting a plane cleaned, restocked and refuelled is a precision-driven task that often requires a solid hour. Southwest had little or no option. They were either going to keep the planes in the air, or they'd go out of business. Years later, author, Kevin Frieberg, author of the book, "Nuts!", was quoted as saying, "Aeroplanes only make money in the air". This kind of go, go, go machine-driven attitude is what we seem to apply to humans as well. Many of us see ourselves as the product of hard work; of ha

In a small business, strategy and tactics often go wrong. Yet all you hear about is success, success and how someone made it big. This episode is about some bad judgment calls and also about plain pomposity. It's taught us to be better marketers and better people. ============ In this episode Sean talks about Story No.1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003 Story No.2—A Mess In Wellington: Why Extreme Personalisation is Not A Good Idea Summary: How our minus two learning has helped us To read this podcast online: https://www.psychotactics.com/psychotactics-mistakes/ ============ I remember one of the early events in my speaking career Renuka was sitting in the audience. When I finished my speech, I came back to my seat and asked her how she found the speech. I gave you a minus two, she said. Speaking hasn't been easy for me, and I struggled a lot not knowing what to say when in front of an audience Luckily, almost at the start of my career, I ran into Eugene Moreau and his 13-Box Speaking system. The 13-Box system was so honed, it was like having a Samurai sword at your disposal. Except, it's not much use having a Samurai sword and not going through "sword practice". To get my practice in speaking to a high degree of professionalism, I'd speak everywhere I could. And when I mean, speak everywhere, these weren't at fancy events. I'd speak at the Rotary club, some places where people would meet to network and even at association meetings. In my mind, it was pretty clear that if I didn't get the practice, I wouldn't become a confident speaker. And I knew I'd reached a good level when I was paid to speak at an event It wasn't much. I think it was about $300 or $400, but hey, this was a paid gig. The only problem was that my so-called ability had gone to my head. In the first few years, I'd rehearse fifteen, sixteen times before getting in front of an audience. This event, however, was different. The audience happened to be farmers—not professionals. They still had to sell their products, so they still needed a message like the one that's contained in The Brain Audit. But because they were farmers, I got a little pompous. I practiced a couple of times, then my wife Renuka and I drove to the event The signs were not good. Both Renuka and I had spent a restless night, and we had a long drive ahead of us. She kept asking me if I'd done my usual practice runs. I nodded, but I knew I'd taken some shortcuts. And on that day, when I went on stage, I was sleep-deprived and already a bit tired from the drive. Plus, as you can tell, I hadn't done my usual 15-16 practice runs. Yes, I got a minus two. This series is a little detour into the world of Psychotactics—and. About times when we got below par results Some of the results were our fault, and some of them were just experiences we had along the way. In every instance, we learned a lesson, and it helped us move ahead in our business. Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? Let's look at some minus two experiences. Like the time back in 2004, I think, where I was a speaker at an Internet conference, and everyone was selling their products, but me. Why did things go so wrong? Story No:1—The Internet Marketing Conference Fiasco of 2003 I should have known better than heading to a particular Internet Marketing Conference in Australia. It was what you'd call a pitch-fest. Pitch-fests are given that name because the speaker tends to speak for a fixed amount of time, but then reserves at least a third of the given time to pitch their products or services. Think of speaker after speaker getting up on stage and selling like those folks you see on infomercials, and you get the idea. I was not even part of the original speaker set up, but I was keen to be part of an international speaker group Even though it was barely 2003, the speakers at the event had substantial lists, exceeding 50,000 subscribers. We, on the other hand, might have had fewer than 1500 people on our list. I watched as speaker after speaker got on stage and made a presentation. Then they'd make an offer, and there would often be a scramble to the rear of the room, where they were selling their products. It was pretty early in my career, but I was pretty confident of my speaking skill by then I'd done a bit of selling from the podium as well, and I thought I'd be going home with several thousands of dollars in sales. This dream of mine seemed more feasible when I compared myself to the person who did his presentation just before mine. His presentation was more about how to run some software, than a real transfer of knowledge. And yet when he made his pitch, there was an almighty scramble to the end of the room. I was sure I could top that act, because my presentation was clearly better than his, and plus in my mind, I was a far superior speaker. But even before I could get on stage, things went wrong I was allocated just 45 minutes, and that included my presentation and my pitch. I figured the pe

When you sit down to write a book you and I can waste a lot of time, if we don't take time to outline But what are the elements involved in outlining? And how can we make sure we don't make any silly mistakes? If you're about to write a book or plan to be an author sometime later, this information is for you. But even if you've already published books, you'll be amazed at how this information speeds up your process and gets better results. In this episode Sean talks about Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline? Element 2: Why deconstruction is important. Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book. Read online: Outlining Your Book: The Three Crucial Steps -------------------------- Around the start of 2010, I was very upset with myself. I'd pre-sold a workshop and as I always do, the notes for the workshop are sent to the attendees a whole month in advance. Since the workshop was being held earlier in the year, I had been thinking about the notes right through my summer break in late December and early January. Uniqueness is a pretty difficult topic and I needed to find a way to ensure that everyone—without exception—got the concept of uniqueness and was able to implement it. The only problem with writing the notes, was that it seemed like the notes were going to be at least 200 pages long. 200 pages is like a security blanket for a writer In the mind of a writer, the chunky volume of notes seem to suggest you have something important to say. And yet my wife Renuka isn't a big fan of a ton of notes. "Why can't you write fewer pages?" she asked me as we were sitting at the cafe. "Why can't you get the same point across, so I don't have to read so much?" A pointed question like this is truly frustrating for me because I know it's easier to fill a book with a ton of information. But a book, or notes in this case, need to be Spartan. They only need to have enough pages; just enough knowledge for the client to get a result. They don't need to be padded or filled with words no one needs. And this meant I had to go back to my outline several times. When writing a book, the most difficult task isn't the writing Distilling the ideas down to simplicity is what gets in the way. I have to force myself to leave the office, sit at the cafe for hours at a time, with no Internet connection. Monday's draft gives way to Wednesday's, and will be supplanted by Friday's draft. Sometimes it can take a month of drafts to get my thoughts together. Except it was already January. The clock was ticking closer to my deadline. I had to make sure I had the book going. Which is why you, and I, we both need an outline. So how do you outline a book? What method should you use? What if you can't write a lot and can only manage a few pages? Should you give up? Let's explore three elements of book outlining to get us on our way: Element 1: Why you should ideally cover just three points. Element 2: Why deconstruction is important to get you going Element 3: Understanding the purpose of the book. Element 1: How many points do you cover in your book outline? When you think of a topic like "presentations", what comes to mind? Let's make a list, shall we? – Creativity – Crafting stories – Simplicity – Delivery – Audience connection – Engagement – Displaying Data – Creating Movement – Time Keeping Those points above represent a tiny list. If you were to look through the books on Amazon.com alone, you'd find at least fifty, possibly a hundred, even two hundred and ten topics on the singular topic of presentations. It's at this time that a novice or unthinking writer decides to do it all. He or she decides to cram as many items as possible into a single book, just to make sure nothing is missed. Take watercolours, for instance Back in 2010, I was pretty hopeless at watercolours when the painting bug struck me. How hopeless is hopeless? I painted for three months faithfully following the instructions of my teacher, Ted. After three months, the area had an auction of the artwork. My painting came up on the auction block. The auctioneer started at $30. No takers $20? Wait, auctions are supposed to go up, not down. But there was the painting at $10, and still no buyers in sight. Now that you'll have to agree is a hopeless situation. Anyway, to avoid such a high level of embarrassment in the future, I decided to take watercolours a lot more seriously. I tramped down to the library and came back armed with at least a dozen books on the subject matter. As I opened book after book, a similar scenario unfolded. Every book seemed to feel the need to cover all the possible topics under the broad umbrella of watercolour. This is the kind of mistake you want to avoid as a writer The journey to outlining a book or just about anything—a book, an article, even the weather report—is better served by working three elements; three main topics and then digging deep into the sub-strata of every one of those topics. Ironically, though, you have

Why do some landing pages work while others fail? The core of a landing page lies in picking a target profile. Yet, it's incredibly easy to mix up a target profile with a target audience. And worse still, the concept of persona comes into play. How do we find our way out of this mess? Presenting the target profile mistakes we make and how to get around them quickly and efficiently. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Target Profile Blind Spot Part 2: Person vs. Persona Part 3: Target Profile Questions To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/landing-pages-fail/ ------------------------ In Mexico, there's a beach that goes by the name of Rosarito. The rocks on that beach made advertising executive, Gary Dahl over 6 million dollars back in 1976. Those rocks were a smooth stone that was soon better known as Pet Rock. These rocks were marketed as if they were live pets. They had their own cardboard boxes, straw and breathing holes for the "animal". People buying the Pet Rock knew fully well what they were buying. And yet they went along with the gag. They leafed through the 32-page official training manual, which included instructions on how to care for the rock. You could, it joked, teach the rock to "sit" and "stay" but "roll over" or "shake hands" was a little harder to explain. What was important back then and what's just as important right now is that people knew it was a gag; a dummy. They knew they were buying something that couldn't really do much for them. And they went along with the joke. When it comes to marketing or selling our products and services, we often don't realise we're dealing with a dummy. We think we're doing the right thing when choosing an audience. In the book, The Brain Audit, there's a whole chapter on why this premise of target audience leads you off the path and into dummy land. And yet the one thing we've heard over and over again is the concept of target audience. It's our Pet Rock moment. We are stuck with something that seems fun and exciting, but won't do anything but "play dead". This episode takes on the issue of target profile and why it's so important for your landing page. Thousands of clients have read the book, The Brain Audit, and yet I see so many of them mixing up the concept of target profile and target audience. So how do we separate the two once and forever? In this article, we cover three parts (as always). – The blind spot with target profile (and why we keep repeating the same mistake). – We go deeper into the concept of the "dummy" as we examine person vs. persona. – Finally, we'll take a look at some of the questions to ask in target profile interview. Let's start with the blind spot, shall we? Why do we keep making the same mistake over and over again? Part 1: The blind spot with target profile I remember when I took my first driving test in Auckland, New Zealand. I drove a manual, what you'd probably call a stick shift back then. As part of my test, I was asked by the testing officer to go down a hill. Immediately, I put the gear into neutral and coasted downhill. You know what happened next, don't you? As exhilarating as it can be to race down hill at top speed, you shouldn't ever put a car in neutral and when heading downhill. There are a whole bunch of things that can go wrong. But that downhill drive was my blind spot. I had done it so many times before, that I didn't see that it would not only cause a problem, but would get me a nice big F (as in Failed) against my test. Most of us make the same mistake when we get down to working with our target profile When asked about our target profile, we get drawn into the error of describing a target audience. And this mistake is reasonable because almost every marketing book or course talks mostly about target audience. It suggests that we should look for a bunch of people. E.g. people who are afraid of making presentations, or teacher, or people who want to be coaches. It talks about targeting huge groups of people all at once. While this is a great starting point, it's only the starting point. An audience won't get you very far You may not be focusing on an audience, but instead on a type of person. So instead of 'people who are afraid of making presentations', you think of a fictional person. And you say: "Ok, let's call him Chris." And then you go on to rattle off the factor of how this fictional person named Chris may end up being terrified of presentations. And you think you're on the right track at this point. But a testing instructor would still fail you And this is because you're still not paying attention to that blind spot. When we use the term, target profile, it's not an audience, and it's not a 'let's call him Chris.' Because if you say let's call him Chris, you're saying the following: Chris is a fictional person. Kinda like a real person, but not a real person. He kinda lives in a real house. But not in a real house, but in a fictional house. And he lives in a real city, but not r

Why do great inventors, business people, and a ton of smart people have in common? They have many traits, but one specific trait is the ability to crack a problem. When everyone else has given up, these people are able to figure out what no one has done before. How do they do it? This article shows you how to increase your learning speed by using deconstruction. It shows you how to crack puzzles that seemed too difficult by others.' ---------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Where to start your learning journey Part 2: How to find learning patterns when there's no one to help you Part 3: How to stack the layers and accelerate your learning To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/speed-learning/ ---------- How to deconstruct complex topics (and accelerate your learning) What can a single video on YouTube contain? If you were to look at just six minutes of a NASA video, it might put you off ocean currents forever. In exactly six minutes, the contents of the video contain some of the following: ◦ Atmospheric circulation ◦ Wave formation ◦ Thermohaline circulation ◦ Upwelling and nutrient distribution ◦ Dead zones ◦ Sea surface height ◦ Shifting rain patterns ◦ Population density That's only the partial list of what's included in the video, and it hits you with rapid succession If you're confused, you ought to be, because the video is approximately how we approach most topics. A topic, any topic, is incredibly complex. However, the complexity can be quickly deconstructed. That is to say; you can learn a skill or teach someone a skill reasonably rapidly if you're able to break apart the concepts into smaller bits? The question is: where do you begin? What does deconstruction involve? And how do you know you're going about deconstruction the right way? To understand deconstruction we need to look at three elements: – Where to start your journey – How to find patterns when there's no one to help you – How to stack the layers as you go forward So where do we start our journey? Deconstruction always starts with a choice. But what do you choose? Let's find out. Part 1: Where to start your journey of deconstruction A tonne of gold costs about $64.3 million in today's prices. Indians are reputed to own 22,000 tonnes of gold. That's a staggering $1 trillion dollars in gold in a single country. Gold bars and coins are almost alway bought at festivals when buying gold is said to bring luck to the buyers. But the real obsession for gold stems from wedding jewellery. Weddings alone account for 50% of the demand every year. And in South Mumbai, if you wanted to buy gold, you'd head to a particular area called Sonapur. "Sona" is the Hindi word for gold and in Sonapur, you'd see dozens of gold merchant stores crammed back to back in a specific area. Now bear in mind that Mumbai is a big city that spans 603.4 square kilometres. Yet, someone looking for jewellery, and particularly gold jewellery would know exactly where to go. We have no such specifics when we're dealing with a vast and complex topic Should we start with wave formation or thermohaline circulation? Upwelling, dead zones or nutrient distribution? Or should we wander right into sea surface height, instead? It's clear that we need to start somewhere and the best way to get started is to pick subject matter at random. Random? Surely that doesn't seem to be a systematic way to go about deconstruction Let's pick "dead zones" from our list above, shall we? It's a pretty random pick considering how much material the six-minute video covers. However, as we dig into the topic, one thing becomes very clear. It's easier to dig deeper into "dead zones" and see how they occur. In under a minute, this video talks about how we get to mass extinction by focusing on a single topic. Deconstruction becomes clearer when we move into areas we're more familiar with Let's take a sales page or landing page, for instance. A landing page has headlines, subheads, first paragraphs, problems, solutions, objections, uniqueness, bullets—the list goes on and on. To be intimidated by such a vast amount of moderately unfamiliar information is difficult to cope with. So we go into "random mode". We pick something—anything—so that we can get going. Let's ignore the vast majority of the page, and head for the bullets, instead. What do you notice when you look at the bullets below? – How to assemble all the elements a customer needs to see to buy – Why template based construction is key to pain-free landing pages – Why "How to, how, and why" are your best friends in bullet points – How to use sequence graphics to keep your reader on the page – Why Bonuses need graphics for maximum impact – How to write bullets that sell even if you can't write – How to avoid ineffective graphics – How to construct power testimonials even for a new product – Why FAQs are the place for "fussy" objections – Why the target profile is central to growing your tribe paDidn't find a pattern? Well, let's look

The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere This is an elaboration/review of the book by Pico Iyer. How do you slow down? What do you mean by going nowhere? And how can we slow down with our busy business and family life? Sean says, " I still have the same day I used to have before. But somehow it's different. Now, I have more time." ---------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere Part 2: The Charting of StillnessPart 3: The Internet Sabbath To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/losing-momentum/ ---------- 4 am is the most difficult part of my day. And it's not for the reason you might be thinking. It's not difficult because it's so early in the morning. For me it's quite the opposite. For close to 20 years I've been rising at 4, sometimes a bit earlier, without the need of an alarm. The sound and feel of 4 am is embedded in my system and I instinctively know when to wake up. Which is where the problem begins. Within seconds of waking up, I'm completely awake I feel as though my brain is a train leaving the station, and I, as the train driver need to keep up. Five minutes later, I've walked out of the door, across to the office next door and I'm already at work. At this time of the day, and without the need of any coffee or tea, I can start to write a book, work on a presentation or take on the endless flow of e-mail. So how do I slow down? That was the question I asked myself as we slid into our December break. We're all so alert, so full of this persistent need to work, to learn, to keep going at high speed. How do we slow down without losing momentum? And if we were to slow down, where would we get the time to slow down? This last question seems to cut right to the core. That we have no time to do what's most important to us. Which is why I started first listening to, then reading a book I'd bought almost two years ago. Yes, the irony wasn't lost on me. It took two years to get to the book, but as December rolled along I listened to it once, then a second time, before getting a physical copy from the library. The name of the book? The Art of Stillness: Adventures In Going Nowhere. A book by writer, traveller, Pico Iyer. And let me tell you my short journey about going nowhere in a hurry. We'll look at three elements of the book, and it's a very tiny book, spanning just 74 pages. When listening to it on audio, I think I was done with listening to it in a few hours. Even so, less is more. That's the agenda of the book and the lesson I learned. Here are the three things we'll cover: – The Passage To Nowhere – The Charting of Stillness – The Internet Sabbath Part 1: The Passage To Nowhere Sitting still is a way of falling in love with the word and everything around it. That's an interesting thought, isn't it? And within three pages of "The Passage to Nowhere", author Pico Iyer makes you want to slow down, but not just feel like you're getting off the motorway, but instead coming to a complete standstill. A stillness so unusual that if you close your eyes, you can hear the computer gurgle, feel the caress of the breeze, even your heartbeat seems so much louder. Iyer, despite the Indian sounding name, was born in Oxford, England in 1957 By the time he's twenty-nine, he's got an office on the 25th floor in midtown Manhattan; an apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street and a job that most writers only dream about. He covers apartheid in South Africa, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines, the chaos that enveloped India during prime minister Indira Gandhi's assassination. He wrote extensively for Time Magazine and took long vacations in exotic parts of the globe. The very thought of going nowhere was an incredibly alien concept. And yet the constant excitement has a finite boundary If you listen closely enough to life, it speaks to you in a whisper. Pico Iyer found that he couldn't hear that whisper. He was racing about so much that he never had a chance to see where he was going, or truly enjoy what he was doing. He never had a chance to check if he was truly happy. Writers have a funny way of going to their core Some hit the bottle, others write endlessly. Iyer decided to retreat to Kyoto. Now I don't know if you've ever been to Kyoto, but it's one of the most amazing cities in the world. There is a richness in the palaces and temples of Tokyo that's hard to imagine, let alone replicate. Iyer decided to leave behind his dream life and spend a year in a small, single room on the backstreets of Kyoto. He craved a sense of stillness. In the early part of his book he talks about how not so long ago, our greatest luxury was access to information. There was no such thing as too many books because a book was savoured. Information was a slow drug. Today it's the freedom from information that we seek. The chance to be still is what Iyer calls the "ultimate prize". "I'm not a member of any church, and I don't subscribe to any creed; I've never been a member of any medi

Part 2 of how working with a partner can be both an upside as well as a downside. How do you cope? How do you take it to a whole new level, without all the drama that goes with partnerships? Find out how to run a two-engine business instead of depending on flying alone.

How easy is it to work with your spouse or partner? What are the upsides and downsides? These are questions that are asked all the time and there's a good way to know if you're going to work well together. Here's Part 1 of a series of 2 episodes. --------------------- https://www.psychotactics.com/insider-story-psychotactics/

Everyone loves a fabulous year, but the best years for us are those that aren't terribly great. We learn more, and go through a revolution in such "difficult" years. That was 2016 for me. Life took me on diversions I hadn't expected and to me that became the most interesting element of all. Now I look forward to the diversion. Find out how you can be calm even when life takes you off route. And how the off route can be the one thing you look forward to time and time again. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why Goals Are Not Enough (And Why Pacing Matters) Part 2: Time Management vs. Energy Management Part 3: Dealing With Seemingly Closed Doors To read it online: https://www.psychotactics.com/power-diversion/ ----------------------- In February 2016, I took a rather interesting vow. I vowed to stop grumbling. Now let's get one thing straight: we all grumble. Some do more than others, but I'm one of those people who are easily disappointed, and so I'm relatively more prone to grumbling. Why I decided to stop grumbling, I'm not sure, but I know it led me down an interesting path. Instead of spending all my time trying to figure out what was wrong with the situation, it often led me to analyse why I was in that situation in the first place. And that leads me right into what I learned in 2016. I learned why goals are not enough (and why pacing matters). I've always been clued into the fact that time management is not as powerful as energy management. And 2016 was when I had some solid, practical applications for this concept of time vs. energy. I also realised that closed doors open, if you're willing to persist. However, at the top of the list of my learning was "the importance of the diversion". This message resonated stronger within me than anything else. Let's find out how and why the diversion mattered. In July 2016, we decided to go to Goa, India. India, as amazing as it is in terms of beauty, food and culture is not quite a vacation for me. My parents live in Goa, which by itself used to calm and peaceful, but now seems like any other part of India, noisy and chaotic. What makes the visit slightly worse is the location of my parent's house My parents live in a tiny two-bedroom cottage, but it's located at a junction. If you've visited India, you know that horns on vehicles are meant to be used whenever possible. Cars, buses, motorcycles—they all honk while on the move, but almost always honk when at a junction, just to warn others of their approach. You see the problem, don't you? My parents are used to the traffic, as well as the honking, but the sounds of India drive me a little crazy. To make sure we were suitably removed from that chaos, we decided to rent our own cottage This cottage was about 15 kilometres (about 7 miles) from my parent's place and supposedly a lot quieter. You know how you're not supposed to trust things you see on the Internet, right? Well, we didn't. I got a cousin of mine to check out the place and get back to me. "It's by a narrow road," she said, "and not particularly noisy. There's a bit of traffic, but it's not too bad." Going by this assessment, we decided to rent the cottage. When got to Goa and the cottage was amazing It had a superb lounge area, superb art on the wall, decent food nearby, two large bedrooms and was perfect in every way but one: the sound of traffic. Apparently the road was narrow and seemingly devoid of traffic, but it also happened to be the route to an industrial estate. This meant that when traffic rolled, it was the sound of enormous trucks rolling by. Normally this would be enough reason to grumble We'd done all our due diligence and there we were in a situation not a lot better than before. Yet this location proved to the starting point of a completely different type of vacation. Normally on vacations we eat, drink and rest a lot. Instead we ended up at an Ayurvedic centre (quite by chance) and were instructed to stay on a diet, with no alcohol and we could only sleep at night. At night we were often woken up by the barking of stray dogs, so we'd wake up early the next day for the Ayurvedic treatment, yet quite tired. In short, what seemed to be a vacation was not a vacation at all. We got back to Auckland more tired than when we left and could barely function for the first two weeks. Yet, this was my biggest learning: the role of the diversion We weren't supposed to end up in this cottage. We weren't supposed to be at that Ayurveda centre. We were supposed to eat, drink and make merry. Yet it was the most life-changing vacation we've ever had. Both Renuka and I found that the diversion helped us tremendously with our health. Once we were done, my blood pressure which was soaring, was almost back to normal and my cholesterol levels were the best they'd been in past seven years. Our food changed If you look at the photos on Facebook, and I post food photos almost every day, you'll notice a marked difference in the food we ate from July onward

Many of us believe that smartness comes from learning the skills in our own field. And yet, that's only partially true. We can never be as smart as we want to be, if we only have tunnel vision. So how do we move beyond? And how do we find the time to do all of this learning? Amazingly it all comes from limits. Find out more in this episode. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Learning all you can in your own field Part 2: Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertisePart 3: Working with limits ---------------------------- Last month I got an invitation from a group asking me to dinner. The dinner it seems was a group of startups. They wanted to spend the evening with Renuka and I and have a conversation about how to get started and to keep that momentum going. What they wanted most of all was the promise of the "Three Month Vacation." Yes, they were start ups, but what would it take for them to get going and then not spiral out of control. What would it take for them to become successful without being sucked into the mantra of "more, more and even more." The answer to their question was relatively short But as I chugged on my mojito, I got another question that people tend to ask all the time. The question: how do you get really smart? Is there a shortcut? And how do you stay smart? That's what I would like to cover in this piece. In my opinion, there are two ways to get smart—and one tool to make sure you get there efficiently. The three elements we'll cover are: – Learning all you can in your own field – Learning all you can in an area where you have no expertise – Working with limits I wasn't always a copywriter. I didn't always write sales pages or articles. While I was in university, I decided to earn some money by selling my cartoons to newspapers. A newspaper called the "Indian Post" had just started up in Mumbai, and I was encouraged to meet the features editor, Reena Kamath. Reena, or "Chips" as she was called, was this incredibly kind and educated person. I was, in my own head a cartoonist, but not a very confident one. What Chips did was to give me enough confidence to push my art a lot more. She encouraged me to learn how to cartoon even better, so much so that I soon published my work in other magazines and newspapers. By the time I was headed to graduation day, I had two daily comic strips in two big newspapers. All of this confidence didn't mean a thing when I joined an advertising agency "Yes, you're really good at cartoons," said the creative director at the Leo Burnett agency, "but you realise that advertising and cartooning are completely different, right?" Once again I was back in newbie land. I didn't know enough to get going in the world of copywriting. Fortunately for me, I was given the honorary title of junior copywriter, a small stipend and left alone to do pretty much anything I wanted. Which is when I found the agency library If you're in advertising, you'll fondly remember these massively thick books called the "One Show." These doorstepping books contained hundreds of real-world advertising. And so began my education in the world of advertising. Which brings us to the first point in this article: learning all you can in your own field. The very concept of learning everything is, as you know, impossible Yet, what choice do we have? Everything seems to rush along madly and just to keep on top of things is quite a task. But do we have a choice? Back when I was in the Leo Burnett agency, the library was enough to keep me busy for months on end, and today we have more in a folder of our computer than we had back then. Armed with little choice, here's what I do I read as much as I can. I'll plough through as many books as possible. Right now I have eight books sitting on my desk and at least four-five unread on the Kindle. There are months when I'm reduced to reading books at a snail's pace, so I find it smarter to read magazines articles instead. However, my secret weapon is audio. If I'm standing in a queue at the supermarket, I'll be listening to audio. I go for walks every morning and chomp through an hour of audio. Even while I'm making breakfast, I'll be listening to a podcast in one earbud. I'll tell you why. On the road, while walking, it's easier to focus on the podcast. However, when I get home, my wife Renuka will suddenly pop in from the garden and want to give me some news. When I have both earbuds in, it feels a bit like "I'm busy, don't disturb me" and so I have just a single earbud on whenever I want to keep listening, without completely tuning out the world. Does this mean you have to be learning all the time? No, it doesn't. You can listen to music, watch videos that go nowhere or simply bounce back into Facebook. Even so, one of the key elements that make people smart is that they don't believe in inborn smartness. The greatest champions on the planet aren't great because they were born that way. The gold medalists keep pushing themselves long af

Did you know that landing pages fail almost at the headline stage? We're all told to create landing pages. So why do they fail? The answer, it seems, can be found at any international airport. When planes land, they don't land all at once. They land one at a time. Yet on a landing page, we scrunch the issues together. We throw everything at the page. That's a mistake. And this episode tells you why it's a mistake and how to fix it. Click here to read: How To Write A Sales Pagehttps://www.psychotactics.com/writing-sales-pages/

It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We've been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop. How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner? Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Click here to read: Why Persevere Even When Failure is Certain https://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/

Resistance seems like an overbearing force in our lives We want to achieve a lot, but as soon as we get started, resistance kicks in. But did you know there are ways around resistance? Resistance loves a loner. If you're working alone, you're just setting yourself for an encounter with resistance. Resistance loves to play the game of winner. We need to put resistance in second place. Here's how to go about the task of winning the game. Click here to read: How To Beat The Resistance Gamehttps://www.psychotactics.com/resistance-detests-groups/

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? Click here to read: Good to Greathttps://www.psychotactics.com/good-to-great/

Whenever you run into tips on productivity it's always this earth shaking advice You're advised to make these monumental changes to improve your business or life. In reality all you need are tiny little tweaks. Important tweaks, but tiny ones. And some of these tweaks are slightly irreverent. Which is what makes these productivity tips even more interesting. You'll enjoy this episode on productivity—gentle productivity—and here's a tip. You may end up sleeping a lot more as well! Click here to read: How Gentle Productivity Gets Astounding Results https://www.psychotactics.com/gentle-productivity/

If you were to boil down marketing to a single word, it would be "risk". When a client is ready to buy they still hesitate. Even when there's a sense of urgency on their part, they still go through a series of steps before they come to a decision. What are those steps? Why do clients seem to back away at the last minute? Click here to read: How To Overcome The Hesitation Factor https://www.psychotactics.com/elements-of-risk/

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, gets the student to apply the skills. When you're creating info-products, writing books or articles, this is what needs to be kept in mind. Click to read: Why Learning a New Skill is So Difficult https://www.psychotactics.com/why-clients-struggle/

Trying to come up with a suitable name for your book or info-product seems like a nightmare What if you're wrong? What if the name isn't well received? However, there's a way to make your book really stand out. And guess what? It's not the title that matters. It's the sub-title. Find out why we've been tackling things the wrong way and how to get a superb name for your book or information product/course before the day is done. -------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. Part 2: The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out. Part 3: How to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles. -------- My friend, Karen, was about to have her first child. As you'd expect, she was a bit apprehensive but also quite joyful. One of the reasons why she was so excited was the whole process of giving a name to her soon-to-be child. She had half a dozen books on "naming the child". While we were visiting, we had a little conversation about the naming process and she went into a lengthy explanation about how she intended to name the child. Of course, I expected her son to have an interesting name. Several months later when I ran into Karen online, I asked her the name of her son. "Jack", she said. "Jack?" I responded almost incredulously. "You went through all of those books, and all you could find was, Jack?" "Yes," she said. "I was going to find a fancy name when I ran into an article that asked me to go to the doorway and call of the name of the kid 20 times in a day. It seemed easy to shout out "Jack", then something like "Bertrand, so "Jack" it was. And that is how my friend, Karen named her first born. Your "firstborn" might need a slightly different process. Especially if your firstborn is a book – and you are called upon to name the book. This is where we go slightly mad. We're not really sure how to name our products. Which is why this article is all about learning a structural method that will help you name your products. We will look at books or information products that already exist, and see how they have gone about the process. We will also take a look at what we're doing at Psychotactics and how even when we understand the concept, we tend to get it wrong. Well, sometimes you can just get lazy. What are we going to cover? 1 Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product 2 The critical role of the subtitle and what makes it stand out? 3 how to use a title and then add random interesting sub-titles. All of these three steps are part of the journey that we need to take the name our information product. As always we need to start at the top, and that takes us to the first topic. 1) Why your crappy name will bury your book/information product. The list you see below are the successive names given to a single book. The author tried repeatedly to come up with a great name, but these were the names he came up with—despite putting in a great effort. See if you like any of the names. – The Parts Nobody Knows – To Love and Write Well – How Different It Was – With Due Respect – The Eye And the Ear. Have you heard of any of these books? Possibly not, because they never made it to the bookshelf. And the author, a "certain guy" called Ernest Hemingway, died before the book's title was finalised. So what was the name of the book that made it to the shelves? It's called "A Moveable Feast". "A Moveable Feast" caught the attention of the editors and then the readers and became a bestseller (and has stayed high on the 'books to read' list). But it could have easily been dead in the water, with a title like "With Due Respect" or "The Eye and the Ear". As it appears, it's not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. So how do you name your books? The simple answer is to make it curious. And how do you make it curious? You use both the title and the sub-title to dramatic effect, that's how. But let's not start with the title and take on the sub-title instead. In fact, let's take a few good (and bad examples from the Psychotactics stable itself). As it appears, it's not enough to just write a great book—you can kill your book with a lousy name. Title: The Brain Audit Sub-title: Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't) So is the title interesting? Yes, it's interesting at once. We're terribly interested in anything to do with the brain, and so in a sea of books, a name like The Brain Audit stands out immediately. But that's where the sub-title comes in. Would you know if The Brain Audit was a medical text or a book on calisthenics? It would be hard to tell, right? If you look up Amazon.com for books that have the term "Brain" in it, you get a range of books including one called "The Brain That Changes Itself", "Brain Rules", "Brain on Fire" and you can't really tell which one is a business book and which one isn't. And that's where the sub-title comes into play. So yeah, that sub-title worked. Time

How do we get talented? Part 2 of "How To Get Talented" is a bit of a shocker. You realise that talent is only the stuff you can't do. If everyone can do what you can, then it's not really a talent. Ok, so that's the spoiler, but listen or read anyway. ------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Pattern recognition and energy Part 2: How can you achieve a ton of talents Part 3: Is all talent inborn? Read online: https://www.psychotactics.com/three-definitions-talent/ ------------ Definition No.2: Talent is merely high speed pattern recognition. What is 11 x 13? 143. What is 11 x 27? Yes, it's 297. And just for good measure, what's 11 x 45? If you said 495 in a flash, you'd have the right answer. However, the chances are you were slightly flummoxed by the questions You could clearly see that we were dealing with the 11 times table, but it made no sense whatsoever when you had to multiply these random two digit numbers with 11. And yet a 10-year-old could do it quite quickly. I know this to be true because I teach willing 10-year-olds this simple maths trick. Let's start at the top, okay? First, let's look at the numbers. What's 2 + 7? OK, so take that 9 and stick in the centre, of the 2 and 7. What number do you get? Sure it's 2-9-7. Now, what's 11 x 27? It's 2-9-7. Confused? My brain took a little time to work out the system as well So let's take a simpler example where you already know the answer. What's 11 x 12? It's 132, right? So what we did was take the 1 + 2, and we got 3. We stuck that number 3 in between the 1 and the 2. And we got 1-3-2. Okay, so what's 11 x 44? 4 + 4 = 8. So that's 484. What's 11 x 33? 3 + 3 = 6. So it's 363. Once you have the pattern, you can pretty much multiply any two digit number by 11 and get an answer in seconds And what you've done is acquire a talent. An witty-bitty talent, but a talent nonetheless. And the way we've gone about it is to isolate the pattern and then roll it out slowly. At this point, your brain can figure out the pattern no matter what two digit number you multiply with 11. A similar concept applies to just about any skill Take drawing for example. Many, if not most of us, say we draw like a six-year-old. And you know what? You're right. You draw like a six-year-old because you stopped drawing when you were six. You can walk into any school on the planet, and you'll find that kids love drawing. Give them a set of crayons, chalk, even a piece of coal, and they'll be drawing endlessly. But ask them to do maths or grammar, and they look at you like you're a banana. However, that kid gets a packed lunch and is sent off to school. The years whizz by and those kids are 10. Ask them about grammar, or multiplication tables, and they can give you pretty solid answers. But ask them to draw and notice what happens. They draw like six-year-olds. Talent is about pattern recognition Those kids were given patterns that involved algebra and grammar, and so they picked up on those patterns. Music? Arts? Clay modeling? All the stuff they did right at the start? Well, that's for babies, isn't it? And this is how we go about life. We learn or are given patterns, and we dump the others. Or at least put them in cold storage. Some patterns are crucial, so we keep refining them. Take eating with a spoon, for instance. When you were a year old, trying to get a spoon full of mashed potato from the plate to your mouth was a major issue. Given a chance to "do your own thing" the potato mash would be partly on your face, on the ground and the dining room floor would look like a potato war zone. Now you're able to use a fork, knife and conduct a conversation while trying to look up Facebook on your phone—and all at the same time. Somewhere along the way, pattern recognition kicked in. What seems like a mundane task of eating a potato was once horribly complicated. But given enough time and pattern recognition, you're now a pro at potato eating. And that's because all of this pattern recognition is costly in terms of energy Think of it as a mansion with lights. When you're first learning something new, you have to turn on every light in the house. It takes enormous energy just to do the simplest task. Over time the brain figures out the pattern. Instead of every light, it turns on half, then quarter of the lights. Finally, it probably needs almost negligible energy to do a task you're familiar with. Take for example the task of walking. You were utterly hopeless at walking when you first started, right? You don't think much of it now, do this small task for me. Stand up and walk across the room, and say "left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, balance, balance, balance." You'll make it across the room, but your brain is using up so much energy that it instantly rebels. And it does so because it's already worked out the pattern. It needs almost no power to get you to walk across that room. All the skills you struggle with are a matter of pattern recognition and pattern ex

Why do others seem more talented than we are? Is talent innate? Is it just practice? Or is there something else. Incredibly the key to talent is in the way you define talent. Change the definition and you see it in a whole new light. In Part 1 of this episode on talent, you'll see how mere definitions change the way you see the world of talent (and how it can get you talented faster than before). Additional rocket launch audio recordings used in this episode are courtesy of NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/) ----------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Our battle with talented people. Part 2: Is talent a reduction of errors? Part 3: What has "Austin's Butterfly" got to do with talent. ----------------- 7 miles per second That's what it takes for a spacecraft to break out of Earth's orbit. Breaking free of the gravity of Earth and heading into space is called "Escape Velocity" and is easily one of the biggest challenges of space travel. The spacecraft needs an enormous amount of fuel to break free of Earth's gravity. And yet, that very fuel adds to the weight of the rocket. The more fuel you have, the more thrust you achieve, but the fuel also adds to the weight of the rocket. It's almost a maddening Catch 22 situation that scientists have been trying to solve for ages. And it also drives us crazy when we look around us and see people who are clearly more talented than us We had this problem in school. Some kids were brilliant at writing and others that excelled in maths. As we grew up, we noticed people who sang better, danced better, are better artists, speakers, pick up languages faster than we could ever imagine. And then we brush it off We believe we were born with certain skills and it's best to use them to our fullest capacity. The gravity of our situation holds us back. That's not the way scientists look at gravity. For them, gravity is a challenge. Achieving "escape velocity" is simply a matter of breaking through what holds us back. It's always about how to go at 7 miles per second in the most efficient manner possible. What you're about to read is my battle with talent. You may already know of some of my skills. Writing, drawing, teaching, painting, cooking—that's what you might have seen. You may not know that I'm also an excellent babysitter, dance exceedingly well, learn programs at very high speed and know more than six languages. And the reason I'm stating all of this isn't to impress you. In fact, it's the reason why I started studying the science of acquiring talent back around the year 2008. I'd be sitting at the cafe, and someone would come up to me and tell me how I was "talented" at drawing. I'd be on the dance floor, and I'd get a compliment about how well I danced. Compliments are amazing. They were my Jamba Juice. They spurred me on to get a lot better. But they also drove me crazy. It almost seemed like people were suggesting I was born with the skill. And so I started on an uphill climb. To prove that innate talent may not exist. In reality, I don't care whether it exists at all. But it wasn't easy to say it out aloud because the very concept of acquiring talent seems improbable. "Not everyone can be Michael Phelps," they tell me. Not everyone can be Albert Einstein. The funny thing is I love pushback I love it that people kept putting objections in my way because somehow I had to prove beyond any doubt that talent could be acquired. What made the challenge even more interesting was the concept of 10,000 hours. I was determined to prove that you have didn't need anything remotely close to 10,000 hours to acquire a very high level of skill. But you don't have to believe me—well, not right away. All I'm asking you to do is listen to three definitions of talent. And then I'll have made that little dent in your universe. Or at least that's the theory. So let's get down to the nitty-gritty of talent and see why mere definitions can make you see the world the way I see it. It might even make you a better dancer. Are you ready? Let's go, then. Definition No.1: A reduction of errors. No matter where you look, you find people who have talents in one area or another—except one. Not one person has innate talent when it comes to riding a bicycle. Definition No.1: A reduction of errors.When you see parents trying to teach kids to ride, they run wildly behind the kid, shouting out instructions that fall on deaf ears. After all the kid is trying desperately to pedal, steer and not go kaboom into the tree. So no one teaches you to ride a bike, and no one (at least no one I know) was born with the ability to ride a bicycle. Assuming you can ride a bicycle, that leaves us with only one conclusion Bike riding has x. no of errors you can make. Errors that involve steering, pedalling, balancing, etc. And slowly but surely, you started eliminating those errors one by one. The more errors you reduced, the less crashed into trees. Eventually, as you ironed out most of the mistakes, you were able t

Which is the most frustrating part of an article? Yes, it's the First Fifty Words. We get so stuck at the starting point when writing an article, that it's almost impossible to go ahead. But what if there were not just one, but three ways to create drama in your article? That would be cool, wouldn't it? Well, here you go. Not one, but three ways to start your article with drama and get attention. ====== In this episode Sean talks about—Three ways to get your readers attention. Part 1: The power of story Part 2: Disagreement with your premise Part 3: How to create intrigue with lists You can read it online here: 3 Ways To Create Instant Drama In Your Articles ========== In 1974, New York had a problem that didn't seem to go away. No matter where you rode the subway in New York, there was graffiti painted both inside and outside the trains. Young men with their spray cans covered the city's trains with their version of art and soon the subway came to be seen as a symbol of a city on its way to the gutter. The city put up security fences, razor wire and brought in guard dogs They even went through one amazingly misguided strategy to paint all the trains white. Sure enough, The Great White Fleet as they called it, was soon covered with a fresh layer of graffiti. The city couldn't seem to think of any way to solve the graffiti problem. Then along came David Gunn In 1984, Gunn was appointed as the president of the New York City (NYC) Transit Authority. Gunn had a track record of cleaning up subways in Boston and Philadelphia. Even so, the city of New York had been battling the graffiti problem for over a decade. What radical idea could Gunn implement that would turn back the clock to better times? As it turned out Gunn's solution centered around a single idea The moment a train was bombed with graffiti, it was to be pulled over and painted. If a train car was being repaired, they'd ensure the car remained graffiti-free. If they found graffiti on a train overnight, the NYC Transit Authority would sweep in and repaint the train. Even during rush hour if they found a train had been "bombed", they would pull it back to the yard and clean it up, so that the graffiti was nowhere to be seen. On May 12, 1989, the city declared victory over the city's graffiti artists. Notice what just happened? You started reading this article to find out how to write the First Fifty Words. But before you knew it, you were transported back to New York, the subway and the graffiti dilemma. And the reason why you got to this point is because of the drama created by the First Fifty Words. When your article, presentation or webinar has a powerful opening, the client gets pulled along happily. And yet, it's not always easy to know how to go about creating those First Fifty Words. So today, let's take a look at three ways to create the drama. Method 1: The power of story Method 2: Disagreement with your premise Method 3: Lists Method 1: The Power of the Story In the 1980's a persistent drought swept through the African Savannah. Watering holes dried up, food was scarcer than ever. Yet, one animal, the kudu, wasn't affected as much. This is because the kudu can continue to get its nutrition from the hardy Acacia tree. Most other animals don't tangle with the Acacia's thorns, but the kudu navigates its way between the thorns to get at the juicy leaves. But suddenly dozens of kudu started dropping dead. When the kudu were examined, there seemed to be no reason for the deaths. They looked perfectly healthy and didn't appear to be suffering from any malnutrition. However, the number of deaths soon soared into the hundreds, then into the thousands. Now we may believe that Africa is one vast open area, but in reality a lot of wildlife lives in vast ranches While it was devastating for the ranchers to see the kudu fall to the ground in heaps, they were also puzzled by the inconsistency of the deaths. On one ranch the kudu continued to thrive. On other ranches, their numbers decreased precipitously. There seemed to be no answer to the question, until they considered the number of kudu on the ranches. On some ranches there were a lot of kudu On others there were a lot less. As the drought raged on, the kudu had no other vegetation but Acacia leaves. Once the tree lost all its leaves, it would no longer be able to harness sunlight. In effect, the Acacia trees would die. In an act of self-preservation, the tree started producing more tannin. Not just more tannin, but lethal amounts of it. Biologist and African herbivore expert, Professor Woutor Van Hoven examined the rumen of the kudu and found the digestive system to be in complete shutdown. Now tannin is a compound can only come from a natural source. It wasn't hard to point fingers at the Acacia tree. On the ranches with dense kudu populations the Acacia tree was producing 400% more tannin The tannin was getting inside the digestive system and killing the kudu. In effect, the Acacia trees were culling

What links thousand year old organisations with a bike company like Harley Davidson? What do football teams have in connection with businesses owners that can take time off? It's all here in these free set of goodies (yes, 36 audio files) and a PDF. You'll love how you can implement much of this information right away. Learn Why Marketing 'Doesn't' Work. And Why You Need Structure In Your Business! http://www.psychotactics.com/bam ========================= You will learn in The Brain Alchemy MasterClass: 1) The Spider's Secret: How to get customers to call you instead of you chasing them. 2) The Three Prong System: This tool will change the way you look at your business forever. Ignore at your risk. 3) How to create a huge demand for your product or service: This secret is over 10,000 years old and works every single time. And most businesses don't use it. >>Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. >>Here is the link to get: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass Free (Yes, all 36 audio files and the PDF) ========================= The difference between you struggling in your business and zooming ahead is understanding the structure of business Working hard is great, but it's not the solution to your problems. No matter what business you're in — a structured marketing system is the best way to exponentially increase your sales. The Brain Alchemy is about tactics and strategy that will form the very core of your business, no matter whether you're just starting up, or have been in business 'forever.' There are over 253 testimonials for The Brain Alchemy MasterClass When I heard the Brain Alchemy MasterClass my immediate reaction was, "Damn, I spent so much on going to business school and they never taught us any of these." I had a big paradigm shift in the way I was thinking about business and marketing. I also understood that no matter how much I think I might be communicating clearly, the receiver might not be listening right – this revelation came about listening to participants speak. And it is true the other way round also. Biggest learning was the power of giving. This really stuck with me – and also to give in the right possible packaging. -If you did implement something, what did you implement? I have been letting the material sink in and I plan to implement few of it. I will keep you posted about it. I would definitely recommend this course, because Sean is an amazing teacher. He breaks down complex subjects into simple manageable bites and makes sure that we are able to consume the information. The course is pure gold ! I would like to add that – I am a big fan of Sean and Renuka – mostly because it showed me that the size of the team doesn't matter as much as how much power they pack. Thank you for giving The Brain Alchemy away, Sean. Regards, Shirisha Here is the link to get: The Brain Alchemy MasterClass Free (Yes, all 36 audio files and the pdf) http://www.psychotactics.com/bam

Envy isn't something we talk about, or even admit to openly. And yet it's the one thing that all of us feel. We feel that others are going places and doing more than us. We even feel we need their spot and somehow that spot belongs to us. So how do we overcome this intense envy before it kills us? Find out how even the superstars of the world have to deal with envy. Yes, even people who seemingly have unimaginable wealth and success. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad? Part 2: How do You Cope With Envy? Part 3: How To Stay Motivated—And Happy. Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. =============== No one I know is free of envy We all, at some level, are envious of others and even more so in our field of endeavour. If you were to look at my inbox every morning, you'll notice about 60-70 e-mails. Then as the day progresses, another 60-70 will stream in. And yet not one of the e-mails is from some one in the same profession as mine. As you probably know, I'm in the marketing profession If you want to put a weird tag on me, you could call me an internet marketer. So why don't I have any marketing-based e-mails in my inbox? It's not like I don't want to learn about marketing. It's not that I don't want to read what others in my field are up to. Instead it's a lot simpler. The e-mails depress me, sometimes. And I'm using the word, depression, but hey, I'm never depressed. I'm grumbly, upset, maybe even a bit paranoid, but not depressed. However, I do feel this wave of frustration that takes my day down a few notches. I don't feel happy and light hearted. And I figured it wasn't depression after all. It was envy. This is my story about how I deal with envy And I kinda know it's your story too. I think very few of us are free of this problem of envy. We look around us and we see people doing things that we aren't doing. We see them earning a lot more, and seemingly with a lot less effort. And then there are those like me, who come along and talk about taking three months off. And I know that there are others who are working their tails off and there's this joker who's talking about the luxury of not just a vacation—but three whole months in a year. How is it that we can have endless bounty and still feel envy? And how do we deal with such a situation? Part 1: Is Envy Good or Bad? On the chilly night of December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman approached John Lennon outside the Dakota Apartments in New York. Chapman opened fire at Lennon with a .38 calibre pistol. He fired five shots in quick succession. The first shot missed Lennon, passing over Lennon's head and hitting a window of the Dakota building. Two of the next bullets struck Lennon in the left side of his back, and the other two penetrated his left shoulder. By 11 pm that night, John Lennon was dead. But what was going through Paul McCartney's mind as he heard the news? These are Paul's exact words related to Esquire magazine 35 years later. "When John got shot, aside from the pure horror, the lingering thing was, 'Well, now John's a martyr. A JFK'. I started to get frustrated because people started to say, "Well, he was the Beatles". And me, George and Ringo would go, 'Er, hand on. It's only a year ago we were all equal-ish. Paul McCartney, now Sir Paul McCartney was horrified. And envious. Back in the 1500s, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, was going through the same pangs of envy Michelangelo was no ordinary man, no ordinary painter. He was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime. This is the artist who created the statue of David, the Pietà, the Last Judgement, the statue of Moses and no less than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his lifetime he was often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). And yet he was openly envious of another older contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad? In the August 2015 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Smith, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky gives us an insight into envy. Smith who began studying envy in the nineteen-eighties, writes that the feeling typically arises from a combination of two factors. The first is relevance: an envied advantage must be meaningful to us personally. A ballerina's beautiful dance is unlikely to cause envy in a lawyer, unless she once had professional dancing aspirations of her own. The second is similarity: an envied person must be comparable to us. Even though we're both writers, I'm unlikely to envy Ernest Hemingway. Aristotle, in describing envy, quotes the saying "potter against potter." When we admire someone, we do so from a distance. When we envy someone, we picture ourselves in their place. So is this factor of envy normal? And is it any good or bad? The closer we get to someone's capability, the less we seem to admire them. Instead, what might po

How do you write intensely curious headlines—even if a deadline is looming. When writing headlines, you often get stuck. Can grammar come to the rescue when under pressure? Find out how grammar class helps you write outstanding headlines in a jiffy. --------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What has grammar got to do with writing headlines. Part 2: Why you need to break up your headline writing process Part 3: What's the one thing you can implement today in your headlines You can read this online here: https://www.psychotactics.com/headlines-three-ways/ --------- Every year, 20 billion bottles of wine are produced. And 80% of those bottles are closed with a single substance. A substance called cork. The cork, as you'd suspect, comes from bark of the cork tree The bark has to be harvested, and then you get the cork for those 16 billion bottles. But there's no hurrying the process of cork production. A tree must be at least 25 years old before the bark can be harvested. After that, it can be stripped of its bark every nine years. Even so, the first stripping is totally unsuitable for wine and used only for industrial purposes. The second stripping still lacks the quality needed. It may take well over 40 years before the cork is considered good enough to put into a wine bottle. As you can see, a cork tree can't be rushed. Good headlines too need a little time. But in today's world, we need headlines for our newsletters, podcast titles, webinars, and workshops. But is it really possible to turn out a great headline almost immediately? Or do we have to wait? What we'll cover in this article is the concept of headlines in a hurry. We'll learn three ways to write great headlines and to write them under pressure. But we'll have fun, and instead of just learning three ways, we'll go back to grammar class. Method 1: Headlines with AND Method 2: Headlines with EVEN Method 3: Headlines with WITHOUT Method 1: Headlines With AND Remember Windows 3.1? I sure do. I was a cartoonist still living in Mumbai, India at the time. And that's when I got my first computer. It was a 386 and top of the line with programs such as Corel Draw and Photoshop. Right before I got the computer I would go through the tedious task of drawing a cartoon, photocopying it several times and then colouring each version. Clients wanted to see the same cartoon rendered in different colours and I'd spend trips back and forth to the photocopy shop. Let's say I got to know the photocopy guy quite well. But it also wasted a lot of my day Then along came Windows 3.1 and I was able to scan and then colour my cartoons in under half an hour. From paper to the computer was my big leap forward when it came to cartoons. And yet several years later when I moved over from cartoons to copywriting, I struggled a lot with writing headlines. Every time I sat down to write headlines, I'd get the blue screen of death in my brain. Until the day I figured out the incredible power of AND in moving a headline forward. AND? When writing a headline, all you have to do is add the conjunction AND and your headline seems to dart forward. Let's take a few examples, shall we? How to raise your freelance rates How to raise your freelance rates (and get a greater number of clients) How to create magic with your brand stories How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish How to keep fit over age 55 How to keep fit over age 55 (and still eat everything you want) What did we notice with those AND headlines? The first was the sheer simplicity of the headline. We start the headline as if it's going to be a really short one. e.g. How to raise your freelance rates. Then as an afterthought, we add the AND. What this tends to do is give your headline more oomph. The first part of the headline, without the AND is good enough, yet the second part allows the headline to move your client forward. Which is why the AND headline has a far greater curiosity factor than the headline without the conjunction. When writing AND headlines I use the parenthesis or the em dash The em dash is the long dash, used when you seem to be breaking a thought mid-flow. It seems like you've already finished with the thought. For example: How to create magic with your brand stories. Then suddenly the em dash shows up out of nowhere talking about "new readers". It's brought in a new thought—a much richer thought. Now your headline reads as: How to create magic with your brand stories—and engage new readers every time you publish. But you don't always have to use the em dash You can just use the parenthesis instead. The parenthesis does something similar to the em dash. It creates a continuation of the thought, and the client feels a greater tug towards the AND type of headline. Visually too, the headline is more arresting. When you look at the headlines side by side, or even in your inbox, the second headline seems to say a lot more. But because there's the em dash or

Imagine a client walked through the door and you could give them the power of X-ray vision. Would that client come back for more superpowers? Of course she would. So how do you create superpowers that attract clients? What three elements need to be in place for the superpower to work? Find out in this the third part of this series on "how to stand out even when the competition is outstanding".

AirBNB was struggling? Was it just start up problems or was it something else? Find out how AirBNB, Zappos and other now-famous brands had to dig, or even stumble upon the biggest problem before they got their business off the ground. And yes, what you've got to do to find the biggest problem as well. It may seem like we know the biggest problem we're solving for our clients, but we're very far from the reality. Find out why this is the case and how to rectify the problem right away.

If there's little or no competition, it's easy to be top dog. But what if there's oodles of competition? And what if the competition isn't just average, but utterly outstanding? What do you do to stand out in such a situation? Can you even make a mark? The answer is quite surprising

Most of us know of the concept of the "guardian angel" They come into our lives and they take care of us. The "kicking angel" is quite different. The angel shows up just to push us over the edge and then he/she disappears from our lives. In this episode Sean talks about How do we know when we're being kicked? And what "kicks" do we pay attention to and what do we do. Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer #112: How Kicking Angels Help To Jumpstart Your Business =========== You've heard of a guardian angel, haven't you? But what on earth is a kicking angel? Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. It's an angel that does the job of giving you a swiftie on your rear. We got our first swiftie in the year 2002 We'd just set up Psychotactics. And we were looking to sell our products on the Internet. Um, did I say products? I meant 'product.' But as most of us do, we were waffling. We'd been busy tweaking our website. We had been searching for a merchant provider for a month or two. We'd been thinking of setting up a sales page for about three months. We'd been yiddling and yodelling, and doing diddly-squat. Then along came the 'kicking angel.' This kicking angel happened to be an Internet Marketer. He was kinda impressed with our first product, and promised to help us market it to his list. "But here's what you have to do first," he said. "I'll give you a week to set up everything. You'll need to get a merchant account. And write your sales page. And set up an affiliate account. And we'll start marketing your product in September. And your product will go to my list that's well over 25,000 prospects." You know what we did next, don't you? Yup, in one week we did everything we'd been waffling about for well over a month. And then we went back to the Internet Marketer. And here's what he said: "I'm a little busy doing promotions in September. How about October instead?" October turned to November. November turned to December. Santa came and Santa went. Our Internet Marketer was always too busy; too pre-occupied; too whatever. We felt betrayed, and angry… And what we didn't realise, was that this Internet Marketer wasn't a guardian angel at all. He was a kicking angel. He'd got us moving. And as summer (yes, we have summer in December) rolled around, we started selling our product. It was a measly 20-page booklet, but hey we were selling… And doing a jig around the room every time yet another product sold. Amazingly, our kicking angel never came back. Ever. And that's when it dawned on us A kicking angel isn't supposed to come back. That's what they're there for. To give you a kick. They kicked us into starting workshops . They kicked us into writing/creating a series of products. They even came along, and cajoled us into starting the Protege Program–a biggie for us at the time. There's one who's been kicking into starting up the Brain Audit Trainer program. And here's the irony of it all… Kicking angels are classic ditchers. They promise to help us promote. They promise to buy into the product. They promise to join a workshop. They swear to be there to sign on the dotted line. But they never ever show up again. But in our desire to please these angels, we created products And services. And courses. And workshops. And our business grew. It took us a while to realise the role of the kicking angel That they weren't our friendly neighbourhood volunteer. Not one of them even turned out to be a strategic alliance or customer. Their only job was to get us off our butts. So we could create stuff. And jig. Jig a lot. The kicking angel is not a guardian angel by a long shot. Their only job is to land that swiftie. And the funny thing is that they'll keep at it, till you listen. If your bum is sore from getting all those swifties, it's probably time. Time to listen to that kicking angel. Are you listening? Next Step: Three Disaster Stories (And How We Recovered and Soldiered On) http://www.psychotactics.com/three-disaster-stories/

The moment we sit down to write an article, we need to do a fair amount of research. Case studies, stories, they're all needed to create a solid article. Yet that very research causes us to spend so much time on our article, that we're exhausted. Is there a way to research without getting tired? In part two we explore the techniques I use to write extremely detailed articles. Let's find out how to go about a strategy that works every single time. -------------- Stage 3: Never research when writing the article If you were to put all the energy drainers together and pick one of them, the biggest of them all would be research. You need research to prove your point, or to get examples, or even just to get the First Fifty Words going, in your article. The only time you should not be doing that research is right at the point you're writing the article. I have to admit, I'll still occasionally do some research when I'm writing the article I want to make a great start to the article, so I'll go looking for a story. And the moment I do, I'm off into the big black hole called the Internet. What's worse is that many hours later, I may not find the facts or story I need. And the article is still left undone. Which is why Evernote was invented? Now I've covered the concept of Evernote (or if you like, OneNote) before. And the idea is pretty simple. We all collect information, but can't find the information at the exact time we need it. Well, that's what Evernote is stunningly good at doing. No matter if you're online or offline, Evernote can comb through all the information you've saved. It can even read your handwriting if you take a picture. And so, you don't have to go hunting at the last minute. I was a cartoonist and cartoonists used to keep reference books Photography was too expensive a hobby when I was growing up, and so all our reference books were based on cuttings. Newspaper cuttings, magazine cuttings, etc. And when I started in the world of copywriting, again, all those case studies were stored in those Windows folders. But it was a pain to find anything in a matter of seconds. But as you probably know from past articles or podcasts, I store everything in Evernote. And I started storing hundreds of stories and data that I'd possibly need for future articles. I don't even know what the notes are going to be useful for in the future I have information about fungus, elephants, Air BNB, The Invention of the Mouse, the Lemon Index—and hundreds of pieces of information that can be easily found in the future. As I write this piece, I am going to need some of that Air BNB information. I'm also going to need some Zappos information. And it's all there, already in place. I'm not going to need to go online and waste time. In fact, since I was going to write that article sometime this week, I've already reviewed the material and marked out what's important. See how much energy is being saved? Most writers spend enormous time in research. The way I go about it is to clip stuff the way I did when I was a cartoonist or copywriter. I clip in advance, store it in Evernote. Then when I need it, it's already curated, underlined if needed and ready to use. Even so, there are times when I need information and can't find it In such a scenario, I tend to use my own case study. Let's say I wanted to write an article about "how to find the right problem" (which is what the Air BNB story is about). And I can't find a story online, or I'm just not prepared. In such a situation, I pop over to 5000bc or on Facebook and ask others for their stories. Often the stories will come thick and fast, but more importantly, their story will lead you to remember a story of your own. When you're stuck, use a case study from your own business or life You already know all the facts; you have the details. And a case study brings your business to life. If your case study is about success, clients love that story. If it's about failure, they realise that you too are human. In fact, I will use a lot of stories from Psychotactics for that very reason. Instead of this random business sitting somewhere in cyberspace, Psychotactics becomes human. A good strategy would be to have a mix of both No one is saying you shouldn't do your research. Nothing is quite as interesting as finding out how Barry Manilow's drummer played a role in one of the hottest Internet companies today. It's a super thrill to find out how the NY trains got rid of their graffiti. And a case study of how a company increased its sales by 33% or lost 47.5% of its clients is always going to be interesting. But then, so are case studies and stories from your life. So mix them up and your articles become far more engaging. Yet this article is all about energy Any research will suck up all the energy you have, so save the information in advance. Even if you've tried to use Evernote before and failed, give it another few tries. Listen to the podcast on Evernote and you'll see why so many people

The biggest problem with article writing is the exhaustion factor It's write, delete, write, delete and the endless cycle goes on. So how do you go about article writing? Can you really write articles and not get exhausted? In this series you get to see how I went from getting really frustrated, to writing 800 word articles and then 4000 word articles. What's the secret to such an enormous output? And how do you do it without getting exhausted? ------------- In this episode Sean talks about Topic 1: Spacing out your article Topic 2: Is the timer an energy saver when writing articles? Topic 3: Why you should never research when writing the article Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. ------------- When I was growing up in Mumbai, India, I thought pizza was sweet. No one I knew had ever eaten a pizza and all the references to pizza were from Archie Comics. Archie—and especially Jughead—always seemed to be eating a pizza. And for some reason, I associated pizza as a sort of candy, or sweet dish. Imagine my surprise when I ate pizza for the first time in my twenties. I sense a similar sense of surprise when I talk about how I write an article. Every time I talk about article writing, clients are usually taken aback. It's almost as though they're experiencing a disconnect between what they perceived to be true, and the reality. You may or may not know that I turn out about 3000-4000 words of fresh content every week. I do all this writing in between cooking and painting and everything else. So how do I write an article? Is it really a writing gene? Well, it can't be a gene because I struggled like everyone else. I'd take two working days to write an article, back in 2000. Today I can complete an 800-word article in about 45 minutes. So what's changed? Strangely it's got not a lot to do with article writing itself, and a lot to with how I manage my energy. So what are we going to cover? Topic 1: Putting space between activities Topic 2: Using a timer Topic 3: Never research when writing the article Stage 1: Spacing out your article Here's how I cook a meal. I get fresh vegetables and ingredients from Huckleberry—the organic grocery store up the road.Then I do nothing. Later that day, I'll assemble the ingredients and then do a second bout of nothingness. Finally, when I'm ready to cook, several hours may have gone by. But cooking is quick, painless and the dish is incredibly tasty. What you're reading about seems to be my method of cooking, but it's not. It's my method of conserving energy. To me, energy is what allows me to write so much. And the best way to expend energy is to do everything all together. The rookie writer will sit down, try to dream up the idea for the article, then try to write and get frustrated on a consistent basis. Instead, what you should do, is do as little as possible. So here's how I go about my writing I'll write down a topic, or if I'm, um, prolific, several topics. Then, before the idea slips away, I'll write down three sub-topics. And in this article, the topic was about "How I Write" and the sub-topics were about: – Putting space between activities – Using a timer – Never research when writing the article Once that's done I let my brain take a well-deserved rest It may seem like it's important to keep the momentum going, but the best thing you can do when writing, is not to write anything at all. If you feel obliged to do so, maybe you can take those three topics and outline them. An outline will have a lot more detail because it's the structure of the article and shows the flow. My outlines usually cover these main points. – What are we talking about? – Why is it so very important? – Other questions such as when/where etc? – Examples – Objections – Mistakes, if any – Summary – Close A week usually starts off with me writing one or many topics and sub-topics Then once I've let a day or two go by, I'll write the outline. Another 24 hours will slide before I start to expand the outline. This part takes the most amount of time. If I write an 800-word article, it may take me about 45 minutes (it used to take me two days to do this part when I first started writing articles). And if I take on a 3000-word article it might take about 3-4 hours. But here's the thing: I don't sit down to write everything all at once. And you shouldn't either. You should break up your writing into bits. There's a very good reason for all this breaking up It's called energy. Every step takes energy. When I'm cooking, (and believe me I love cooking), just getting the ingredients is a minor mission. Then the cutting, chopping—again, stuff I've come to love over the years—it's all takes time. And anything that takes time also drains energy. But the moment I split up the activity and come back later, it seems like someone else has done the prep work. And all that's left is to finish it off. Energy needs to be your biggest focus Time is what we focus on a lot, but hey, you hav

Having a vision is hard enough, but where most plans go off track is we scramble after every possible target. To keep our focus we have to have a hatchet person. But what is the role of the hatchet person? In Part 2 of this episode, we take a deeper look at focus. ------ Part 3: The Hatchet Person (And Why It Helps Focus) When you're making a leap into the unknown, fear is the biggest factor. Fear of making enough. Fear of justifying the decision you've just made. Fear of not knowing enough—of wanting to learn more. It makes you eager to press every "buy now" button online, just so that fear can go away. But fear is only one part of the leap. The other is focus. And focus to me, is less about persistence and more about "getting rid of the distractions" Which takes me to my first mentor Dough Hitchcock—also my first hatchet person I didn't know much about marketing, and at the time, Jay Abraham was easily one of the most well-respected marketers on the planet. There were other marketers, no doubt, but Jay seemed to be more eager to teach; to give. Among those hundreds of books I borrowed from the library, there was one by Jay Abraham. That led to me getting on his list, and buying a book—a big, thick, blue book—that cost $300. We knew so little that the first thirty pages of that book took us months to implement. But now we were well and truly on Jay Abraham's list. I wanted everything he put out, so imagine the day I got this long sales letter (and yes, sales letters came in the mail back in 2003). He was having a seminar and to get a seat I needed to pay $5000 I should have been horrified. I lived in New Zealand. I was paying off this huge mortgage. $5000 in US dollars was approximately $11,000 NZ dollars back then. Plus there would be airfares, accommodation, transport and food costs involved. Yet I was happy to go and I excitedly told Doug Hitchcock about it. You know what happened next, right? Doug brought down his hatchet. He forbade me (as kindly as he could) from embarking on such a silly adventure. "What are you going to learn that's worth $10k-15k?" he said. In effect he wasn't stopping me from learning or buying into products, but he was certainly helping me focus. And being a hatchet person is not just restricted to money—which is the biggest struggle at the start—but also to other aspects. Most entrepreneurs tend to be restless They want to do it all. And I wanted to learn everything, do everything and promise everything. And that's where my wife, Renuka, took over where Doug left off. To this day, I'm the one who conjures up dozens of possible products, workshops etc. and she gently cancels it off the list. t doesn't mean we don't push ourselves. We take the weekends off, take our breaks and our vacations, but when we're at work we still put in a decently long day. I am so happy for those who say they spend just 15 minutes in the office, but I know that to create great work you have to labour over it and make it better all the time. And yet, this restless nature you need to have a hatchet person. Someone in your networking group could help Maybe a friend who you could meet. It could be a coach, but it doesn't need to be a coach. In 5000bc itself we have a taking action forum and people post their three goals (yes, only three) and they work through it bit by bit. You'll find that if you ask for help, you'll get it, but expecting to figure out everything yourself is the hardest task of all. Your hatchet person has to have a single role To get you to cut the stuff that you don't need, so you can focus on what you have to do. And trying to find a mentor like Doug, is a laudable task, but it's often not necessary. Clients often mention that it would be wonderful to have a "Renuka" around, but when they say that, they're missing the point. The point is that you live in a world where you may not have Doug or Renuka And that you still have to make the leap and keep the forward movement. You can't hope and wish. You have to find someone who's good at getting you to stick to the three things you need to do. Once you get that momentum, you can add more, as long as you're only ever working on three things at any given time. And should we forget, it's the job of that hatchet person to bring us back on track. Focus is about elimination—that's it. Most people are too scared to make the leap and rightly so I was afraid to go through putting El Capitan—the new operating software—on my computer. And guess what? There was this nervous wait and then it turned out to be almost fine. One of my programs wouldn't work but it could be easily replaced. And that's what you're going to find as well. Despite this leap into the crazy world of entrepreneurship, you'll find that some "programs" may not work. But you'll manage and then start to prosper. Most of all, you'll never want to go back to a job ever again. However, let's see what we've learned because these three points are important. Summary: 1) The leap into the unk

The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap. ----------------------------- Today I sat down to install one of my most-used programs: Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use Dragon a lot in the membership site, on our courses and also for e-mail. So when I got a notification that a newer version of Dragon was available, I paid my $99, downloaded the software and started to install it. Except it wouldn't install The software informed me I needed to upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan —which is the Mac's current operating system. And therein lay the problem. All my computers were humming nicely on Yosemite, and there seemed no need to rock the boat and install a new operating system. At least if I were having some trouble with the existing system, it would be worth the trouble, but I was doing just fine. Then along came this new version of Dragon and it was forcing me to do something that involved a whole lot of risk. When you're in a job, it's like living in Yosemite land It's not the best thing ever and you know there's a world of entrepreneurship you'd rather explore. But it's safe in Yosemite-land so why make the leap into the unknown? And how do you know things will work out anyway? You don't. That's the whole point of being an entrepreneur. You have no clue if or when things will work out. The only thing you know for sure is that change is happening. That the Dragon wants to be let loose in your world and you're holding back. I understand there's a huge difference between taking a leap from a job into the world of business. I know that the fear is a lot greater when you have a family, a mortgage, and bills to pay. Yet, there comes a time when your hand seems to be forced. You can stay where you are, or you can take the leap. In this series we deal with three recurring questions 1) Managing the fear 2) Keeping the vision strong 3) Focus—And why you need a hatchet person Part 1: Managing the Fear I hated my job as a web designer. I'd just immigrated to Auckland, New Zealand in Feb 2000 and my priority was to find a job. Compared with India, where I came from, Auckland was terribly expensive. And anyway, I couldn't see myself starting up in business right away. To my utter amazement, I found a job that was going to pay me $50,000 a year to build websites. By the second day, I was ready to quit. My wife, Renuka, wasn't so sure To get a job that was reasonably well-paying was not an easy task. At the time she was still in India, and she asked me to hang on until she showed up in the following month and got a job of her own. "Then you can quit your job if you like, " she told me. However, things don't exactly pan out the way we imagine When Renuka got to New Zealand, she found it hard to find a job that fit her position. For the next few month, she bounced between temporary jobs and at least at the time, my job was the one that paid the bills—and the mortgage. Barely three months after we entered the country, we bought ourselves a house and had a mortgage of $200k. The week after we bought the house, I was made redundant. The fat, it seems, was in the proverbial fire. What I experienced was a no-choice situation It wasn't entirely no-choice. I could have clambered back into the job market and got myself another job. After all, I was pretty good at Photoshop, illustration and had a decent track record in copywriting. Instead, I decided to say goodbye to the workplace once and for all. Put yourself in my shoes for a second: new country, we had no family in New Zealand, Renuka had only temporary jobs (that she hated just as much). Plus there was that small matter of a $200,000 mortgage. A no-choice situation doesn't give you time to be fearful All of the fear comes from waiting. While you're waiting to quit your job, a thousand thoughts go through your head. You wonder if you're making the right decision. You worry about your future and the future of your family. And you look for a bit of a safety net online. This morning as I wrestled with the Yosemite vs. El Capitan operating system, I went through a similar tug of war. I looked for a safety net as I have for the past year or so. I read through the reviews. And there were over 5000 reviews, some new some old. Some saying the upgrade was a breeze, others claiming it was an absolute nightmare. All of this build up fear and frustration. You're put in a position where you don't really know what to do or whom to trust. And yet the outcom

So Kathy Sierra and her husband have a bestseller on their hands but we've only seen two of the ideas being explained. What is the third, if slightly confusing idea? Here's Part 2.

When Kathy Sierra sat down to write her book on JAVA, it wasn't supposed to be a bestseller. They had incredible odds with over 16,000 other books on JAVA already on Amazon. And yet they cut through the noise? How did they do it? They didn't pull the stunt that most Internet marketers do. Instead they focused on how people read and why they get to the finish line. The more the readers got to the end of the book, the more popular the book became in programming circles. ==================== To find out about their open secret, let's take a trip into Kathy Sierra land. Part 1: Dependence on memory Part 2: Not Identifying Confusion Part 3: The Perfect Life ==================== It was the around the year 2000 Technology companies that just months prior were considered extremely, reported huge losses and folded. These losses created a economic cascade which came to be known as the dotcom crash. Stuck in the middle of this seemingly thermonuclear disaster were thousands of programmers. One of them was a woman called Kathy Sierra. If you've ever dipped your toes into the programming language, JAVA, you're likely to have heard of Kathy Sierra Her book series "Headfirst Java" has sold well over a million copies. If you look back at the past ten years or more, there's Sierra's book—one of the longest running bestsellers of the decade. Yet, Sierra isn't like one of those in-your-face Internet marketers. Her blog is untended. She jumped off social media back in 2007 and only reluctantly got back online in 2013. She speaks at conferences, but it's a rare treat. But back to Sierra's disaster story According to Sierra, back in the late nineties and in the year 2000, anyone landing a job in a dotcom company could get stock options. And then along came the implosion of the dotcoms, and her shares were worth nothing. And this is what Sierra says: "Anyway, I needed a job. I am probably as old as most of your parents. If you are trying to get a job as a programmer when you are competing against people who are half your age — and granted, I was not the most awesome programmer. I was very decent. And we needed regular income. I said we because, my husband, also a programmer, also the same age, same problem. And we had two kids and a dog." In short, Kathy Sierra was seemingly at a dead end when she wrote her first book, "Headfirst Java". Yet, Sierra believes in the concept of consumption. Consumption is when you create a product or service that's so easy to understand and use, that progress is inevitable. Instead of floundering and flipping back to Page 3 or 6 or having to refer back, the reader is able to move forward confidently. Today we're going to dig deep into that concept of consumption from a Sierra-point-of-view If you've followed Psychotactics, you'll probably be more than aware that consumption has been a driving force of our business since 2006, possibly even earlier. However, I really like Kathy's work. I really like her passion. I even like the name "a brain-friendly guide"—that's the title on all her books. And though I won't ever bother with Java, there are three concepts of Sierra's consumption model I'd like to share with you. Ready? Well, here goes: Why do people/readers get stuck? Factor 1: Dependence on memory Factor 2: Not Identifying Confusion Factor 3: The Perfect Life. Let's get cracking with the first element: dependence on memory. Factor 1: Dependence on Memory In a BBC documentary, Michel Thomas, master language teacher, looks around a classroom filled with desks. The sunlight is streaming through the windows, but Thomas' face is slightly grim, as if he's reaching for a painful memory. "This reminds me of my own classrooms", he says. "As a child, as a youngster in high school. And it was (education) always under stress. One had to associate learning with work, with concentration, with paying attention, with homework. Work, it's all work. But learning shouldn't be work. It should be excitement. It should be pleasure. And one should experience a constant sense of progression with learning. That is learning to me. A teacher is someone who will facilitate and show how to learn." Thomas' classroom looks very different from the traditional classroom The desks are gone. The students help cart in their own furniture, mostly sofas. Plants show up, so does a carpet and the scene resembles a cozy version of your living room than a classroom. Yet what Michel Thomas says at the start of every learning session is far more important This is what he says: I'm going to set up a very important rule, a very important ground rule, and that rule is for you never to worry about remembering. Never to worry about remembering anything and therefore not to try. Never "try to remember anything from one moment to the next. This is a method with the responsibility for your remembering and for learning is in the teaching. So if at any point there's something you don't remember, this is not your problem. It will be up to me to know w

Writing a sales page can be a real drag You start, stop, start and stop. But is it possible that you're writing a sales page in an inefficient way? What if you started writing the landing page from the bottom up? What if that bottom up method got you to create a quicker and far superior sales page for your product or service? Find out a simple, tested method that works time after time using the bottom up technique of writing sales pages. ======== 26 Olympic medals 22 of those medals were gold. You know his name because almost anyone following the Olympics knows his name. As Michael Phelps stepped up to the starting blocks, the eyes of the world bounced between Phelps and his biggest rival in the race: South African Chad Guy Bertrand Le Clos. Their short and intense rivalry had fired the imagination of the press. No one was particularly fixated on Singaporean, Joseph Isaac Schooling Schooling it seems was the underdog. No pushover in the pool, Schooling had won the bronze at the 2015 World Championships. He'd been clocking up wins in the Asian, Commonwealth and South East Asian competitions. But at the finals 100 metre butterfly event, he seemed slightly outgunned. When you're dealing with copywriting and a sales page, the spotlight always seems to veer between the headline and the opening paragraphs. Other elements of the sales page seem to have a much shorter, less important stature. Yet it's these seemingly obscure elements that are the powerhouse of the page. If you've been frustrated with the process of writing a sales page, there's a quick, more efficient way to the finish line. And it starts not from the top down, but instead from the bottom up. And this is why we'll look at three factors in this article. Factor 1: The bullets Factor 2: The features and benefits Factor 3: The target profile (even when you don't have one). Factor 1: The Bullets Last week I bought a new car. Not just another car, but a kind of car I'd waited for since I was 12 years old. An electric car. An electric car that was tiny, responsive and had a rich pedigree of car engineering. I bought myself a BMW i3 and plugged into the socket to charge—yes, just like a toaster. I'm no car fanatic I don't revel in terms like torque. But a week later if you asked me to describe the car, I'd go into a slight rhapsody. I'd do what most of us would do when asked about a product or service. I'd spit out the bullets. It's the greenest car on the market It's the most efficient electric car you could buy at this point in time. It's not a monstrous hulk. It's sub-compact. Did I tell you that you can park it by using gestures? Imagine doing that in a car park. You could do the same for any product or service You could describe your house using bullets. Your computer? Your home town? The cafe you visit? All of them could be described with a series of bullets. And seasoned copywriters tend to avoid the headline and opening paragraphs of a sales page They start with bullets instead. They sit down and write 10, 20, 30, even 60 bullets for a single product or service. And that's what you should do too. When you write bullets, you get into a brainstorming trance of sorts. Try it. Try it right now. Sit down and make a list of a service like a cafe. The way to go about it is to break up the service into sections. So if you're writing bullet points about a cafe, for instance, you'd have main topics. e.g. the food, the drink, the ambience, location etc. It's pretty much what you'd expect to see on an AirBNB listing online. Those points, they're bullets. When you tackle a product, a similar method applies Several years ago I wrote a series of books that I was very proud of called 'Black Belt Presentations'. I realised that people get on webinars all the time and do a terrible job. They also have to make presentations either in person or via audio. And they tend to be so verbose and unfocused. So this series of books were about three main topics (yes, it's always a good idea to break up any product into sections). The topics were about "slide design", "presentation structure" and "crowd control". And every single one of those books had different elements that when compressed, formed bullets. For example: Part 1: Controlling Presentation Design or DIY Slide Design: How to create stylish slides without driving yourself crazy. Understanding the 'proximity of elements' and why it avoids visual chaos The power of invisible lines and how they help avoid distraction—and increase focus Why a simple colour palette saves you endless amounts of preparation time How to avoid 'unwanted noise' by choosing uncluttered backgrounds Why 95% of your slides need just one thought for max impact The palm test: How to get rid of unwanted and distracting graphics How to use the power of size to make graphics pop on your slides Two core methods to instantly increase curiosity on every slide Why most photos/graphics are flat on slides and how to bring them to life instantly! How to avoi

Most of us have grand plans to succeed Yet, the moment we start there are a million distractions in our way. Chaos lurches around in our doorway and there seems to be no way out. At Psychotactics, we had managed to get around most of the chaos but then I was in charge of mentoring my niece. As she moved from Year 6 to Year 7, it seemed like we were hit by an okinami of chaos. What did we do to find our way out? How did we manage to avoid the madness that we had no control over? Find out in this article. ================== In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Part 1: Non-negotiable items Part 2: Part 2: Just say no Part 3: The power of drills Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. ================== How To Get Things Done In The Midst Of Unending Chaos "J'ai beaucoup de devoirs aujourd'hui." That's French for "I have lots of homework today". And it's what my niece Marsha informs me almost daily, when I pick her up from school. Three years ago, my wife Renuka and I started mentoring my niece, Marsha While school work is never easy to cope with, there was always time to beef up on spellings, learn about clouds, earth's subduction zones and the wondrous mysteries of solar system. Then Marsha moved to year seven (what you'd call seventh grade) and we were suddenly swamped with homework. English, social studies, maths, even that little bit of French came rushing at us from out of nowhere. It seems so maddening when every day you're thrown deep into yet another onslaught of homework. This is the kind of chaos that hits us as we go through our business lives We have every intention to learn more, do more and yet we find ourselves in this spin cycle that we don't understand. At this point, it's important to pull back and notice that nothing else had changed in our lives. The Psychotactics newsletter still went out on time; The Three Month Vacation podcast rolled out on schedule. Every post at the membership site at 5000bc, and the Article Writing Course went out just as planned. But in Marsha's world such order didn't exist. The homework seemed to pull us away from what we believed to be important. Somehow, something had to change. In this series we look at how to achieve the seemingly impossible To break free from gravity, we have to have a strategy that enables us to forge forward even under trying conditions. The three things that we're going to look at are seemingly pedestrian, but it's something we've had to use ourselves—for our business and now for Marsha. They are: – Non-negotiable items – Just say no – Drills Part 1: Non-negotiable items I just finished conducting the Article Writing Course On that course you have 25 participants all headed towards one goal: to be able to write articles that are far superior to what you'd see on the internet. And to do so in under 2 hours. At the end of the course, I ask every one of the participants to relate their experiences as they went through the course. And that's when you hear the stories you've never heard before. Stories of how one of them almost lost a child—and still finished her homework Or the story about how one person had been working until 2 am, then sat down to write an article at about 3 am, so that they could meet the deadline for the day. Every one of these stories starts off in an almost identical manner. In their world, article writing was all about struggle, about frustration and chaos. And then, 12 weeks later, every single one of the participants who've made it to the end point can write an outstanding article, complete in almost every respect. And do so within that two-hour period. Some of them were taking days, one even took four weeks to write an article and yet at the end of the course those very same people were achieving the seemingly impossible in under two hours. Not surprisingly, you do the same In the early part of the 20th century, 1912 to be precise, tooth decay was a massive problem. People simply didn't brush their teeth. They do so now, twice a day. In the USA, the Boy Scout handbook from the mid-1950's had a section on personal hygiene. It stated that ideally a boy should bathe twice a week and shampoo his hair once a week. What we're doing today, all of us is achieving the seemingly impossible. We're engaged in time-wasting activities; activities that were considered unimportant for almost of all human history. Our modern lives have made it easier to brush and shower, but you know the reason why we do what we do. We've made it non-negotiable Marsha's reading, spelling, and solar system learning became terribly negotiable. The homework rushed in, took control of the evening and soon the important elements were swept away. And it's not a lot different from what happens in our own lives. We start off wanting to achieve precise goals, but suddenly a client dumps a truckload of work. And we're off scampering. The reason why the graduates of the Article Writing Course can write in under two hours is

Food, drink and sleep. That's my dream for every vacation. And yet this trip to Goa, India was quite the opposite. So what did I learn that almost turned my life around? That's what this podcast is about. And it might just turn your life (and health) around as well. ========= Sometimes life takes you down a diversion. And you end up exactly where you need to be. This is the story of my trip to Goa, India. It's where my grandparents came from. Where I spent many summers under the mango trees in the sweltering heat. It's also the place that has led me back to where I need to be. So what did I learn? I learned a few things:1- The importance of digestion (and sleep) 2- The importance of food and types of food 3- Breaks are not enough to avoid extreme stress. Part 1- The importance of digestion (and the avoidance of sleep) "When you turn 40," my dentist said to me, "you should go for an annual medical checkup." There I was on the dentist's chair having a bridge fixed and my dentist wasn't giving me dental advice. Instead, he was telling me to go see my doctor, even though I hadn't been sick a day for almost 20 years. And since my negligence with my flossing was causing me a small fortune, I decided to take the dentist's advice. I went and visited my doctor and did my first ever medical test. It wasn't good. My blood pressure wasn't high, but it wasn't normal either. My cholesterol and blood sugar was creeping up too. And like clockwork, year after year, those numbers edged upwards. Sometimes, they nudged their way downwards, but the general trend was not looking terribly good. You know me. I'm the 3-month vacation, take weekends off guy. I work hard, but I take a lot of breaks to rest, think and just do nothing. And yet all of that nothingness wasn't dropping the pressure, cholesterol or blood sugar. And then I did something that made a huge difference to my life and health. I went yet again on vacation and this time to India. I have a love-hate relationship with India I grew up in Mumbai, vacationed in Goa and travelled through many parts of India before I finally moved to New Zealand. India seeps within you as you hang around that sub-continent. The food, the culture, the languages, history and science going back thousands of years. This trip was about the monsoon (something that's worth experiencing), the food and most of all to see my parents (who I hadn't visited in five years). Yet within days of landing in Goa, my agenda was hijacked Oh sure I started out with the food and drink, but we also wanted to get a few massages. And that search for massages got us to an Ayurvedic centre. Now you've probably heard of Ayurveda, an ancient system of natural healing from India. Some think it's 5,000 years old, others believe it to be older, going back a whopping 10,000 years. But I wasn't there for any medical checkup—I was just there for the massages… Yet life takes you down this diversion, and it's just where you need to be. It was July, the rain was coming down in torrents and the doctor at the Ayurvedic centre was available. And we found out that my blood pressure and cholesterol was pretty high (conducting the article writing course and working through 12,000 posts helps, I guess). But even as he was telling me about the course of action to take, he brought up one important, yet obscure point. "The reason why we have a lot of problems with our health isn't the food we eat," he started. Food makes a difference, but the bigger problem is digestion. If we don't digest the food completely, it sits in our system and it becomes like the inner side of a kitchen pipe. It's got all this junk that starts to accumulate over the years. And it's that junk that causes a huge number of problems. So he put me on an Ayurvedic course to get rid of the junk. It was interesting, this course Spanning over 11 days, it started mildly. All I had to do for the first three days was avoid oily food. But then it got really weird. For breakfast, all I could have was liquid ghee (mixed with some herbs). I don't know if you know what ghee is, but it's high in saturated fat. And if you're trying to get someone's cholesterol down, it sure seems like the last thing you want to dole out. And yet, it wasn't just a sip of ghee. On the first day it was 30ml, then it went progressively to 80, 130 and 180 ml (almost a full glass). As it turns out, the ghee is supposed to permeate all the parts of your body down to your fingers and toes. And then to cut a long story short, the ghee pulls all the impurities and chucks it into the stomach. And you know what happens next, right? So did it work? If there's one thing I hate, it's a "quick fix". I detest Lemon diets and detox diets of any kind. I don't care to believe in quick and easy. But there I was, on vacation, and keen to get the cholesterol and pressure down. And 11 days later, we had our results. The blood test before and after could not have been more dramatic. There was a plunge from abnormal to we