The Three Month Vacation Podcast

"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

Who's Doug Hitchcock? And in a world full of goal-setting exercises, why does Doug's system stand out? Find out why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark and Doug's plan works almost like magic year after year. Find out not just how to set goals, but how to create a stop-doing list (yes, that's a goal too). And finally, learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system. Find out how we've made almost impossible dreams come true with this goal-setting system. http://www.psychotactics.com/goal-setting-successfully/ ------------------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why most goal-setting goes hopelessly off the mark Part 2: How to set goals, but how to create a successful stop-doing list Part 3: Learn why most goals are designed for failure because they lack a simple benchmarking system Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources Chaos Planning: How 'Irregular' Folks Get Things Done Learning: How To Retain 90% Of Everything You Learn 5000bc: How to get started on your goal setting ------------------------------- The Transcript "This transcript hasn't been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we'll be sure to fix them." This is the Three-Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Doug Hitchcock was my first real mentor and he had been bankrupt thrive. When I first moved to Auckland in the year 2000, I didn't really know anyone. I was starting up a new business, I was starting up a new life. I joined a networking group and within that networking group I asked for a mentor. Well, no one in the networking group was willing to be a mentor, but someone did put me in touch with Doug. The only problem with Doug was he had been bankrupt thrive. Now, when I say he was bankrupt thrice, it doesn't mean he was still bankrupt. He just pulled himself out of the hole three times in his life and there he was, at about 70 plus, and he was my first mentor. Before he starts to talk to me about anything, he asks me, "Do you do goal setting?" I'm like, "Yeah, I have goals," and he goes, "No. Do you have goals on paper?" I said, "No." He says, "We have to start there. We have to start with goals on paper." That's how I started doing goal setting, all the way back in the year 2000. Almost immediately, I got all the goal setting wrong. You ask, how can you get goal setting wrong? After all, you're just putting goals down on a sheet of paper. How can you get something like that wrong? You can't write the wrong goals, but you can write too many goals. That's exactly what I did. I sat down with that sheet of paper and I wrote down all my work goals, my personal goals, and I had an enormous list. That's when Doug came back into the scene, and he said, "Pick three." I said, "I could pick five." He goes, "No, no, no. Pick three." I picked three goals in my work and three goals from my personal life. You know what? By the end of the year, I'd achieved those goals. Ever since, I have been sitting down and working out these goals based on Doug's method. Doug may have lost his business thrice in a row, but he knew what he was talking about. Most of us just wander through life expecting things to happen. When they happen, we say they happen for a reason, but they don't happen for a reason. They happen, and we assign a reason to it. In this episode, I'm going to cover three topics. The first is the three part planning. Then we'll go the other way. We're create a stop doing list. Finally, we'll look at benchmarks and see how we've done in the year. Let's start off with the first one, which is the three part planning. Does the San Fernando earthquake ring any bells in your memory? Most people haven't ever heard of this earthquake, and yet it was one of the deadliest earthquakes in US history. It collapsed entire hospitals, it killed 64 people, it injured over two and a half thousand. When the damage was assessed, it had cost millions of dollars, and yet it could have been the disaster that eclipsed all other US disasters. That's because the earthquake almost caused the entire Van Norman Reservoir to collapse. The dam held, and yet, if it had collapsed, the resulting rush of water would have taken the lives of more people than the Pearl Harbor Attack, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, 9/11 and 1900 Galveston Hurricane combined. In barely 12 seconds, the top section of the dam had disintegrated and yet, the surrounding areas were extremely lucky. The reservoir was only half full that day. The aftershocks of the earthquake continued to cause parts of the dam to break apart. A few feet of free board was the only thing that stopped a total collapse. This total collapse is what many of us come close to experiencing as we try to clamber up the ladder of success. We try to do too many things and we don't seem to go anywhere. In effect, this is like water cascading down a dam. There's too many things and we hav

What's wrong with this statement? Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It's Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ The Transcript "This transcript hasn't been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we'll be sure to fix them." This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Imagine you're a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you're the most popular band in the whole world. You've sold over 200 million records. You're in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it's everything to me. It's all I've ever known. I don't know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can't get a job. Speaker 2: He's the only surviving member of one of the 20th century's greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he's about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they've earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It's not like he needs the money or the fame, because they're the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, "We weren't on the charts. We were the charts." In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that's not the point. "I have to keep this music alive," says Gibb. To me, that's what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren't really looking for this magic pill. We're not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we're trying to do is keep our music alive. We're trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff's really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles' fame, John Lennon said, "Work is life, you know, and without it there's only uncertainty and unhappiness." When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I've ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn't open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he's preparing the next day's meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It's different every single day. It's a big surprise, and it's always amazing. Today I'm going to talk to you about three myths about business. We've run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I'm going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they're important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that's really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That's what we'll cover in today's episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That's myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you d

How do you make your product or service irresistible? With tens of thousands of similar products or services in the market, can you use simple techniques to create a great offer? This episode shows you two psychological methods that we can't turn down?as humans. We love both the buffet and the specialty. No matter if you're a small business or a big one, you can use these techniques and increase your product and service sales. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Buffet vs. Specialty Principle Part 2: How Studio 54 put out a buffet of fantasy Part 3: What does this mean for you when you're selling a product or service? Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. What Are The Factors in Play Behind An Irresistible Offer: Part 1 of 3 Imagine you're Frank Sinatra. No matter where you go on the planet, people know of you. Doors open magically for you. People can't help but gape in wonder as you show up at an event. So imagine a place where the great Frank Sinatra can't enter. It's inconceivable, isn't it? And yet it happened. When Frank showed up at Studio 54, he was turned away. So was the president of Cyprus, the King of Saudi Arabia's son, Roberta Flack, and several young Kennedys. Even the famous movie star, Jack Nicholson was unable to enter on opening night. Studio 54 was like no other place in New York From the moment it opened its 11,000-square-foot dance floor, it was packed with celebrities dying to get in. Olivia Newton-John, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Dolly Parton, Mick Jagger, Tine Turner—you get the idea—they were just some of the visitors to Studio 54. Almost every night since it opened its doors on April 26, 1977, it was packed to its capacity—almost 2000 people a night. If you considered yourself cool, you wanted to get into Studio 54—but there was no guarantee you'd get in. There was someone stopping the flow… This someone was at the door Studio 54 night after night. He'd show up at the door at 11:30 pm and get on a step stool above the crowd. He'd pick who could get into the club that night—and who was to be turned away. His name is Steve Rubell, part-owner and the person who made sure the Studio was one of the most irresistible places in New York! So what made Studio 54 so irresistible, when there were so many cool places in New York at the time? And what makes any product or service irresistible, even without star power? Let's take a look at three core elements. Buffet vs. Specialty Exclusivity Build Up Buffet vs. Specialty Principle If you were to go to Lynda.com you'd be faced with a buffet. On Lynda.com there are hundreds of tutorials on software, business and creative skills. In 2004 alone, there were over 100 courses on the site. And that course number has gone up exponentially. For the past few years, Lynda.com been adding more than 18 hours of content, almost every single day of the year. That means you're likely to run into thousands of hours of tutorials topics such as Photoshop, computer animation, 3-D animation, photography—in all about 224,413 tutorials to date. That's a huge buffet, don't you agree? And as humans, we're primed for buffets. We love the "eat all you want" concept and it's even better if the "food" is of an extremely high quality. This means that a potential client of Lynda.com can access all their content for just $250 a year. Immediately you see why this kind of deal is incredibly irresistible. If you decide to learn a program like InDesign, you can easily do so, because there are at least a dozen courses on InDesign alone. If you want to learn to work with WordPress, hey, there's a mountain of video instruction already in place. No matter where you look, the volume and quality of content tantalises you. Which brings us to our first principle—the buffet principle If you're offering your clients an enormous amount of something, they're instantly drawn towards it, whether they can consume it or not. When given a buffet option, few of us can stop ourselves from feeling the need to buy the product or service. When you look at 5000bc.com, you get a buffet option 5000bc is the membership site at Psychotactics.com. The moment you get to the sales page at 5000bc, there's a feeling of a ton of information at 5000bc. There are cumulatively, hundreds of articles on topics such as copywriting, web design, branding, lead generation etc. Which is why most clients tend to sign up to the membership site at 5000bc. It's more than likely they've been a subscriber at Psychotactics for a while, bought and read The Brain Audit, possibly even bought some other books from Psychotactics—and then they're exposed to 5000bc. And the buffet concept kicks in. At $259 a year (remarkably similar to Lynda.com), clients can get not only a ton of curated content, but also have the opportunity to ask me dozens of questions—some of which are answered within hours, if not minutes. This concept of a buffet becomes impossible to resi

What's wrong with this statement? Instead of wondering when our next vacation is we should set up a life we don't need to escape from.? There doesn't seem to be anything wrong, is there? And yet this entire line is based on a myth. And that's not the only myth that circulates so well and widely. Another myth is that a business has to grow; has to increase clients; has to increase revenues. But is that why you really got into business? Did you set out to create a life that's work, work and more work? Join us as we explore three big myths, and destroy them: Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger. Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot / Myth 3: That we need to set up a life where we don't need to wonder about our vacations. / / Yup, incredibly silly business myths. Let's take them head on and get some sanity back into our lives, instead. http://www.psychotactics.com/three-business-myths/ ================ In this episode Sean talks about Myth 1: That your business needs to constantly grow bigger Myth 2: Somehow you'll have more time, and your business will be on auto-pilot Myth 3: Vacation is the enemy and work is everything Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources The Power of Enough: Why It's Critical To Your Sanity Three Obstacles To Happiness: How To Overcome Them 5000bc: How to get reliable answers to your complex marketing problems ================ The Transcript "This transcript hasn't been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we'll be sure to fix them." This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Imagine you're a band, but not just any old music band. Instead, you're the most popular band in the whole world. You've sold over 200 million records. You're in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, and probably only five or six bands have sold more than you in the entire history of pop. Barry Gibb has never done this before, never taken the long walk to the stage by himself. Speaker 2: Is it important for you to do this? Barry: Yeah, it's everything to me. It's all I've ever known. I don't know how to do anything else. Speaker 2: t went pretty well, though. Barry: I can't get a job. Speaker 2: He's the only surviving member of one of the 20th century's greatest vocal groups, and this night, at the TD Garden in Boston, he's about to begin his first ever solo tour. You have to ask yourself why. Why would Barry Gibb, with all his success and all the money that they've earned over the years as the Bee Gees, do his first solo tour. It's not like he needs the money or the fame, because they're the only group in history to have written, recorded, and produced six consecutive number one hits. As Barry Gibb himself boasted, "We weren't on the charts. We were the charts." In that spring, as he hit the road across North America for six solo shows, every show was costing him half a million dollars a night. He said he would be lucky to break even. But that's not the point. "I have to keep this music alive," says Gibb. To me, that's what embodies what I do. I want to keep the music alive. I think this is true for most of us. Most of us aren't really looking for this magic pill. We're not looking to double our customers, triple our income, do any of that kind of nonsense. What we're trying to do is keep our music alive. We're trying to get some purpose in our lives. The money, the fame, all that stuff's really nice, but does it matter in the long run? At the height of The Beatles' fame, John Lennon said, "Work is life, you know, and without it there's only uncertainty and unhappiness." When you look at someone like the guy who runs Uchida, a little restaurant in Vancouver Island, the restaurant is only open from 11:00 to 2:00. When you get there you eat some of the most delightful Japanese food I've ever eaten, and I have traveled to many places, including Japan. That magic is expressed in his work. He gets to work and he stays until the restaurant closes at 2:00. It doesn't open for dinner because from 2:00 to 9:00 he's preparing the next day's meals. Every day the meal is just so amazing. It's different every single day. It's a big surprise, and it's always amazing. Today I'm going to talk to you about three myths about business. We've run Psychotactics for the past 13 years, but the business goes back a long way when I used to be a cartoonist. I'm going to bring to you these three myths which I think are important. I think they're important because everyone is talking about the other side, about more money, more customers, doubling your income, doing all that stuff. As I said, that's really nice, but is there a flip side to it? That's what we'll cover in today's episode. First up on the menu today is the fact that you have to grow. That's myth number one. Myth number two is that things get easier as you go along. Myth number three is that you have to create a life that you d

What is the meaning of life? This utterly vast and philosophical question pops into our lives with amazing frequency. But is it the right question to ask? What if we move the words around a bit and asked another question. Like: What gives your life meaning? Hmm, that changes things a bit doesn't it? And even when we change the words, we may still move towards the specific. So why does the abstract help more? Find out in this episode. http://www.psychotactics.com/meaning-of-life/ --------------------------- ------- The Transcript What gives your life meaning? It was 6:20 AM. I was close to the beach, halfway through my walk, listening to this podcast on Transom.org. There was this reporter who was asking older people how they went through their lives. They were 100 years old. She started out with this question, which was: What is the meaning of life? I've grappled with this question before, and it sounds very philosophical, but then somewhere in the middle, the question changed. Those words just interchanged somehow and it became: What gives your life meaning? I had to stop. I had to stop on the road just to absorb what that meant. Just by that little interplay in the words, suddenly the whole sentence, the whole construct changed. It was amazing to me. As you tend to do, you tend to try to answer the questions. I tried to think of the people in my life and I tried to think of the things that I do. Then I realized I was going about it the wrong way. In today's podcast we're going to cover three elements as always, but the way I'm going to cover it is, I'm going to talk about me me me. I'm going to talk about the three things that give my life meaning and why I approached it the wrong way. But I think it is the way that we need to approach it. Of course you might choose to borrow these, or you might choose to bring up your own three elements, but this is the way I think that you've got to approach the question: What gives your life meaning? Part 1: Space I think the right way to approach it is to go through an abstract sort of thinking. The three things that give my life meaning are space, deadline, and elegance. Let's start out with the first one, which is the factor of space. About a month ago, it was August in New Zealand. Well, it was August everywhere, but it's wintertime here in New Zealand. I had this little piece of paper in my pocket. I'd been carrying it in my wallet for well over a year, maybe a year and a half. This piece of paper had been given to me by my doctor. I'd done my annual checkup the year before and I was supposed to get the blood test done. I had been procrastinating for quite a while, as you can tell. That day I decided I'm going to park the car and I'm going to walk to the lab and get the blood test done. I wasn't expecting anything. I'd been walking every day. I'd been eating sensibly, I think, drinking sensibly. Yet, the very next night I got some news from my doctor. He said, "Your cholesterol is high." I went and looked it up, and I found that there was no real linkage to what you eat and cholesterol, but there is a very distinct relationship between stress and everything, not just stress and cholesterol but stress and everything. That is when I started taking the weekends off. Now we fool ourselves. We say we're taking the weekend off but we check email and we work for a couple of hours, or do this and do that. Suddenly, the weekend is not really off. I found this to be true for me. I used to get to work, even on the weekend, at 4 AM because I wake up at that time. Before I knew it, it was 9:00, 10:00. I put in five or six hours on the weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Of course I had my excuses. The podcast takes so much time, and we're doing this course, and I have to write this book. When I got this report, I suddenly realised the importance of space. I realised that there is no point in me doing this stuff on a consistent basis and driving myself crazy, and that the weekend was invented to give us space. Now we take three months off, and you know that, but these minor breaks become very major breaks on the weekend. I had to find a practical use for this, because at the same time we have courses going on, like we have the headline course going on. Now our courses are not about just information. They're about practical usage. Clients will come in five days a week and they'll do their assignment every single day. This is a problem for me, because in the US it's Friday, but here in New Zealand it's Saturday. That means I have to look at the assignment on a Saturday. That's what I was doing. I convinced myself it was only going to be a couple hours here or there. I had to then go to all the participants and say, "I'm going to take the weekend off, but my weekend, is it okay if I take it off?" I had to take their permission. No one had a problem. I don't know I was expecting that they would have a problem, but no one had a problem. This is the concept of space. I've had to use thi

When you're giving away bonuses, it's easy to believe you don't need to give away your best product or service. The best information always needs to be sold—so you can earn a decent living. And yet, this podcast episode takes an opposite stance. You need to put your best stuff out in front—free. Yes, give away the goodies, no matter whether you're in info-products or content marketing; services or running a workshop. Giving away outstanding content is the magic behind what attracts—and keeps clients. -------------------- Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/100 Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Concept of Consumption Part 2: Why Package Your Free Content Part 3: Why You Must Feel Pain Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources 5000bc: Where smart people come together to help each other honestly Goodies: How to design a visual "yes-yes" pricing grid for all your products The Brain Audit: Why clients buy and why they don't -------------------- The Transcript "This transcript hasn't been checked for typos, so you may well find some. If you do, let us know and we'll be sure to fix them." What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Many years ago when I started my cartooning career, I used to get all kinds of jobs. What I really loved was the plum jobs, the jobs where you had this fabulous stuff that you could do and used to get paid really well. I would spend hours and days and weeks doing those kinds of jobs. Then you had the recurring jobs. These were tiny cartooning assignments which didn't pay very well, so I'd just work very quickly through them because well, they weren't paying that much anyway. One day, my neighbor, who happened to be an art director of Elle Magazine, he stopped in and said, "Sean, why are you doing such a bad job with these cartoons? Why is it that this work looks so shoddy?" Of course I said, "Well, they don't pay much." He said, "I don't really know how much they pay when I look at your work in the newspaper. I only look at the work and I say, 'This work is shoddy. This work is sloppy. As a reader, I'm not supposed to know how much you get paid. I only see the end result.'" This is true for us as well. In today's world, where we're giving away free stuff, we look at the stuff we're giving away and we think, "Wait, we need to put in all our efforts into creating great products and great services. But if it's going to be free, then we need to pull back about it. We can't put in all the effort into free." My art director friend would tell you, "I don't see it that way. It cannot be shoddy. It cannot be sloppy." That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to cover how you need to make your free product as valuable or even more valuable than your paid product. What are the three benchmarks that you need to create this magic? Part 1: The Concept of Consumption The first thing that we're going to cover today is the concept of consumption. The second thing is how it needs to have that unhurried look, that unhurried texture, that unhurried feeling. Finally, we need to feel pain, real pain. Let's cover these three topics. Let's start off with the first topic, and that is one of consumption. In case you didn't already know it, Netflix has been monitoring your behavior for a very long time. Netflix is big time into consumption. The reason for that is very simple. The more they get you to come back and watch serials and movies, the more likely you are to renew your subscription month after month, year after year. For ages, the television industry has suggested that the pilot episode is the most critical of them all. If someone watches the pilot episode, they're going to watch all the rest, or at least that's how the philosophy went until we ran into Netflix. Netflix started pinpointing the episodes for each show season in which 70% of all users went on to complete the entire series. Here's what they found. When they looked at Breaking Bad, the hook was not episode number one; it was episode number two. When they looked at the prison comedy, Orange is the New Black, they found that episode number three was the one that made the difference. In some cases, it was episode number eight that made the difference; in some, four; in some, three; in some, five. What they found, however, was that people wanted to get to the end, and that if they got them to binge watch, they would watch all of them one after the other. What does this tell us about our clients? What does this tell us about our reports and our newsletters? It tells us that people are a lot more willing to give us a chance than we think, if we can get them to the end. This is why consumption becomes so critical. When you look at all of those signups, you know those little boxes that

When you start writing articles, you get advice from all sides. But there's advice you don't want to hear. It's advice that goes against the grain. And yet, it's this advice that forms the hallmark of great writing. So how do you get from average to great? You take the road less-taken. It's harder and yet far more satisfying. Here's advice you probably don't want to hear. --------------- A friend wrote to me today and asked me what seemed like a pretty normal question. She expected 5 lines, maybe 6. Instead I ended up with 1800 words. So what was her question? What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content? The answer is something that most writers may not want to hear. It's an answer that demands sacrifice, going against the grain and being persistent when things are going horribly wrong. Still interested? Well, here's the question again: What traits do you consider to be hallmarks of quality in a piece of content? The answer 1- contrast 2- lack of pandering 3- the gap between style and ability. ———— 1) Let's start with contrast It's the year 1986. John Heritage and David Greatbatch have an itch to scratch. They're studying applause and what causes it. So they embark on what could be considered one of the most boring tasks in the world: they analyse politician's speeches. 476 of them. And what were these two poor souls looking for? Applause, that's what they were keen to find. Why was it that one speech received total silence, while other speeches got applause? But not just applause, but applause twice per minute! Nineteen thousand sentences later they had a clue It was contrast. The moment the audience encountered applause, the brain was no longer dormant. Contrast brought a smile to their faces, and cheering followed. Contrast requires you and me to work so much harder But contrast also puts you in a strange and precarious position. If everyone says: You should go this way and there's a writer that says, "Nope, you're headed into sheep land. This is the way to go". Now that is going out on a limb. Contrast is scary. It's much easier to say what everyone else is saying. If you want to start with the hallmark of quality, contrast is where you start. Let's take an example of contrast Let's say you're writing about a subject such as productivity, for example. Now productivity doesn't bring to mind any sort of rest or sleep does it? Instead the enduring message of productivity has almost always been one of focus and concentration. It's always been one of working out astounding efficiencies to do more work than ever before. At this point in time, let's say your article talks about sleep. It talks about taking the weekends off. It even goes on to suggest that you take several months off in a year. You've shaken up the force a bit, haven't you? You've created a counter force that may at first seem impossible to defend. Yet, that's what great writing is about. Conceptually, it stands out and picks a topic that's contrarian. But not all topics need to be contrarian to have that hallmark, do they? You could write articles on topics that have none of this rebellious nature and still bring out the big guns. This calls for a bit of a roller coaster in your writing An article needs to have a flow so the reader can move forward, but just as important is a counterflow. So let's say you're writing about how to "grow a curry leaf tree", you also need to bring in the counterflow as you're writing. That counterflow would be a possible glitch in the planting process. It could be a couple of mistakes you're about to make. To be able to speed ahead, brake and go in a counterflow direction isn't easy. Some writers do it while creating the material. Others create it later during an edit process. Flow by itself is super boring Try this paragraph for example: We went to the airport, there was no traffic on the highway. We got through check in and immigration in next to no time. And then we sat down to have a beer. So what are you thinking at this point in time? I'll tell you what. You're wondering if the story has any purpose. And yet, the moment counterflow comes into play, you're alert again. Let's go back to the story. You've had your beer, when a policeman walks up with a grim face. That's drama, that's contrast. And the hallmark of a great article is the ability to insert contrast into various sections of your article. Case studies can have an up and down. The concept can start out being all in favour of something and then diverge without warning. Now you've created contrast and lifts the tempo of your words. Counterflow needs to head back to flow, however Too much counterflow and your reader is turned off. The grim policeman, the spilling of beer on your white shirt, the missing of the flight—and the article seems to be falling right out of the skies. Which is why contrast matters so much. Contrast is about a constantly evolving set of words that get you to slip slide through like—yes—a roller co

We all want to create profitable products but aren't sure where to start. We hope for some amazing formula, when all you really need are three core questions. When you are clear about the answers to the three questions, you can take an amazingly pedestrian, everyday concept and make it hugely profitable. So what are the three questions you need to have in place and how can you get started today? ----------------------- How to Create a Profitable Idea for Business Around July 2000, I was made redundant from my job at a web design firm. Life wasn't supposed to unfold this way. I'd just moved to Auckland, New Zealand from Mumbai, India a few months prior. And here I was, barely a few months later, without a job and with a mortgage that hovered around $200,000 (yes, we'd just bought a house). What do you do when you're hurled into such a situation? I turned to Photoshop, but not quite. There's a story behind the Photoshop story and it began back in India, in July. Back in Mumbai, I freelanced as a cartoonist and work was pretty steady through the year, except around July. For some inexplicable reason, the phones would stop ringing at that point in the year. At first, it drove me crazy and I'd do everything I could to drum up business. I'd rant and rave and complain about the fickle nature of July when my mother pointed out that things were always quiet for me in July. From that point on, we'd use July to learn how to use Photoshop One of the big games at the office (yes, I had staff) was to learn to use Photoshop in Tab, F mode. If you were to turn on Photoshop and hit the Tab key and press F (full screen) you'd find that all your toolbars disappear. The game at the office was to keep working in Photoshop without any toolbars. A bystander would look in awe as you were able to use the brush tool, increase opacity, decrease brush sizes etc. You could do almost anything in Photoshop without needing the tool bar. It looked like pure magic. It's this magic that I had to use when I was made redundant The moment I was made redundant, I went back to trying to get work as a cartoonist. Since most cartoonists at the time were still using pen, ink and paint, my work in Photoshop stood out when I went to meet art directors at the advertising agencies. One particular art director got a bit chatty and as we talked she realised that she too could use the magic of Photoshop in her work. And so, while I started out trying to sell cartoons, I ended up charging $60 an hour, teaching art directors how to use the core tools of Photoshop without the tool bar. Notice something very interesting in the last sentence? I wasn't teaching them Photoshop. I wasn't going into the 2,459 rabbit holes that Photoshop presents to a beginner. Instead I was just teaching them a subset—the core tools of Photoshop without the need for a tool bar. And this is precisely the kind of advice I'd give to a client if they called me up and asked how they should start a profitable business. I'd say you need to ask yourself three questions: who, what and when. So why do these three questions matter? Why Who Matters I've been pretty good at drawing since a very young age. Like every other kid around me, I did the usual doodles and scribbling, and when the rest of the kids decided to give up drawing at the age of four or five, I kept at it. So you can say I'd be pretty good at drawing after all these years, wouldn't you? And you'd be right because I've never really stopped drawing for a day. But drawing is a bit like cooking. Just because you're good at cooking Italian food doesn't mean you're going to be any good at Japanese food Over the years I became exceptionally good at drawing cartoons, loved the structure of buildings and architecture, even dabbled in a bit of caricatures. But there's one thing I avoided: drawing animals. I'd decided very early in my life that I wasn't too good at drawing animals. Then, recently, I was saddled with about 400 amazing envelopes. There's a story behind those envelopes, but for now let's just say it was much too hard to throw away those envelopes. So I started drawing animals on them, tentatively at first, but then with a sense of a mission. The moment I started posting the photos of these envelopes online, there was a flurry of interest People from different parts of the globe started giving me advice on what I should do with them. You should print them, said one. You could create a collector's item box set said another. And the advice kept pouring in, and did exactly what advice usually does: it confuses you beyond belief. The reason you're hearing this story is to give you a framework of how a profitable idea doesn't arise from an ability to do something well. A profitable idea arises from the first question you need to ask: Who. The envelope art I just started working on in early June 2016. So why is who so important? Without the "who" in mind, struggle is almost inevitable. Think about the boxed set of envelopes, for ex

It's super-easy to tell stories of success and how everything went from good to great. But what about the events when you had to eat humble pie? Or the times when you were scared out of your mind? Here are three stories which by some coincidence involve presentations. Nonetheless, there's a solid lesson behind each story and it's well learning from. ------------------------------------------ Imagine your website has just gone live and the next thing you know, you're on a radio show. That's exactly what happened to me one week in June 2001. After weeks of hard work and lots of back and forth, my website had gone live. By today's standards it wasn't a very flashy website. It had tiny fonts and was extremely spartan, but finally it was up and running. That very afternoon, I was at a store when I ran into the presenters of a popular radio show. They asked me a few questions and then asked me what I did. At the end of the question set they announced my website on air. I was excited beyond belief I called my webmaster, Chris Parkinson, and told him to expect loads of traffic. You know what happened next, right? Yes, nothing. No one showed up to the site despite the popularity of the show. My excitement turned to disappointment as the hours ticked by. But what was I expecting? I'll tell you what I was expecting. I was expecting a "miracle moment". And I learned that events don't always roll out the way you've planned. Which is why this series is about the startup stories we've experienced at Psychotactics. They're a series that give you an understanding of how we went about our early days. How we didn't just sit behind our computer and hope that clients would sign up. It wasn't just about starting a blog or putting a website. There are stories that I haven't quite told before. These are three of the stories: Three startup stories from the early days at Psychotactics. Story No.1: The One Person "Australian" Workshop In 2004, we did something quite bold. We'd been in business for just a year and eight months when we decided to have a workshop in Los Angeles. That workshop, priced at $1500 per person sold out. Which prompted us to have our second workshop closer to home. When a client suggested we have a workshop in Australia, we jumped at the opportunity and the deal for this workshop seemed almost too good to be true. This client wasn't asking us to do all the promotion. Instead he was going to get over 60 people to attend our two-day event and all we needed to do was show up. Workshops are notoriously hard to fill at any point in time When you start marketing a workshop you get a few early sign-ups and then it gets deathly quiet for a long time. Finally, as the final date approaches, you get another spurt of sign-up activity which usually fills the remaining seats. For this particular workshop, we hadn't got any early sign-ups, and even though that was a worry, we weren't terribly concerned. After all, the client was going to get those 60 people to attend. Even if just half of them showed up, we'd still have a sizeable number of attendees. Even so a uneasy calm set in The e-mails from the client weren't encouraging. He kept bringing up stories of local disasters. There was a drought in the area, a big fire in the city—things that seemingly had no bearing on the workshop. When we didn't react to the doom and gloom, he sent us more e-mails. The numbers receded from 60 to 30, then from 30 to 10. It was too late for us to change our minds We'd already committed to the workshop and we decided to go ahead anyway. When the client knew we were determined to go ahead, he decided to book a venue and some accommodation nearby. And here's the interesting bit: We just knew the workshop was in Victoria somewhere and assumed it would be in a big city like Melbourne. Imagine our horror when we were driven over 116 km to a little town called Hepburn Springs We must have been naïve at the time anyway, because it never occurred to use to ask where the workshop was being held. Our workshop at Los Angeles had been so successful that it didn't cross our minds that anything could go wrong. Yet here were with no clue as to who was going to turn up to the event and not even a faint idea about the venue. Which is when we got our next shock The venue was a bed and breakfast with what seemed to be a billiards room. There in the middle of the room was—as you'd expect—a billiards table and I was somehow supposed to present with that monstrosity right in the room. I asked if the table could be moved. The owner grinned and said, "That table hasn't moved in a hundred years, and it's not going to move now". The only option we had was to put a big sheet over the table and chairs around it as it if were a conference table of some kind. But the surprises didn't stop at the venue and the table On the day of the event, two people turned up: the client and his non-paying friend, called Margaret. Nonetheless, we were there to do a workshop and if one per

17 questions? Why have 17 questions in a testimonial? And what if the client won't answer the questions? The reason for the 17 question testimonial is simple. It's not a testimonial any more, it's a experience on paper. When other clients read it, they can sense the ups and downs. They can see the final result. It makes your testimonial stand out. In order to get this 17 question testimonial going, you have to have a strategy in place. This podcast shows you exactly what you need to do so that you can get the answers your business deserves. --------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Part 2: Creating compartmentalisation: Bento Box Style Part 3: Why it's a mistake not to send examples Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. ------------------ A few billion years ago something quite amazing—and destructive—occurred on Earth. Oxygen was produced for the first time. If you were to go back into Earth's history, you'd choke and die quickly And that's because the Earth's atmosphere mostly consisted of Nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide—plenty of carbon dioxide from all those erupting volcanoes—and methane. And then between 2.3-2.4 billion years ago, life began to undergo an amazing transformation on the ocean floor. A bunch of photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria started harnessing the Sun's energy and converted the carbon dioxide and water into food. And what was the waste product of these cyanobacteria? Yes, it was oxygen. Life-harnessing bacteria began to spread to any surface in the sea and creating huge amounts of oxygen. But this oxygen didn't go very far. The oceans were packed with dissolved iron, and you know what happens when iron mixes with oxygen? Sure you do. You get rust. The oceans literally rusted and for hundreds of millions the iron in the ocean sucked up the available oxygen. For about 700 million years of rusting, the oceans ran out of iron. There was just one minor issue: the cyanobacteria were still producing immense amounts of oxygen. Where would all this oxygen go? Into the atmosphere, that's where it all went The oxygen had to escape and it made its way into the Earth's atmosphere. In the billion years that were to follow the Earth began to change from a place where you could hardly breathe, to one that had a bounty of oxygen. Something similar applies you're dealing with testimonials for your business At first the testimonials you get are weak, almost impossible to use. Then as time passes, and if you use the six-questions from The Brain Audit, you'll get testimonials that are more oxygenated. But for you to create a great oxidation event, you need the power of the 17-Question testimonial. And the reason why you need this 17-Question testimonial is because it catapults your testimonials into an experience. Instead of just reading yet another testimonial, the prospect feels the ups, down, twists, turns and final result. Let's go into the land of the 17-Question testimonial and explore three elements: 1) Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions 2) Creating compartmentalisation: Bento box style 3) Why it's a mistake not to send examples First, what are the seventeen questions? We'd want to get that out of the way, so here goes: 1) What was your primary reason for taking this course? 2) Describe how you used to approach writing before this course began 3) Describe how things changed about mid-way into the course 4) Describe how you feel now, towards the end of this course 5) Can you tell us about your experience with the group and the difference it made? 6) Can you tell us why the forum helped? And where it helped? 7) Can you describe to a newcomer how this course is taught? ( teaching methodology) 8- Describe Sean as a teacher 9) Did you have any personal experience (e.g. The moment I understood the one-word, it was a special moment because in the past….etc). 10) What would you say are the big benefits of this course? 11) How did the extra classes? Audio on Mistakes etc. help? 12) Why would you recommend it? 13) The course is called the toughest in the world. Can you describe how tough it was, and what sacrifices you had to make to keep going? 14) What was your toughest moment? How did you overcome it? 14) Have you done other courses with Psychotactics? OR have you signed up or considered signing up for another course? Why? 15) What advice would you give to future participants? 16) How did the course personally help you? 17) Anything else you'd like to add? Part 1: Why you need to send instructions before asking the questions Yesterday my wife Renuka was filling in a form for an online visa. She'd fill in a page of details only to be confronted with yet another. Then she'd fill a second page and the third would show up. Mother's name, father's name, previous visa number—details after details popped up to the point of frustration. When you're asking cli

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! --------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to work with a timer Part 2: The power of sleepPart 3: Why you need to focus on the road, not the destination. Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. --------------------- I've always assumed you needed a nut cracker to open a walnut. Then I learned you could easily use the rear end of a screwdriver. A couple of hard whacks along the ridge, and the nut cracks open easily. To prove the point, I gave my niece Marsha to crack open the nut. She's just 12 and her gentle taps were driving me crazy until I realised that once again I was assuming erroneously. I found out you don't need to whack the nut at all. A few Marsha-taps and it opens just as effectively—and without any splatter. We assume we have to do something great and wonderful to get productive. In reality, the changes needed are Marsha-taps. They're gentle, almost negligible changes that enable us to get a lot done with little or no effort. In fact, one of the biggest productivity tools is to do nothing. Intrigued? Well, follow along. The three points of gentle productivity are: 1) Working with a timer 2) Sleep 3) Focus on the road, not the destination. Part 1: Working with a timer The Psychotactics Article Writing Course is billed as the toughest writing course in the world. And rightly so. In fewer than 12 weeks a participant has to go from a "frozen state" to being able to write an article exceedingly well. When you look at all the components involved in article writing, you run into a mountain of elements to master. A single course covers "topics, sub-topics, outlines, how to start an article, different types of formulas of writing, subheads, objections, examples, summary, sandwiching and yes, the incredibly important task of starting an article." And in the process of juggling all these components, the participants do something that jeopardises the entire learning process. They will try to write an article that seems to meet their own standard Participants complain about the quality of their article. After they write their articles, they somehow feel something's missing. So they go back to write and rewrite until they reach some sort of "quality standard. No one starts off wanting to spend three or four hours on an article, but invariably that's how we go about trying to get our work to a higher "quality". In reality, all that's happening is the build up of exhaustion If you spend four hours writing an article today, and four hours writing an article tomorrow, will you be awake on the day after? The chances are you're just going through the motions as the tiredness seeps into your bones. When you're tired, you're not only robotic, but you miss out on very important learning cues. It seems very much like a Catch 22 situation. You can't create a "great" article unless you work hard at it. And yet, working hard leads to so much exhaustion that the rest of your work suffers. Is there really a way out of this mess? The answer lies in a timer The Article Writing Course runs to a timer. You have a fixed time to do the outlines; a fixed time to do your assignment; and yes, a fixed time to spend your time on the forum looking at the work of others in your group. When your time is up, you're done. But does this make any sense at all? With a fixed time would the quality not get a lot worse? After all, when you labour over your work, you get time to fix the glitches, tidy the work and make it better. A student that is given just 90 minutes to write an article may well be dissatisfied with their work, but give them 180 minutes and they don't turn out 200% better work. Their work is probably improved by a mere 5-10%. But their exhaustion level goes sky high when they take more time to do the task. Tasks that have fixed deadlines may not be the best in the world but they're the key to productivity I draw a daily diary of cartoons in watercolour. I'm fastidious about doing one watercolour every day. Then a big project comes along and I'm suddenly lost. I skip a day, which turns out to be a week. Soon a month has slipped by without any work being completed. What's worse is that I ache to do that watercolour every day, but hey, a watercolour takes me anywhere between 45 minutes to an hour. Which is why I can't handle the watercolour when that project rolls along. But what if I only painted for 15 minutes in the day? Instantly I feel the need to rebel. I know it takes 45 minutes so how on e

There seem to be two sets of clients: really painful ones and amazing It's the painful ones that seem to drain an enormous amount of energy and time. They're the ones that you constantly have to battle with. But how do you know in advance how to avoid these clients? There are red flags in place. In this episode you'll learn how at Psychotactics (for the most part) we avoid painful clients. ---------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why and how to add barriers Part 2: How to filter through testimonials Part 3: How to spot 'Red Flags' Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. ---------------- How We Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Which ants have more offspring? The ants that forage more and hence have more food supplies? Or the ants that are do less foraging and hence have less food? Incredible as it may seem it's the ants that restrain their foraging that fare better Biological studies have almost always believed that species that have the greatest food supply tend to do better. A Stanford study by Deborah M. Gordon demonstrates how harvester ants experience greater success when they're picky. This picky, picky, picky habit applies quite neatly to client acquisition When you first start out in business, it seems like a good idea to go out and forage for new clients all the time. Over time, you'll learn that there are good clients and energy-sapping clients. And that by appealing to everyone you may get success, but at Psychotactics, we've found that seemingly counterintuitive behaviour seems to work a lot better. That instead of trying to increase our reach, we've narrowed it down In the ant world, success is measured by a greater number of offspring. In our world at Psychotactics, success is measured by the amount of control we have over our lives. The ability to work with the clients we want, earn a profit that's sizeable, yet within a pre-defined limit. Most importantly, it has allowed us to take three months off and travel the world on vacation. In a world that's increasingly driving itself crazy, we live with an island mentality. And a significant part of this success lies in the fact that we have great clients. But no one just has great clients. You have to pick great clients. So how do we pick our clients? Over the past 16 years, we've used three core methods. And these methods have worked amazingly well for us. They are: – Adding barriers – Filtering through testimonials. – Red flags Part 1—Barriers: The First Step To Avoid Energy-Sapping Clients at Psychotactics Let's say you tried to buy the copywriting course off our site. You randomly go to the sales page, plop down a couple of thousand of dollars and then wait for your download. The download might never show up. Instead there'd be a back check on your record Yup, just like an employer does a check on your past before hiring you, a check is done on your history with Psychotactics as well. Have you been a subscriber? For how long? Have you bought The Brain Audit yet? When did you do that? Have you bought other smaller products? If the answer is no, it's likely that you'll get your couple of thousand dollars right back in your bank account. So why is the case? It's a barrier in place. And we have rules. And the rules are simple. You need to have subscribed. You need to have read The Brain Audit. Without jumping over those barriers, you're not truly qualified to be part of our system. So yes, we may check if you've bought and consumed the products with another email address, but if the answer is no, then the money goes bouncing right back to your account. I remember an event in Chicago quite clearly I'd just spoken at the System Seminar. I'd just given a presentation, and a member of the audience approached me to buy our info-products course. Was he a subscriber? Did he have The Brain Audit? Would he buy The Brain Audit? His said he wasn't planning to buy The Brain Audit. He just wanted the info-products course. And he was willing to spend his couple of thousand dollars if I just swiped his credit card. You can tell how this story goes, right? To this day, customers can't understand why we'd walk away from thousands of dollars over a measly subscription and a copy of The Brain Audit. But think about it for a second. Would you marry someone who you'd never had a first date with? Would you even consider marrying them without engaging with them at least a couple of times? And if you're not the marrying kind, it doesn't matter. We still understand the concept of testing the waters, putting up the barriers just to see how the other person reacts. At Psychotactics, we know how the other person reacts The greater the barriers the client has to climb, the more they stick around. The more they stick around, the more we get to know each other and help each other move forward. And that is why we have a 3% or less refund rate on bigger products. It's because the client has qualified themselves repeat

In an interview with Tim Ferris, marketer, Seth Godin says that 97% clients drop out from his online courses. And under good conditions, 80% drop out. Yet there's are three core reasons why clients drop out and unless you tackle those issues, it's impossible to stop the dropout rate from spiralling. At Psychotactics, our dropout rate is a measly 10%. Which means that 90% of the clients finish the course. How is that possible? How come there's such a massive difference? This episode shows you what you can do to achieve far superior goals than many, if not most trainers online. ------------------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The power of energy management Part 2: Why the Safe Zone is important Part 3: Why you need group filtration and how to design it ------------------------------------ The Dropout Factor 97% of client drop out in most online courses. 80% of clients drop out from my courses. – Seth Godin The responsibility of the learning depends on the teacher. – Michel Thomas When you think about dropouts, you almost always think about the student. Yet, the responsibility lies with the teacher. It's this seismic shift that rattles most trainers because in their mind it's clear that they've done the best they could. Despite their best efforts, students still drop out. So why does this dropout occur? And what could you do as a teacher to avoid this dropout? There are three core areas which cause a dropout 1) Energy management 2) Safe zone (or the lack of it) 3) Group filtration and design Dropout Factor 1: Let's start with energy management Back when I was about 12, my uncle gave me a Nintendo video game called Snoopy Tennis. The game was pretty simple. Snoopy, the dog, had to bat off the tennis balls being hit at him by Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown had this languid, easy-going serve that was easy to handle. And then Lucy would show up and hit the tennis balls at high speed. If you survived the Lucy barrage, she'd go away, and it would be back to the nice and easy Charlie Brown serves. So what's Snoopy Tennis got to do with energy management? Energy management involves designing your training module. Does it just have modules that jostle each other for prominence or is it designed like Snoopy Tennis? A training module that has Snoopy Tennis in mind will have modules that are easy, slightly difficult and then screamingly tough. But you can't sustain the screamingly tough part for too long. You have to go back to easy once again. If you don't, you get dropouts When the going gets too hard for too long, your clients are going to have an enormous amount of energy depletion. Handling Lucy in that video game is fine for a while, but if the intensity isn't reduced, the client gets tired. Tiredness, not your course, is the biggest reason for dropouts. Once the fuel needle goes consistently down to zero, dropouts are guaranteed. To avoid this situation from ever occurring, you've got to sit down and design your course. But design is often not enough because you've also got to consider flexibility in your agenda Take for example the Article Writing Course that's in progress right now. The entire course has been designed to be like a Snoopy Tennis game. From Week 1 to Week 4 there's a gentle progression. Week 5 is a bit of a jolt. After spending the first four weeks building up topics, outlining and working on the start of their article, the writers now have to turn out a chunky part of the complete article. Almost immediately the "truancy" rate spikes The writers are frozen because the jump is so great. And yet there are times when you can't help but bring on Lucy into the game. In the past, I'd make sure Lucy stayed on for a long time, and it would cause an enormous amount of exhaustion. Exhaustion is one thing, but I noticed that if I reduced the intensity shortly after, the work would get better. So once the intensity is turned on, you keep it on, but then you get Charlie back into the mix. Which means that one week will involve writing 3-4 articles, but the following week will slide down to just two. What you're working on all the time as a teacher is managing energy You're making sure you keep designing and re-designing the assignments, so that it's not too easy, or too challenging. And that you have to keep your teaching agenda flexible if you see a considerable spike in "truancy." This energy management doesn't apply solely to online courses or training It applies to workshops as well. If you get to a Psychotactics workshop, you'll find we have lots of breaks. There are a ton of tea breaks, group breaks, walking assignment breaks. All of them are designed to lower the Lucy factor and let the brain absorb what it's just learned. We also have a scavenger hunt and depending on the type of workshop, we may have a day-long break. For instance, for the New Zealand workshop in Queenstown, we have a four-day workshop, but we work for two days, then go off to eat, drink and be merry. It's o