The Three Month Vacation Podcast

We're all pounded with the whole concept of success. We think that it means more money, more fame, more power. And yet when confronted with defining our own success, we realise there's something we haven't quite defined. In this episode we explore why feeling like a fraud is normal; why seemingly successful people define themselves differently when the spotlight is removed; why space is so critical to creating that identity. / / Identity is what holds us back. Identity is what can take us further. You'll love this episode! Links: To get the special "Resistance" PDF (It's cool, so get it) http://www.psychotactics.com/resistance To get some magic, go to magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To get The Brain Audit, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/brainaudit To leave reviews at iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/three-month-vacation-podcast/id946996410?mt=2 To leave reviews on Android http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=57686&refid=stpr ------------------------ In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: Why It Is Okay To Feel Like A Fraud Part 2: How We Define Success And How It Becomes Your Identity Part 3: The Factor Of Space And Why It Is Critical To Your Life Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing Why Headlines Fail—The Report Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter Audio and Transcript—Three Obstacles To Happiness (And How To Overcome Them) The Transcript This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. The Cherokee elder stood before his students and he told them of two wolves that live and battle within each one of us. One of these wolves, he explained, is ill-natured. It sees the worst in people and things. It thinks only of itself. It is vengeful, jealous, arrogant. It's full of ego and false pride. The other wolf sees the best in people and things. It is kind, it is generous, it is peaceful. It is full of integrity and respect for love itself and others. One of the students asks the chief which one of these wolves wins the battle. The elder replied, "Whichever one you feed. Whichever one you feed, that is your identity." When I started out in marketing, it was very easy for me to get fed by a lot of stuff around me. When you're on Facebook, when you're on the internet, there is a whole lot of junk out there. That junk makes you feel small. It makes you feel insignificant, and you've got to build an identity with the situation around you. How do you do it? In today's episode we will cover the three elements of what was my journey. Also, it's going to be your journey. The first element is one of feeling like a fraud. The second one is just one of success. What does it mean? Finally, the third one, which is one of space and why it's so important. Part 1: Feeling Like A Fraud When you look at January of 2001, I didn't really feel like a fraud, but by December of 2001 I was feeling more and more insecure. What happened between January and December to create all this insecurity? For many years, even as I was a kid, I used to draw. I was extremely shy, and I've been drawing my whole life. I became a cartoonist. I became a writer. That's what shy people do. As I moved into the world of marketing, that completely threw me. I didn't know that much about marketing. I didn't know how people think, what they do, how they buy, the prices that they decide on. But I read this book by Jim Collins, which was called Good to Great. It asked what can you be the best in the world at. I thought I love the cartooning, I love the writing, but I want to do something different. The answer lay, strangely, in marketing. I was not into marketing. I just didn't understand it. In all the years that I had run the cartooning business, I had done very little organized marketing. It was a good thing, because we moved to New Zealand and the public library was accessible, which was different from India. I stepped into the library and I picked up ten books. Then I picked up another ten books. Then eventually the librarian realized that I was picking up a lot of books so they gave me an allocation where I could take 30 books at a time. I read those books. The more I read it, the less confident I got, the more I felt like a fraud. But because I had no choice, I went out there and I spoke with clients. I spoke at small little events. The feeling of being a fraud didn't go away. It always seemed like someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, "Okay, your time is up. You've been talking nonsense for quite a while now and it's time for me to get in here." Six months passed, and a year passed. That tap never came. Then I did a trip to the US and I met with other marketers and I spoke with them. An interesting thing happened. I realized that these guys don't know that much more than I do. In fact, I know quite a few things that they don't know. That's when that fraud label just slipped off and f

When your client picks up your report, can you guarantee they'll read it from start to finish? No matter how good the content, there are precise elements that cause a client to completely consume the report. This episode delves into three of the most important elements that makes your report stand out—and more importantly—get read. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: What makes a report powerful? Part 2: What are tiny increments? Part 3: How to empower your reader Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources and Links Dart Board Pricing: How To Increase Prices (Without Losing Customers) The Headline Report: Why Headlines Fail The 70% Principle: Why It Knocks Procrastination Out of the Ball Park The Transcript Back in the year 2003 I wrote an article where you just had to take three steps to write a great headline. You could test the headline and you could find out in minutes that it worked for you, and it also got the attention of your customers. I wasn't prepared for how popular that article would be. As we were looking at the statistics of the Psychotactics site, we saw that the article got picked up over and over again. Then we decided, let's make this a report. Surprisingly, when I took that same article, which was just about 800 words, and I put it into a PDF and put some graphics and an introduction and some cartoons, it became close to a ten-page book. That is the headline report. This is the interesting part. The report was nothing more than an article. Can we all do the same? Can we just write an 800-word article, put it in a report, and make it powerful? Not quite. You have to understand why the report works. We're going to break up that headline report here today on this podcast. You'll see for yourself, there are three elements that make it work. Let's explore those three elements. What makes the report so powerful? The key factor is not the elements but the overall concept. The overall concept is one of empowerment. We are so hung up on the concept of information that we forget what we really have to do as teachers. As teachers we have to empower. We know we've done our job correctly when the client is able to do exactly what we're doing, and possibly even better. Frankly, when I was writing the headline report I wasn't thinking of this. I wasn't thinking of empowerment. I wasn't thinking of the elements. But when you deconstruct the report you can see there are three very specific elements that make it that empowerment tool. The first of the elements is tiny increments. The second is the length. The third are the examples in the report. Let's explore each one systematically. Let's start off with the first one, which is the tiny increments. What are tiny increments? About a month ago I got myself some recording hardware. It has all these buttons and it's very hard to figure out which button to press and when to press it. Of course you don't want to look at the manual because that's really badly written. Maybe you go online like I did and you go to YouTube. There are lots of tutorials on how to use it, but there is all this unboxing and then something else and something else. 35 minutes later, you have no clue what you're supposed to do. Then I found a video that was only three minutes long. The video only covered turning on the device. Now, it was three minutes long. How much can you learn about turning on a device? It's a little switch. But it was so cool. I could actually do it. It was a tiny increment. You don't have to put in a ton of information for people to be impressed. You have to empower. At the end of the video, what could I do? I could turn on the device. So I go to the next video. In the next video, they cover a little bit again. This is the concept of tiny increments. When we're teaching, we don't understand that the client doesn't get what we're saying. Let's say you've come to one of the Psychotactics workshops and we're doing an experiment. We're saying we're going to take steps now. I say, "Okay, let's take a step." Then you watch the people in the room. What do they do? Almost everyone will take a step forward, but someone will take a step to the left, or someone will take a step to the right, or someone will take a step back. Now we have all these permutations where people are going off-tangent. If they just take one step, they just make one mistake, you can pull them back and then say, "What I meant was take a step to the left." Now the whole group can go one step back, one step to the left, and now we're on target. When you have something that has a very tiny increment, the customer can only make a very small mistake. You can spot the mistake and pull them back, or you can show them that mistake in your report and pull them back. When you have this wealth of information, all these buttons to press and all these things to do all at once, suddenly the customer is lost. When they're lost, they're intimidated, and intimidation

How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough". ========== Some goodies To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ======== Transcript: Power of Enough Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long. Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?" Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich? One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit? When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day. So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept. The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough. If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop becoming a teacher and you start becoming a preacher. It just becomes a blah blah session. You can't really help people. At least when it comes to work, we have our courses, our workshops, our membership sites. It's all bas

Vacations are like a project. There's a before-vacation and an after-vacation period that needs to be carefully managed. After years of taking vacations?and that too thrice a year, we have to do a lot of planning. So how do we make sure everything works when we're away? How do we make sure we don't get tempted by e-mail and work while on vacation? And how do you manage a smooth re-entry back to work? These super-duper secrets are yours for the taking in this super-duper episode. Contact Me: On Twitter: seandsouza On e-mail at: [email protected] http://www.psychotactics.com (For all notifications and super-duper newsletters). In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: How to handle the recurring elements of a business—newsletters, podcasts and membership sites Part 2: Finishing of projects Part 3: How to handle coming back to work. Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources and Links How To Increase Your Pricing— Dartboard Pricing Why Headlines Fail—The Report Psychotactics Newsletter—Weekly slightly crazy, mostly zany marketing newsletter The Transcript This is 3-month vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza Right after Renuka and I got married, we decided that we're going to go to many places and we did go for a honeymoon because that's what I was told, you don't go for your honeymoon, and every time you have a fight, that's the one thing that comes up. Anyway, we went for a honeymoon and then a year passed and we didn't go anywhere, and the second year passed, then we did a trip to Australia simply because there was some kind of discount on Qantas, but then the years ticked away and then we moved to New Zealand and we realized that 4 and 5 years had passed and we weren't going anywhere. That was a real problem because inherently, the reason why I quit my job in India in the first place was because I couldn't go on vacation whenever I wanted to. Even when I got to New Zealand, it was a problem because every time I went on holiday, I'd be very hassled about someone else taking my work, that I was not getting paid, and so holidays or vacations became a very important part of our life. What lots of people don't realize is that a vacation is also a project and you have to plan if you want to make it successful. One of the things that you have to plan is what you do before you leave and what you do when you get back. This episode is dedicated to the vacation. In this episode, I'm going to cover recurring elements like the newsletter and the podcast and the membership site, and then from there, we'll go to the next thing, which is how we get closure before we leave, and then how we hit the ground running when we get back. Those are the three things that we'll cover today. Let's start with the first one, which is how we handle recurring responsibilities. Part 1: Handling Recurring Responsibilities of a Business—Newsletters, Podcast and Membership Sites At Psychotactics, we are mainly into consulting, training and product, which is really a complete business by itself. Consulting would mean speaking with clients one on one and I definitely don't speak with clients while I'm away. I don't make any exceptions to this rule. When I'm on holiday, I'm on holiday. The second element is one of leverage, which are products, and again, we don't work when we're on holiday. We might take a trip that is specifically designed to do some work but while we're on vacation, there is little work. That just leaves us with the other recurring elements like newspapers and podcasts and membership sites. The newsletter goes out every week twice a week and the Tuesday newsletter, that is about an article about marketing, about business. The Saturday newsletter, that's the sales biz newsletter. It's our products, our services, courses. That has to be queued well in advance. Let's start out with the Tuesday newsletter, which is the article-based newsletter. Let's say we're going to be away for 4 or 5 weeks. Now what we have to do is we have to make sure that we don't just cover for 5 weeks but that we cover 8 weeks. The reason for this is very simple. Before you go on any trip, chaos invariably knocks at your door, so what you've got to do is make sure that your newsletters are being worked out before you leave, while you're away and then when you come back, because when we get back, it's not like I'm keen to sit own and write articles. In fact, when I'm away, I lose all momentum and then when I get back, I'm not really in the mood to write any articles. What I have to do is in the 12 weeks that we're back, I have to make sure that somehow, I double the number of articles in some of the weeks. Even so, I may not finish the requisite number of articles that I require while we're away. What we do is we run some of the articles from the archives, and they do this on TV shows as well. When the presenter is away, they just pull out old stuff and they run it again, and clients don't mind. They don't mind r

Is FREE worth it? Or should everything be paid for? How does a person go from free to fee? And how do you stand out in a world where so much is free? There's a simple strategy that needs to be followed and once you do, you'll find client will happily move from free to paid clients. Tah-dah?the strategy follows! Notes To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/42 Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy Part 2: How Do You Go From Free to Fee? Part 3: How Do We Get Over This Fear? Right click here and 'save as' to download this episode to your computer. Useful Resources and Links Amazing Cartoons for your ebooks, presentations, blog: Cartoon Stock Series How To Avoid Boring Testimonials : And Get 1000-1500 Word Stories Instead The Brain Audit: Why Customers Buy And Why They Don't The Transcript This is the Three-Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Often in Hollywood movies, you get this concept of the ugly duckling. You'll see this girl who obviously looks pretty, but they make her look as if she's got pimples and her hair is not that great. Then, somewhere in the middle of the movie, she magically turns into this beautiful swan. Ugly duckling to white swan. That's how free-to-fee works. When you're giving away information free or even if you intend to give away information free, you'll feel like an ugly duckling. You'll feel as if you're giving away all that hard-earned knowledge that you've gained. You're not going to get much response from it or result from it, and you're somehow hoping that there's going to be a middle of the movie when things change and that ugly duckling scenario turns into a white swan. Yet, there is a logic and a strategy that enables you to go from free to paid products or paid services. As always, we'll cover three main topics, and then we'll go to an action plan, so you can implement it. The first element we'll cover is this concept of why free should be non-crappy. In the second topic, we'll look at some of the tactics and strategies that you can use to go from free to fee. In the third topic, we'll cover the fear and how to get over that fear, so that you can successfully jump from free to fee. Let's start off with the first one, shall we? The reason why your free should be non-crappy. Part 1: The Reason Why Your Free Should Be Non-Crappy Yesterday, I was on Twitter, and I was talking to a guy called "Craig". Craig, you know who you are. He was telling me how he was binge listening to these podcasts. What is causing Craig to binge listen? Then, as I smiled my way through the morning, I got another email. It was from a guy called "Michael". Michael said he's been reading all the articles on our website, and he's been reading them for hours on end. He said he's going to come back to read some more. That's how it should feel. When you're giving away information, it should feel like you're giving away something valuable. Not something crappy. It shouldn't be something that you found in your drawer that you've had since 2003, and you just didn't get rid of. That's what a lot of people do. When they give away things free, they give away stuff that is not so valuable, and it goes into the crappy basket. Their logic is, "Let me keep all the good stuff for my book. Let me keep all the good stuff for my consulting program. Let me keep all the good stuff for whatever it is I'm going to earn from, and let me not give away all that valuable stuff." That's completely contrary to what I'm saying here. I'm saying that you should give away at least a bit of the good stuff if not a lot of the good stuff. In today's world, there is so much information, so much free information that people don't have any regards for free information anymore. If your stuff doesn't hit them right between the eyes, there's probably not going to be a second chance. How do you sort out the good stuff from the crappy stuff? One of the ways to go about creating really good stuff is to go deeper into a topic. For instance, in podcast number 38, it was about not planning testimonials or rather how to get testimonials before you finish a project. Now, a main topic would just be "How to Get Testimonials" or "How to Get Good Testimonials", but this topic is very niche in a way. It goes deeper into the topic of testimonials which is "How to Get Testimonials before the Project is Even Complete". You have to sit down and work out how could this problem be solved. Your clients might ask a question like this, and then you have to sit down and work out this puzzle like a Rubik's Cube, or you might want to sit down with a mind map, and then go deeper into the topic. The main topic is always usually an overview topic. It's usually crappy. This is what you see on the internet a lot. When you go deeper, things change. For instance, with

How much time does it take to do research? Yup, those zillions of hours go down the drain and get us exhausted. And that's because we go about doing research the "wrong way". Most of us do our research once we sit down to write an artilce, create a webinar or podcast. A zillion hours later, the content is still not ready and the hours have flown away needlessly. That needn't be the case at all. Almost all research needs to be done in advance and stored away. But how do you find it once it's stored away? That's where the power of "opposite" tagging", default notebook and the phone and iPad come along. Find out how to reclaim those zillions of hours back—right now! -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/41 Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Finding Money In My Jeans 00:05:31 Table of Contents 00:06:08 Part 1: How To Take Pictures 00:12:12 Part 2: Why Tagging With Opposites Matters 00:15:51 Part 3: Default Notebook 00:19:35 Summary 00:21:14Final Comments + Offers ==== Transcript This is the 3-Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When I was a teenager, nothing was more interesting to me than finding money in my pant pockets. I'd have all these pairs of jeans and obviously I'd use some of them and then not use the others, and just mix them around. Then eventually I'd go back to the same pair of jeans, yes, dirty jeans, we know. You're a teenager, remember? Then I'd find money and I'd announce it to the world. My mother would go, "But, it's your own money." I just found it really interesting. I found it very exciting to find money that I thought I didn't have. I don't know what it might feel like to win the lottery because I'll never buy a lottery ticket, but this sure felt great. To me it felt like winning the lottery. There was of course, a problem with this method, and that was I couldn't find money when I needed it, and so it was not such an efficient method. Evernote on the other hand, is an amazing tool. If you want to find information, you can find it every single time. When I first got Evernote, I thought it was a pretty average tool. I didn't understand it. You know how you sit down and you do research every time you're writing an article or you're writing a book or you're creating a podcast or a video? That's the worst time to ever do research. Research should be done in advance. Evernote is a research tool where you collect all your information in advance and then you're able to find it easily. In fact, you don't have to remember anything because Evernote will remember it for you. In this episode we're also going to cover a concept of tagging that you've probably not considered and that will make your entire presentation, your books and other stuff, amazing. Back in 2010, I was doing a workshop on uniqueness and we were doing the workshop in California, then in Washington D.C. and then in Guildford, which is just outside London. That summer was a brutal summer for me. Remember, summer is December in New Zealand, so all of December, and a good part of January, I was really tired because I had been writing the notes for the workshop. We always send the notes month in advance for all our workshops. We send all the participants the notes a month in advance. Then once I finished the notes I had to start on the slide. When I'm working on slides, I'll put most of the information together and then I'll leave some slides blank for examples and more information that I need to add later. The time came for us to leave on our trip and off we went to the U.S. We reached Campbell, California. That was our first stop. After the first day, which went really well, I sat down in the evening and I went through my slides for the next day. At that point in time, I found a whole bunch of slides that had blanks in them, as in they had the information but there were no graphics and there were no examples and I just cannot have a presentation without a ton of examples. That really helps the participants understand the concept. It also breaks up this intensity of information. I've got no examples and it's 8:00 at night. I've been up since 4 in the morning and been running around all day at the workshop. Where am I going to find any examples at this hour? I go to my pant pockets. That's Evernote. I dig into them and there are 108 notes on uniqueness. Now, not all of them are examples, but 108 notes on one topic and I'm ecstatic. I mean, I'm exhausted but I'm ecstatic because at least I can get some of the examples, take screenshots, do what I have to do and I'm ready for the presentation the next day. This is the power of Evernote. It's the power of doing research in advance long before you need it. What are we going to cover today? The first thing that we're going to cover today is how to take pictures and why they're so critical. The second i

Success is good. Focus is good. Until it's bad. Incredible as it may seem, focus can cause a massive blindspot in our business. So what's the option? Surely it can't be distraction? Actually it's a mix of both that's required. Using the concept of "spinning plates", you can avoid the blind spot of success and the mindlessness of distraction. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/40 Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:20 Part 1: The Rip Van Winkle Effect 00:08:17 Part 2: Chasing Everything In Sight 00:10:03 Part 3: Spinning Plates 00:13:24 Summary 00:14:00 Action Plan: The One Thing 00:14:20 How We Add Plates 00:19:26 End ---- Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. Once upon a time in New York's Catskill Mountains lived a man called Rip Van Winkle. You've probably heard of this story. I heard it when I was a kid. I've kind of forgotten what the story was all about. As the story goes, one autumn day he wants to escape from his wife's nagging so he wonders up the mountain with his dog. He hears his name being called out. He sees a man with antiquated Dutch clothing. This man is carrying a keg up the mountain; he wants help. They proceed to a hollow in which Rip discovers the source of the noises. There are a group of bearded men who are playing nine pins. Rip doesn't ask how they know his name but they offer him moonshine, which is a kind of whiskey, illicit whiskey, not legal. He decides to drink and then he falls into a deep sleep. When he wakes up, it's pretty strange. His musket is rotting; it's rusty. His beard is a foot long. His dog is nowhere in sight. He returns to the village and he finds he recognizes no one. His wife has died. His close friends have fallen in a war; they moved away. This is often what happens in business, especially if you've got a successful business. You get a blind spot. You start focusing on what works for you, and then you work at it and you work at it, and it works even better for you. The longer you work at it, and the more successful you get, the more you have a blind spot to everything else. Now, almost instantly you're wondering where is this going. Focus is supposed to be good, right? If focus brings success, then what's the problem with having the blind spot? There is a downside, and that's what this episode is all about. It's about understanding that you can have focus and you can have success, but that you can also have a blind spot. In this episode we're going to explore three elements. First is the concept of the Rip Van Winkle effect. The second is the opposite, which is the danger of not having that focus. The third is the solution. How do we solve this problem of focus and not focusing at the same time? Let's start off with the first, which is understanding the concept of the Rip Va Winkle effect. If you look around you, you will find that a lot of blogs have shut off their comments. Why have they done this? This is not just little blogs, but big blogs and mega-sized blogs. They've just shut off their comments. Why is this the case? The obvious reaction is maybe they've decided that they're big enough they don't need the comments, but that's not true. Everyone likes to hear back from their customers. Nothing boosts the ego more than having 50, 70, 100, 200 comments on a single post that you made. Remember, when people comment they also send it off to Facebook and Twitter and every other place. Why turn off that channel? Why turn off the chance for people to experience your blog at a different level? The reason is very simple: that group has moved on. When you look at the most of the blogs today, even the really big ones, they have far fewer comments. It's embarrassing, so they have to turn it off. Same thing with Facebook. At one point in time you could effectively run a business off Facebook. Slowly but surely, that tide is changing. Suddenly you find that Facebook has all these restrictions in place. Suddenly there are too many people looking at your stuff, but not the people that you want, so the tide keeps changing. If you made a successful out of blogging or, say, Facebook or any other medium, then it's very simple for you to focus on that medium and not pay that much attention to everything else, so suddenly someone comes around and says, "Hey, podcasting is a big thing." You look at them with skepticism because you tried podcasting four or five years ago and now this stuff, whatever you're doing right now, is still working for you, so you get into that moonshine mode. You fall fast asleep, and that becomes your blind spot. This is true even for us at Psychotactics. We had a blog going around 2003 before blogs became popular in 2005l; we dropped it. We had podcasts going around 2008-2009 before podcasting became popular; we dropped it

What makes one presentation far superior than the next? What makes you want to binge-listen to some podcasts and just reject the others? What makes one book so readable while the other one is boring? It's the concept of info-tainment. Where information is used to get attention, but entertainment is used to keep that attention. Find out more in this episode. -------------------- Useful Resources To access this audio + transcript: http://www.psychotactics.com/39 Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Start / 00:01:57 Table of Contents / 00:03:09 Part 1: Analogies / 00:09:45 Part 2: Case Studies / 00:10:00 Case Study: Shantiniketan / 00:13:19 Part 3: History Lessons / 00:17:14 Case Study: Shantiniketan / 00:17:14 Summary / 00:18:14 Final Notes / --------------------- Sean D'Souza: I'm Sean D'Souza. Every morning when I go for my walk I listen to podcasts and I listen to audiobooks. As you know, I also learn a language, but whenever I'm headed out towards the café, it's always podcasts or audiobooks. I started to analyze. I started to think about what is it that I really like to listen to. 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Now obviously you get a lot of speakers and a lot of different topics, so you can't just boil it down to one thing, but you can. The one thing that I like to listen to, and I find that a lot of people like to listen to, is something called infotainment. That's information and entertainment. People like to learn stuff, become more intelligent, but they don't want to be bored along the way. It's not just a matter of presenting the information in a good way. You literally have to provide entertainment, so how you provide entertainment. As part of my analysis I started reading a lot of articles and books. I started listening to more audiobooks, and then listened to some presentations as well, and I figured out the difference. The difference is a story well told. I like to split up stories well told into three categories. The first is the analogy, the second is the case study, and the third are history lessons. How do we use these concepts to make our information more interesting, to make our articles more interesting, and especially to make our presentations more interesting? More importantly, why would analogies, case studies, and history lesson be so important. The reason is very simple. Information is tiring. That's it. Whenever you give someone information, if they already know the information, [inaudible 00:02:06] just revising the information. If you give them new information, some new concept, so new methods, it starts to seem very nice and very interesting, but as you go past five, ten, 15 minutes, the brain is trying to work out not only what you're saying but also how to apply it, so it gets extremely tiring. That's when the brain needs a break. The brain not only needs a break but it could also do with an example. That's where analogies, case studies, and history lessons come into play. Let's start off with the first one, which is the analogy. In this episode we'll do something slightly different. I'll talk about good analogies and bad analogies, and good case studies and bad case studies, and so on. Let's start off with the good analogy. What is a good analogy? Well, let's start off with what is a bad analogy. I'm sitting there with this photographer and I've been trying to get in touch with him for quite a while, and he's been fobbing me off. Then eventually we sit at this café. It's about an hour and he's going on into this bad analogy after bad analogy after bad analogy. What is this bad analogy? He's explaining to me how photography should have strong foundations. He talks about a house that's built on sand vs. on rock. The point is, has he given me any new information? Is the analogy any different from something I know before. When he's using that analogy it's very boring. I've already heard the story of the house built on sand vs. rock. Then he goes on to even more analogies. I can't tell you what those analogies are because I was completely bored out of my skull. The whole one hour that I was there, he went into analogy after analogy, and then talked about photography in the

We ask for testimonials and we get them, but are they any good? Or are they the usual sugary stuff that no one really reads. How do you get testimonials that are "journeys" and weigh in at 800-1000 words? Find out in this episode on "how to plan—and yes—get outstanding testimonials. Oh, and I'm at [email protected]. -------------------- Useful Resources Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ This is the Three Month Vacation. I'm Sean D'Souza. It's August 13, 2008. The time? It's 9:56 AM. Olympic champion Michael Phelps is standing behind his starting block. He bounces. He bounces lightly on his toes. Then the announcer calls his name and he steps onto the block. Michael always waves his hands thrice; he's done that since he was a kid. He then steps on the block again. He gets his position, and then the gun goes off and he jumps into the pool. The moment he's in the water he realizes something is wrong. He doesn't know what is wrong but the moisture seems to fill up the goggles. By the second turn, everything's blurry. By the third lap, his goggles are full of water. But Michael is no longer in Beijing; he's back in Michigan. The pool is a familiar practice pool, not Olympic pool. There's no roar of the crowd. It's just Bob Bowman, his coach. Bob has turned off all the lights off in the Michigan pool just so Michael can learn to swim blind, just in case something like this were to happen, something's that's happening right now at the Olympic finals. Winners always plan, and this is the difference between winners and those that struggle. The ones that struggle don't seem to have a plan in place. For something as minor as a testimonial you might think well, I don't really have to do that much planning. After all, the testimonial is about the client, isn't it? You just ask them the questions or you ask for a testimonial and they give you the testimonial. That's not true. The greatest testimonial is not some sugary-coated "I like your stuff. Your stuff is so great." The really good testimonial is a journey. It's a journey of how the customer bought your product or service, the trials and tribulations they went through, and finally, how they came out at the end. It's more like a movie than just a little Twitter feed. As you'd expect, there are three steps to get there, and we will take those itty bitty steps and we'll get there, and then we'll have our action plan, just one thing you can do, as always. What are the three things that you have to do to ensure that your testimonial is really good? This doesn't matter whether you're doing a course or you're a consultant or you have a product like a book or anything other product. You have to go through these three steps. These three steps don't work in every single instance, but in most instances you'll find that it's very, very useful. What are the three steps? Step number one is to make an appointment. What is an appointment? Let's find out. The second thing is not having examples. Why do examples matter in the first place? The third, and probably the most important, is not having the requisite questions. What are the questions? What questions do we need to ask and how do we get the answers out of the client? This is what a journey is all about. It's about planning. It's about storyboarding. It's not just about showing up for your testimonial and then hoping that the client will give you a great testimonial. We'll take this journey and we'll figure out how we get this great testimonial. When you finish this journey, go back to episode number 37. At 37 you learn the specific points where you can ask for testimonials and get those testimonials long before your project is completed. Not after the project, but before the project is completed. Now we're on episode number 39, and let's find out the three steps that you have to take to make sure that you get these amazing journey-like testimonials. What's the first step that you have to take? The first step that you have to take is making the appointment. Most of us make the appointment at the wrong spot. The spot is usually after the job is done. The appointment needs to be made before the job is done. I explained to you in episode number 37 how we do this in our workshops. On day one there are people that give testimonials, on day two there are people that give testimonials, and day three there are people that give testimonials. What we're doing is we're making appointments. Renuka will go ahead of time, meet these people, make sure that they're ready at a specific point in time. They're seated somewhere. We have the equipment ready. It is an appointment. The same thing applies to your business. Even if you're a consultant, or you're selling a product, you want to make an appointment with a client. You have to be there most of the time. Even if you can't physically be there,

You've told yourself you shouldn't be a perfectionist. Yet time and time again we head back to getting things done—perfectly. And in the process we get nothing done. I get into that trap a lot, and the only way out of the trap is to use a combination of three methods: external deadlines, internal deadlines and the "version system". Interestingly, one of the most effective tools you have at your disposal is a timer. Find out how to use these methods—and yes—the timer. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Twitter/Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: The Great White: The Ultimate Predator? / 00:05:19 Table of Contents / 00:06:00 Part 1: External Deadlines / 00:11:34 Part 2: Internal Deadlines / 00:14:11 Part 3: Versions / 00:16:49 Summary / 00:18:06 Actiion Plan: The ONE Thing / 00:18:28 Final Wrap Up / This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. When you think of the greatest killer in the ocean, one thought comes to mind, and that is the great white shark. Until quite recently, the great white shark was considered to be the ultimate predator. They grow up to a length of 15 feet and they weigh about 5,000 pounds, which is about 2,500 kilos. We consider the great white shark to be the ocean's ultimate predator. But in fact, the ocean's ultimate predator is not a fish at all, it's a dolphin. Well, it belongs to the dolphin family and it's called the orca. Orca are known as killer whales, but that's wrong because they're not whales at all. They belong to the dolphin family. The reason why they're probably called killer whales is because at some point in time they were called whale killers, and somewhere along the line it got inverted and now they're called killer whales. The greatest predator in the ocean, that's it: the orca, the whale killer. It's called a whale killer because they routinely gang up on whales, especially baby whales. Yes, that's breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes. But no one had ever seen an orca attack a great white until it happened. Then in October of 1997 there was this whale watching tour. They were out on a routine whale watching mission and they got this call that there was some activity. They rushed to the scene and what they saw had never been seen before. They saw an orca attacking a great white. There they are, this whale watching tour, off the Farrallon Islands, which is just off San Francisco. There's complete quiet, complete silence in the water for about 15 minutes. No one knows what is happening. They know that the orca and the great white are out there but no one knows what is happening. Then out bursts the orca with the great white between its teeth. Now a great white, as fearsome as it is, is about half the size of an orca. It's about 15 feet, whereas an orca grows up to be about 32 feet. The weight is different as well: about 5,000 pounds for the great white and 22,000 pound for the orca. Still, they'd never seen an orca attack a great white before. Why was it so quiet for 15 minutes? What kind of attack would involve quiet? What they found out later was how the orca attacks. Sharks, as it appears, are only fearsome right side up. If you flip them over they go into a state of almost being unconscious. It's called a state of tonic immobility. What this orca did was it attacked the shark and flipped it over. For all those 15 minutes it held it in a state of tonic immobility. Now a shark that is held in that position, it cannot breathe. After a while it just drowns. That's what the orca knew. Somehow they had figured out that if you held the shark in a state of tonic immobility, they would not move again. They would be stuck forever. This is how it feels like when we're trying to deal with perfection. So many of us call ourselves perfectionists, but we're in this state of tonic immobility. We're struggling to get things done. How do we get out of this state of always wanting to do things perfectly? How do we get out of this state of tonic immobility? As usual, we're going to cover three things and then you're going to get an action plan. You know something? I think I forgot to give an action plan in the last podcast. That was podcast number 35, I think. Anyway, we'll have that action plan this time around. The three things that we're going to cover are first, the external deadline. The second is the concept of a timer, which is an internal deadline, and finally, the understanding of how versions work. Let's start off with the first one, which is the external deadline. In October of 2014 I decided that I wanted to write a book on pricing. I put it down and got everyone to look at it and did a plan. Then November came along and then December came long, and then Jan and then Feb. Then around the middle of February we sold it, as in pre-sold it. We did an offer. I didn't do a s

Most of us wait until a job is completed to ask for testimonials. Admittedly that's a good time, but it's also much harder to get a testimonial from a client at that stage. Then we have to get all needy when asking for the testimonial. There are three points when you can get testimonials, and get them long before the client has finished with your product or service? Where are these points located? And can all of us get testimonials at these points? Find out in this episode?and get to the points sooner than later. What I'm listening to on audio books Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb The Brain's Way of Healing by Norman Doidge Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Twitter: seandsouza / Facebook: seandsouza Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / Time Stamps 00:00:20 Start / 00:02:41 Table of Contents / 00:03:18 Bear Point No.1: Getting Agreement In Advance / 00:05:45 Bear Point No.2: In Progress Testimonial / 00:09:58 Bear Point No.3: Tail End of Project / 00:12:09 Summary / 00:15:36 Links, Resources and Goodies Sean D'Souza: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. As spring arrives in British Columbia and Alaska, something amazing happens. The grizzly bear comes out of its hibernation. All through the winter it has been high up in the mountains where there's lots of snow, and it's relatively easy to hibernate in the snow. Now it's time to feed, but there's no food up here so it has to make its way down to the coast. It's all about timing. It's all about planning. It has to get there just in time for the salmon run. It might seem to us that the bear just shows up, but usually a mother bear will have some cubs with her as she makes her way down the mountain, so it's not just a matter of showing up but also making sure that the cubs make it, because the cub mortality rate is very high. Over half of the cubs die every year. The bear has to wake up from its hibernation, makes its way down the mountain, make sure the cubs are all fine, or at least as fine as they could be, and then get in position for the salmon run which will happen at a speak time, provided the rains come. All of this requires an enormous amount of time and anticipation, and we have to do exactly the same thing. We have to act like bears when we want to get our testimonials, because if we don't anticipate and we don't plan, then nothing happens. It's all about timing. It's all about being there at the right time, at the right moment. Or is it? Most of us think that testimonials are only available for us once the project is complete. It doesn't have to be like that. The project can be very incomplete before you starting to get testimonials. Let's just explore these elements of where you can get testimonials. The first point of getting a testimonials, or getting an agreement for a testimonial, is before the project even begins. The second point is the in-progress testimonial. Finally, you can get a testimonial right on the tail end of the project. In all three instances, the project hasn't been completed and you're getting a testimonial, or at least an agreement to a testimonial. Let's explore all three of them one by one. In one of my first jobs as a consultant I didn't have any testimonials, so I had to get the testimonial in advance, or at least get the agreement for the testimonial. Here's what I did. When we sat down to work out the project, we worked out the scope of the project, and then at the tail end of the discussion I turned to the person and said, "If this project works out exactly as you planned, as we planned, can I get a really good testimonial?" Of course the client is anticipating the fact that the job will be done really well, and so they will give you a really good testimonial. Just by asking this little question at the starting point, it makes a huge difference to how you get the testimonial at the end. When someone has already agreed to something, there is more of a likelihood of them giving a testimonial. When they have not agreed to something, and at the end you in and say, "Can I have a testimonial?" the chances are diminished. The first instance is always to look at where can I get an agreement. At first it seems like this is only consulting-based, but it works just as well if you're doing a workshop, just as well if you're writing a book. Say for instance you're writing a book and you have these graphs. The client or the prospect client can look at those graphs and agree to a testimonial in advance. Same things applies to the workshop. What you're really doing is setting the whole benchmark. You're getting the client ready and prepared. Not every client is ready when you just finished the project, but if you've put it in right at the start as part of the agreement, the chances are much higher. You're like that bear sitting there not on some river any place on the planet, but specifically in British Columbia. You're waiting for the salmon, so you're setting it up in advance. You'r

-------------------- It's easy to just want praise, but that's not how nature works. Nature roots out the fragile and keep only that which is anti-fragile. So is anti-fragility just a factor of "resilience"? No it isn't. There's a big difference between being resilient and anti-fragile. And the key to anti-fragility is to be like a "hydra". Find out more about how you can root out the namby-pamby factor and become anti-fragile. Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Anti-Fragile / 00:00:33 The Trip To New Zealand / 00:02:26 The Stockdale Paradox: Good To Great / 00:05:43 Table of Contents / 00:06:15 Part 1: Chaos / 00:09:33 Part 2: Twice as Strong / 00:13:37 Part 3: Brutal Feedback / 00:20:06 Summary / 00:21:03 The One Thing You Can Do / 00:21:41 What's Happening Next? / 00:23:10 ====== Sean: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. In the year 2000 we had moved to New Zealand from India. When we moved to New Zealand we didn't really know anyone here. We'd never been to New Zealand. We just chose to come here, and then in 2001 we decided we were going to stay here, so we had to get on a flight and go back and sell our apartment and sell all the stuff that we had there and just close up everything in India. While I was on the flight I had a book with me. It was called Good to Great. It's a book by Jim Collins. I'm not sure why I picked it up. Maybe it was the title. As I was reading that book on the flight, something happened to me that changed my mindset. What was my mindset at that point in time? It was a complete jumble of facts. We'd got to New Zealand. We'd bought a house within three months of getting here. I'd got a job; I last at the job for six months and then I was made redundant. The question is were we feeling fragile. That's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about this concept of anti-fragility. Anti-fragility is just not being fragile, it is the opposite of fragile. I used to drink rum and Coke back then, and while I'm at 35,000 feet I'm drinking my rum and Coke and chomping my peanuts, and reading about the Stockdale paradox. This is about a guy called James Stockdale. He was in prison in the Vietnam War and he was the highest ranking officer at the infamous Hanoi Hilton, which was a prisoner of war camp. From 1965 to 1973 he was tortured over 20 times. On page 85 of the book there is this conversation between the author, Jim Collins, and Stockdale. Jim Collins is asking Stockdale who didn't make it out of the prison camp. Stockdale says, "Oh, that's easy. The optimists didn't make it." That causes Jim Collins to be completely confused. He says, "I don't understand. Why the optimists?" Stockdale says, "The optimists always thought that things would get better, so they would say we'd be out by Christmas, and then Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they'd say we'd be out by Easter, and then Easter would come and Easter would go. Then they would say we'll be out by Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving would come and suddenly it would be Christmas again. Eventually they died of a broken heart." Optimism, it seems, can be very fragile. In his book, Nassim Taleb talks about this concept of anti-fragility. The book, by the way, is called Antifragile. Fragile is something like glass. It drops to the floor and it breaks into a thousand pieces. Then you have something which is resilient and that is a piece of metal. That doesn't break, but nothing changes it. As soon as something hits it, it falls to the floor, nothing changes it. It remains exactly the same. Then there is something in between. That in between thing, that is anti-fragile. That's someone like James Stockdale where you get battered and hit and punished and pushed around. Everything comes at you, good times, bad times, and you change but you become stronger. I always thought that being resilient was powerful, but resilient, as Nassim Taleb describes it, is being like that block of steel. Nothing happens to it. It doesn't change, and you want to change. You want to improve. You want to get better. What makes anti-fragility so important? We'll cover three topics as we always do, and then we'll have a clear action plan, just one thing that you can do. In today's episode we're going to talk about chaos and how it becomes part of our life. The second thing that we're going to talk about, how anti-fragility makes us twice as strong, and third, how all of this prepares us for the unknown. Let's start out with the first one, which is battling chaos. Whenever you run into people you're always finding that they're struggling. They're always talking about how difficult things are. What they're really doing is they'r

When we're writing a book, creating a workshop or giving a presentation, we go hurtling down the path of HOW-TO. Except it seems that HOW-To is only part of the picture. We're missing out on a crucial element, which is why our clients get confused. Learn how to use the HOW-NOT-To in your online and offline marketing and training. -------------------- Useful Resources Dartboard Pricing Excerpt: http://www.psychotactics.com/prx Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps / / 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:03:34 Table of Contents / 00:04:01 Part 1: How To / 00:06:41 Part 2: Why HOW NOT to Works / 00:08:03 Part 3: Bringing in HOW NOT to. / 00:14:09 Summary / 00:18:27 ==== Sean D'Souza: This is the Three Month Vacation and I'm Sean D'Souza. Today I was at the café as usual. As I'm paying the bill, the guy, he knows I'm writing the book on pricing and he says, "Well, why is it taking you so long." I said, "Well, it's because I'm not just writing how to, but I'm writing how not to." He lifts his eyebrows like people often do when they don't really want to ask you a question but the question is on their mind, so I feel compelled to answer the question. That's what we're going to cover in today's episode. We're going to see how how to is more an intellectual thing and how not to is more instructional, and why both of them combined make such a potent weapon when you're teaching something, and also when you're learning it. I don't know if you've ever heard of the water test. Now the water test is a test that you do to figure out if the frying pan is at the right temperature. Often when we're cooking, what we'll do is we'll take a frying pan and we'll put some oil on it. Then the oil will start to heat up and then we'll put some chicken in it. The chicken or the fish, it sticks to the pan. Now that only happens because the pan is not at the right temperature or the oil is not at the right temperature. I was watching this video online and they were showing me how to figure out the right temperature. What you have to do is you take a little water and you drop it on the pan. If it goes vsshhhhhh, then the pan is not hot enough. Of course you go through many of these, until at one point it's magic. The water droplet just rolls in the pan as if it were a blob of mercury. At that precise moment you put the oil in the pan and then immediately after that the chicken or the fish, and it doesn't stick. Here's what I did. I took the pan, I followed the instructions, and no matter how many times I tried to get that water test to work, and it just wouldn't work for me. I'm pretty persistent. I went at it quite a while and the pan was in danger of getting burnt, but I still wasn't having any success with it. This doesn't make any sense, because when you think about it, I had the instructions. I should have been able to get it right but I wasn't getting it right. In this episode we'll cover three things as always. The first thing is the importance of how not to vs. just how to. The second is why how not to works. The third is when to bring it in. What's the right time to bring it in? Let's start off with the first topic, which is how not to. What is it and why is it so important? Let's go back to my frying pan. There I was with the frying pan trying to get the water test to work, but it wouldn't work. The reason why it wasn't working was because in the video they had a stainless steel frying pan and I had a non-stick. Now you might think that makes perfect sense. You're such an idiot. You should have seen it was a stainless steel one. They would have even mentioned take a stainless steel frying pan. But when you're encountering something it's like learning a new language. You're just struggling at so many levels that it's easy to have this blind spot, to have many blind spots in fact. You're so focused on trying to get it right, not to goof up, that eventually you do goof up. That's because how to is an intellectual process. It might seem like how to are the steps. You're doing one step, the second step, the third step. But if you've ever sat in an audience when a presenter is talking about, say, search engine optimization, or they're talking about pricing, or they're talking about something that you're not that familiar with, you get it. I remember the time I was at this water color class in Spain. The artist was showing us how to get these reflections of light on a rainy day. When he showed us he went through the steps. This is step one. This is step two. This is step three. I got it. Then I went to my easel and I got the paint out, and then it all falls apart. Of course the reason why it falls apart is not because of the how to, the how to is already in place, but the how not to. That

When you have a product or course online it seems it's easy for competitors to copy it. Yet, being in online marketing isn't the only place things can be copied. The fashion industry, for one has people that can copy. Competitors can copy whatever they feel like, because there's no law that prevents them from doing so. So whether you have an offline business or online, you'll want to stay ahead of the competition. But how do you do so? -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:35 Table of Contents 00:02:50 Method 1: Updates 00:07:04 Method 2: Branding 00:11:20 Method 3: Personality 00:16:11 Summary 00:19:43 Final Announcements ---------- Ever since I was a kid, I always liked to draw. I'd sit in the corner and I'd draw. I wouldn't speak much to people, but I'd draw. As you can imagine, I got very, very good at drawing, but I wouldn't sign my work. I wouldn't put my name on the work, and my mother would always tell me, "Sean, you have to sign your work. People will copy it. They'll copy it and they'll claim it as their work." Now when I was 10, I didn't see the irony of it, that the reason that I could draw in the first place was because I was copying stuff. As human beings, that's what we do. We learn to copy; we learn to trace. The more we can copy and the more we can trace, the better we become at any skill. The problem arises when we grow up and we start to write books and we start to do other things like paintings and then other people start to copy us. Suddenly, when you look out there in the marketplace, there seem to be people there ripping you off and you don't know how to stop it, but there is a way to stop it. The wrong way to stop it is to go after them. The wrong way to stop it is to get so upset, so angry that you want to destroy that competitor. This takes up all your energy. All that frustration comes to the fore and it's completely useless because the other person will continue to copy. How do we stop them? We stop them with our own ingenuity. There are 3 ways that you can actually slow down your competition. How do you slow them down? You can never stop them. You slow them down with updates, with branding, and finally with personality. It doesn't take a lot of effort to do this, so how do we go about it? Let's start off with the first one, which is updates. Yesterday, while I was on my walk I was listening to a TED talk, and this TED talk was by Johanna Blakley. She was talking about the fashion industry and how in the fashion industry it is routine to just copy other people's stuff. You don't even have to think about it; you just copy it. She talked about a shoe designer, and this shoe designer's name is Stu Weitzman. He was very frustrated because he would design these amazing shoes and people would go out there and copy it, and there were no laws to stop them from copying it. Johanna goes on; she went on to describe how Stu upped his game. What he started to do was create these Bowden-Wedged shoes. It was very difficult to copy them because they were made of titanium, and if you didn't' make them of titanium, they would crack. What he did was create an update that was almost too difficult to copy. You're probably not making shoes. You probably have a consulting service. Maybe you have a book or a product, you sell information and there your competitors are copying you. How do we deal with this? Let me tell you the issues that we have at Psychotactics. You can have copying where someone just copies your stuff, kind of similar, and then there are other issues like where they rip off your stuff. If you look at several courses that we have, we have the article writing course, the copywriting course, the uniqueness course. We've been going since 2002. I guess we're reasonably popular on the Internet because if you look at some of the sites where they pirate stuff, where they resell other people's stuff, well, that's exactly what's happening to us. There are these pirates that take our stuff just like they do with Microsoft Word and Photoshop and then they resell it and they make money off it. We can get angry; we can start chasing them down. There are websites that do just this, and it's a complete waste of time. The way to beat this system is to create updates. When we do an article writing course, we change about 20% of the course. If you did an article writing course live with us, not through some pirate, you would find that it has changed 20% since last time. It has got more efficient, it has got better. If you bought the course off some pirate, you're probably struggling 20% or 40% or 60% more. Yes, you're getting the information probably cheaper, but the problem is that

Most of us make a fundamental mistake when dealing with the first few paragraphs. We put too many problems in, right away. And it's a mistake. A big mistake! It's like an air traffic controller letting three planes land on the same runway. So how do we avoid this problem? And is the problem over once the "plane" lands? Or is there more to worry about? -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Sean D'Souza:Imagine you are an air traffic controller and you've got three planes circling the airport. Are you going to land all three at once? Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from the Three Month Vacation. Today, we're going to be talking about how you need to dwell on a single problem instead of several problems when you're writing a sales page. Now why would a sales page be critical to you and how would it be connected to a three-month vacation? It doesn't matter who you are. At some point in time, you're going to have to follow the three-prong system. If you haven't done so, listen to episode number two, where I outline the three-prong system. It is a system that has run for pretty much thousands of years, and it's based on three core concepts, which is creating products, services, and training. Today, we're trying to sell either a workshop, which is training, or a service or a product and you're trying to write a sales page. You know that once you write that sales page and once you sell that product, service, or training, it generates income and clients, and then you get to go on your three-month vacation. Even as you're sitting there, you're trying to land three planes, and that's a mistake. I don't have to tell you it's a mistake. You already know it's a mistake. You know it's a mistake when you're trying to land three planes, but the moment you get onto the sales page, all hell breaks loose. How do we prevent this from happening? How do we land a single plane at a time? If you follow this podcast, you know that we have three topics that we cover and then an action plan. What are those three topics that we're going to cover today? The first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at the problem and how these problems seem to circle the airport and how we have to land them one at a time. The second thing is once they land, what are we going to do with them? The third thing is when do we give them a break? When do we get to the solution? Let's look at these three and see how we can get this sales page to really work for us so that we can start to sell our products, services, and our training. The moment you sit down to write a sales page, you have to focus on the biggest problems that you're solving. It doesn't matter whether you have a product or service, you are solving a bunch of problems and this is where you run into a dilemma. Any product or service that you're selling is going to solve several problems, and you're going to feel like you have to stack them all together. When you go to some sales pages, what you find is you won't find a single problem that they're dealing with. You will find that they put in problem number one, problem number two, problem number three, problem number four, problem number five. Then they ask you, "Are you having any of these problems?" That sounds like five planes circling the airport and you're trying to land every single one of them. What should you do? What you should do is do what any air traffic controller would do; you land a single plane. For us to take this analogy home, we have to treat that plane as a priority, as if there were an emergency. Even if there were a dozen planes circling the airport, one plane has an emergency; it has to land right now. As an air traffic controller, you have to bring that plane down, and this is what you do. You find the biggest problem. How do you know it's the biggest problem? When you give your customer a list of the problems that you're solving, the customer will usually come back and say, "Okay. Out of these three problems, out of those five problems, this one, this is the biggest problem." You know it's their biggest problem and you know you're solving their biggest problem because if you said, "I'm not going to have this anymore. I'm not going to solve this problem anymore," they don't want your product or service. To illustrate this, let's take an example. Let's say you are selling a car to a mother, and she has four kids. Now she wants to buy the car because of fuel efficiency; she want to buy it because of style; she wants to buy it because of space. The car is solving three different problems, and if you were to take away one of them, say you take away space, say you said, "Let's get a smaller car. You'll still get style and fuel efficiency," and s

Whether you conduct online courses or workshops, there's something we fail to consider. It's called the Safe Zone. If we just want to play Internet guru, we don't care if the clients can actually implement the information or not. But if we're keen to be real teachers, it's the ONLY thing we care about. Find out how the safe zone helps clients to consume and apply your material. And that's what makes them come back for more. In a world filled with "experts", you're creating a true learning experience. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ This episode is available at: http://www.psychotactics.com/31 -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem 00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode / 00:02:30 Table of Contents 00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions 00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem 00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem 00:14:07 Summary 00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing 00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review -------------------- Transcript Sean D'Souza:In 2010, I decided to go for a walk at 6am, except it was Paris, and my wife was fast asleep. I decided, well, I could go and explore Paris a little bit, and so I did. It was a nice place. It is a nice place. It's full of people and markets and it was great. I walked for a couple of hours, and then I turned around and I found I was lost. I had taken some kind of road somewhere and I couldn't find my way back no matter what I tried. There I was in one of the most well-documented cities on the plant and I was feeling extremely unsafe. There were all these people around me and they were speaking a different language, and I didn't even know how to get back to where I was supposed to be. This is a lot how students and participants feel when they're doing a course with you. Whether it's an online course or if it's a workshop, it's the same kind of feeling. They get this feeling of being unsafe, and your job as a teacher is to put them in the safe zone. In today's episode we're going to explore the safe zone. What is the safe zone? Why is it so important? How do you take the steps to get people into the safe zone? As usual, we're going to look at three things. The first thing is isolation. The second is mistakes, how do you make them make mistakes. The third is the group size. These three elements are critical to get people into a safe zone. First, what is a safe zone? When you're doing a live course, you'll notice something, that people from the same company, they seem to sit with each other; or people that know each other, they seem to sit with each other. The reason for this is that they feel unsafe. Now they're there for a course; they should not feel unsafe. No one is coming to bite them, but that's how they react. On an online course, you can't see this activity, and so it's very difficult to realize how incredibly unsafe people feel when they're on the Internet. What you've got to do is you have to create that safety. Safety is when people feel comfortable. They feel comfortable with their group. They feel comfortable with the pace of the stuff they're learning. They don't feel that intimidation. Mostly, they feel comfortable with you. You'll know they're comfortable with you when they start questioning your behavior. You're the teacher. You're the person training them, but they start questioning the system. They start questioning the way you've approached something. That's when you know that they're in the safe zone, because that's what happens at home, right? When you're at home, people don't just take your word for stuff. They'll ask you, "Why do you want me to do this? That's when they feel they're in the safe zone, when they can come back to you. For you to create this safe zone is very critical simply because it enhances learning. Instead of it just being top-down, which is you, you're the boss, you're the teacher, it's now back and forth. When a student or participant realizes that there is flexibility in the system and there is safety in the system, they really relax, and that's when they learn. We all learn when we are completely relaxed, not when we're uptight. Let's explore those three things. Let's start off with the first one, that is, isolation. What is isolation? When I teach the article-writing course, which I call the toughest writing course in the world, I have a responsibility as a teacher, and that is not to say that three people finish the course or five people finish the course. I have to take everyone across this minefield. What is in this minefield? You have headlines, connectors, disconnectors, storytelling. You have so many elements, and it's very easy to just throw it all together and say, "O

Most of us use benefits or solutions when presenting our products or services?and not the problem. So why bother with the problem? Will it actually improve the conversion on our sales pages? Will it improve our e-mail marketing? Will it get more attention when we're making our presentations? The answer is yes, yes and yes. And you can do it without being negative in any way. So how do you do it? Let's find out in this episode. / -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Getting Attention with the Problem 00:01:36 Previous "Attention" Episode 00:02:30 Table of Contents / 00:02:53 Part 1: Underestanding Solutions 00:05:29 Part 2: Creating the Problem 00:10:47 Part 3: Sticking to the Problem 00:14:07 Summary 00:16:07 Action Plan: The ONE thing 00:17:13 Brain Audit Kit + Info-products Workshop + iTunes Review ------- Sean: Have you ever been in the situation where you've been in the shower, it's nice warm water, and then suddenly it's freezing cold? That's because someone else turned on a tap somewhere else in the same apartment. No? That hasn't happened to you? How about a computer? Have you had a computer that went vroom, vroom, vroom, ready to start and it started to go slow and slow and then boom? These are problems and problems get attention. The problem is that we don't make use of the problems when we're getting our message across and we certainly don't use it the way it should be. How should the problem be used and why not use the solution instead? That's today's episode on attention getting. On the last episode of attention getting, we talked about how you can use the two concepts of novelty and consequences, but here's another way, using the problem. What are we going to cover today? You like the three things, don't you? We'll cover three things, then we'll do the one thing that you can do and then we'll wrap up. Just in case you haven't heard Episode No. 24, well, listen to it again. I had to do it twice. The first time I did it, I was half asleep and then I had to re-edit the whole thing all over again because the first one really put me asleep. Imagine that? The irony. It was about attention getting and the voice was so slow. If you got that episode or you thought this is really slow, well, there's a new episode. Delete the old one, download the new one again and you'll find that it's much better, much better music, much better tone, and yes, I'm awake in that one. That was Episode No. 24 on how to get attention through novelty and consequences, use the problem. We're going to cover three things in this episode. The first thing is why solutions are less effective than problems, and second is why problems get your attention. The third is the mistake that most of us make with implementing the problem. Let's start with the first one which is why solutions don't work as well as problems. To understand solutions, you have to understand your day-to-day life and your day-to-day life is simply a whole bunch of solutions. When you sit on the chair, that's a solution. When you switch on your computer and it works perfectly, that's a solution. When you get in you car and you turn on the ignition, that is a solution. What is the problem? The problem is the opposite of the solution. Let's take those instances and you know where I'm going with this. You sit on the chair, it breaks. You turn on the car ignition, it won't start. That's where your brain gets activated. You don't think of your chair, you don't think of your car, you don't think of all the things that work. That's because the brain is focused on the problem. It's not focused on the solution. When we get into marketing and when we get onto our website and we get into networking and we get into our presentations, what we tend to do is we start to lead with the solution and that's a problem. The reason why we put our audiences to put is because we're leading with the solution. When someone asks us what we do, what we so is we immediately talk about our solution and you notice that immediately those people start to fall asleep. They are very polite. Let's say you're at a networking meeting, so let's say you're a software developer and let's say you make time-tracking software. Someone asks you what do you do? Well, you spit out your solution. You say we make time-tracking software and this helps you keep track of your time when you're working. That's your solution. Notice how your brain doesn't get very activated by something like that. Now the reason why we do is because we've been taught to talk about our benefits. We've been taught to bring out the solution but the brain kind of goes to sleep every time someone brings out a solution. When y

When you're making a presentation, how do you fire up your audience? There are many ways to get that Powerpoint or Keynote presentation going. But one of the most effective ways is to issue a challenge. The audience then waits for you to succeed (or fail). But you can't fail, can you? You're a magician who has practiced the tricks to perfection. This episode is about creating a challenge?then bringing the entire audience alive with the magic trick. ------------------ Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] / Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic / / Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc / Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver / / For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ / / -------------------- 00:03:48 Creating the Challenge 00:07:48 Space Between Challenge and Demonstration 00:09:04 Never Let The Heckler Win 00:11:01 Summary 0:12:52 Maryland Workshop on Info-products ------------------ Why Creating and Meeting Challenges Fire Up An Audience When you're sitting in a magic show, you don't doodle. You don't take out your pen, a sheet of paper and draw weird, funny squiggles. And that's because a magician creates action. And most of the action is centred around a challenge. And while a presentation is no magic show, there's a way to take your audience from doodle-zone to challenge-zone in a matter of minutes. So what is the challenge-zone? The challenge is something almost magical. Something that the audience would find hard to believe. Like for instance, a magician would make an elephant appear in the room. But the audience is skeptical—yet anticipating some action. This is the challenge-zone. In a world that's full of noise, the challenge immediately ramps up attention. Let's slip into an early example When I do the presentation for The Brain Audit, I will often start off telling the audience, that at about the 17 minute mark, I will get everyone in the room to think of the same question. To a skeptical audience, that seems impossible. How could any presenter know what every audience member is thinking, let alone making you think of the very same question? But the question is based on a trigger And if you've read The Brain Audit (which you should, if you haven't) you learn how to create the trigger. It's composed of the problem, solution and target profile. And when you string these three together, you get a single question, "What do you mean by that?". Once the trigger is sprung, curiosity takes over, and you have the "What do you mean by that?" question at the top of your mind. And that's just one example—so let's take another When I do a presentation on "Pricing", the challenge question is similar. I tell everyone that by the time I show them the price-grid, everyone will want to pay 15% more—instead of 15% less. And I'll create this desire for the more expensive option, without changing the core product. This means that if the core product is a workshop on ballroom dancing, the core product will stay the same. And yet, almost everyone in the room will choose the more expensive option. You see the elephant in the room, don't you? There's no elephant, but you as a magician are creating the challenge. And the audience loves the fact that there's a challenge coming up. What they love even more is that you're promising to "mess with the minds" of the entire audience. They think the guy next to them may be susceptible, but they're not going to fall for some silly trick. And this is what gives the challenge more power. The more skeptical they are, the more you're able to convert them from skeptics to fanatical fans. There's just one itty-bitty problem: How do you construct the challenge? The challenge must contain a method to get from A to B. It can't be just a concept. It must be something they can try for themselves. So for instance, there's this company called ioSafe. They make hard drives. And the beauty of their hard drive is that they can be dunked in water, blasted with a torch, or crushed under a road roller—and still survive. You can see how the challenge works, can't you? The challenge would be for people to try and destroy the drive. But sure, that's a product and quite a unique product... What about if you're selling a service or even a concept? The core of any product/service or training should be that you're able to bring results. Yet, instead of picking many points of your service or product, you pick just one. For instance, we teach a course in Photoshop colouring (for cartoonists). And the way the demonstration goes is like this—we get rid of Photoshop—and the computer. And imagine we're at the cafe, instead And the audience is asked to pick a letter for the "brush" tool in Photoshop. Of course, you chose B. And then to choose any number (on the keyboard) that represents 60% opacity. You may fumble, but you'll settle on 6. And then you ask them to choose between the left or right square bracket, to increase

The Three-Month Vacation, that's one of the things that make me really happy. But what else is required to keep that happiness level up? The key lies in identifying the obstacles. When we remove the obstacles, we know how to get to happiness. This may seem like a weird topic to take on, but check it out for yourself. Happiness isn't some weird pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It isn't some Internet marketer promising you endless clients. It's reachable, you know. So check it out. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: The Secret of Happiness 00:01:23 The List, the list, the list 00:03:56 Obstacle 1: Inefficiency 00:07:07 Obstacle 2: Greed 00:09:32 Obstacle 3: Self-doubt 00:11:30 Summary 00:12:29 US Workshop + Book on Pricing ------ Transcript: When I was 8 years old the highlight of my week was "coconut water". On Saturdays, I'd go with my father to get all the provisions for the week. There was no drive to the supermarket ten times a week. Instead, once a week, we'd get on the train, then walk into a market filled with fresh vegetables, meat, fish and fruit. And in the middle of this market was a guy who sold coconuts—and coconut water. Almost nothing brought a smile to my face as much as the thought of drinking coconut water on Saturdays. It was my moment of pure bliss. And that, just that, is the secret of life We go around trying to find the purpose of life, when the answer is right in front of us all the time. The purpose of life is to be "happy". Except I wasn't entirely happy with just the coconut water After we bought a ton of meat, fish and vegetables and headed back to the train station, we'd eat a potato snack dipped in a mixture of green mint chutney and tamarind sauce. Now that too, was my moment of bliss. So wait, this happiness story is getting weird, isn't it? I mean here we are trying to establish happiness, and it seems we're jumping from one point to another. And that's exactly the point! No one thing makes us happy. For me, my current moments of bliss are the walk to the cafe with my wife, the coffee, let's not forget the coffee. There's also the time I spend with my nieces. My painting, my work, the music on my podcast, single malt whisky—and yes, the 3-Month vacations. And yet, most of us never write down what makes us happy So do it as an exercise. Get out a sheet of paper. Make the list. It won't necessarily be a very long list. And the funny thing is that it will consist of rather mundane things like gardening, a walk on the beach—I even know someone who is super contented by ironing. Making the list enables us to know what we really want from life, so we can start heading in that direction. Because frothing, right in front of us are the obstacles. They're determined to reduce, even eliminate our happiness. So what are these obstacles? They are: - Inefficiency - Greed - Self-doubt Inefficiency? Really? Yes, really! Though you'd never expect to see inefficiency in a happiness list, it's the No.1 killer of happiness. That's because if you were to look at your list again, you'd find that everything that makes you happy, also takes time. Time that you're spending being inefficient Look at the software you're using. How efficient are you at it? Let's take for example the "Three Month Vacation" podcast that I create. Well, the podcast recording itself is just 15-17 minutes. And I can usually do it in one take. But each podcast is matched to music—often as many as eight different pieces of music (you have to listen to it, to believe it). And all this music, and production, and editing—well, it takes 3 hours. So the question that arises is just this: How do you save 10 minutes? Just 10 minutes in a three-hour exercise, adds up to 20 a week—about bout 100 a month. Which totals up to 1200 a year. That's 20 hours of happiness deprivation and for what? For inefficiency? That's a stupid, yes stupid, way to go about things isn't it? But we do it routinely—we stay inefficient We know that one of the best ways to get clients is to write a book, or a booklet. To create information that draws clients to you, instead of you chasing after them. And we know that the book can't just be "written". It needs structure. But no, no, no, no and no. We just sit down and write the book. And many, many hours later, we're not sure why we're struggling so much with the book. Or why a client is even going to read it. And we're stepping deeper in the doo-doo of inefficiency. So what are we to do? Well, we have a list of what makes us happy, right? How about a list of the things we do; the software we use; the books, video, audio we have to create? How about a list—and not a very long list, that en

It might seem that it's impossible to get ideas for your articles. And it is. You go completely blank. Of course, there's a reason for all this blankness. And just as you can go blank, you have more ideas than you know what to do with. Wow, can this really be possible? Can you really have tons of ideas? Yes, you can. Provided you use all, or at least one of these systems. But hey, find out for yourself. -------------------- Useful Resources Email me at: [email protected] Magic? Yes, magic: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic Finish The Book Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Meet Me In Denver: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver For the Headline Report (Free): http://www.psychotactics.com/ -------------------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction: Where To Get Ideas 00:02:05 Table of Contents: Input, Brainstorming, Client Questions 00:02:46 Element 1: The Importance of Input 00:07:46 Element 2: Brainstorming 00:10:39 Element 3: How To Get Clients To Pitch In 00:16:00 Summary 00:17:13 Announcements / 00:18:29 ----- Where to get article ideas: An endless source The moment you see a ray of sun, you know it's something magical. That single ray has bounced back and forth like a billiards ball and taken well over a 100,000 years to get to earth. But even as you look, there's another ray, and another. In fact, we get so much energy from the sun, that in one day, it provides more energy than the world's population could consume in 27 years. If only we could tap into some of that endless energy when coming up with ideas for an article. Instead we sit there, transfixed at the screen. We think. We trash around in our seats. We drink copious amounts of coffee. And despite sitting in awesome sunlight, we're trapped in some dark corner. So what are we to do? Where do we go to get an endless source of ideas? I can't speak for every writer, but I can speak for myself. And I know that dark place very well. There are days, weeks even, when you think you're never ever going to come up with a single idea worth writing or speaking about (yes, I do podcasts as well). Stomping, screaming and coffee doesn't help. So what does? Three things actually—three brilliant sources of sunshine - Reading/Listening - Brainstorming - Client Questions Let's start off with the first ray of sunshine: Reading/Listening You know how you make coffee, right? You have to have ground coffee, water and a source of heat. Well, that's input. Without input, you're staring at an empty mug that isn't going to fill itself. And the same applies to ideas. Those ideas are going to swerve right around you, unless you decide to get some input. Actually, not some—quite a lot of input. You want to soak yourself in input And the way to do this is reasonably obvious. You turn on the TV, read Facebook and listen to the crappy stuff on the radio, right? Ha, ha, that was a joke. Instead you have to get your nose in a book—a good book. A book that's related to your set of topics to begin with. The moment you get stuck in that book, you go through two stages: agreement and disagreement. Yet, even when you agree, you have your own spin on things. But when you disagree, it's like your head is about to burst. You have fire coursing up and down your veins. You're now ready to write. Except there's a bit of a problem Unless we're jumping on a bus or train, we rarely have time to read—in the morning. And the morning matters. It's precisely the point in time when your brain has rested and is more likely to remember and process things a lot better than the evening (and for sure, better than the afternoon). So if you don't have that time to sunbathe in the written word, you have to turn to audio. Audio? Ugh, you say. Audio... And ugh is right. I'm listening to an audiobook right now, and ugh is probably the most suitable description. With a book, I could simply flip pages if the author gets too technical or boring. A quick scan and I'm on my way. But audio is linear. You're stuck, not knowing what to fast forward and how much to fast forward. And that's provided you can remember anything at all. Most of us can't. And you shouldn't The goal of input is to get ONE idea. O-N-E. That's it. With a single idea you can bound off into article writing land. And yes, even though you may like your quiet time in the car, or when you're walking, you also need time to get in input. Or else you get too much quiet, and there's zero input. Suddenly you're thrown back into that dark corner, unsure what to write about. So yes, text is great, audio too. But what about our second ray of sunshine? Ah yes, let's mosey along to brainstorming. So how and where do you use brainstorming? I'm doing a podcast, possibly a book on the "myth of inborn talent". I could read a ton of books, listen to audio etc. but that may not help me. And clients, well, they wouldn't be of much help either. There's no recourse but to do the brainstorming, all by myself. So you sit in the cafe and list out the topics, the

We are prone to think that the opposite of success is failure. And it's not. It's decay. The opposite of moving forward, isn't standing still. It's decay. Like a pool of water that gets stagnant, we decay. Our businesses, whether we're in an online business, or offline?it decays. So how do we overcome this decay? Contact Details and Links To e-mail me: [email protected] For the crazy newsletter: http://www.psychotactics.com Finish your book: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (yes, that's the workshop) Chaos in your life? http://www.psychotactics.com/chaos Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:01:58 What's The Opposite of Success? 00:02:53 Table of Contents / 00:03:10 Part 1: Learning Decay / 00:06:03 Part 2: Fitness Decay / 00:09:24 Part 3: Achievement Decay / 00:13:46 Summary / 00:15:36 The One Thing You Can Do Today / 00:16:26 Final Announcements + Workshop DC Transcript: Sean:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you are listening to the three-month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. What is 15,000 multiplied by 365? Why would you ask yourself such a question? I'm not really sure but I ask myself the question at the start of the year and the answer was mind boggling. It was 5,475,000. That's 5,475,000 steps that you can do in a year if you do 15,000 a day . It was mind boggling to me for a very simple reason: I could never reach that goal. At least that's what I thought. I could never, ever reach that goal. Then I thought about my parents. I thought of my grandparents, my great grandparents and all of them would have reached that goal. Every single one of them would have reached that goal every single year. My parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents, they'd never known what it was to go to a gym. They never knew what it was to diet. They ate pretty much anything they wanted and any amounts of it and then they drank stuff. In the case of my dad I know that he smoked a lot as well and at 75 he was still riding his motorcycle. So why did I got down this bizarre path of calculating these 5,000,000 steps a year? The reason I went there was because I heard an interview somewhere. This doctor was talking about the opposite of success. In his case, he was talking about obesity and weight issues. He says, "The opposite of it is not standing still. The opposite of it is decay." That struck me like a thunderbolt. The opposite of success is not not being successful. It's decay. It's almost like you've decided not to brush your teeth anymore and what happens. We're not really talking about standing still, are we? We're talking about decay. We're talking about stuff going really bad. In today's episode I want to talk about three things. The first is about learning, the second about fitness and the third is about achievements. Let's start off with the first one which is learning. I'm not a neuroscientist but I know enough about the brain to realize that the brain works on a [dimmer 03:20] setting. When we don't learn something it doesn't exactly forget that something, but it sets it on dimmer. Last year, my niece Marsha and I we learned 150 countries and 150 capitals in sequence. We would go at high speed going across the continents Europe, Africa, North Asia, South Asia, The Pacific and of course, South, Central and North America. A year has passed and if you asked us to go through that sequence at high speed, first we couldn't do it but also, we can't always remember the capitals. We know where they are. We haven't forgotten, but our brains are on a dimmer switch. When you look at most of us, our real learning took place when we were in school and university and we spent many hours a day learning. Then after that we've done very little. We've learned to program here and there. We've studied some course and done some workshop, but that's about it. Technically, we're in a state of decay. The problem with this lack of learning is that we're not working at our full efficiency. We're working in our full capacity but not our full efficiency because full efficiency means that you could do the same job in one-fifth a day or maybe one-tenth a day, but you're spending all day doing stuff. Like writing an article for instance. Most of us would spend a half day or a day writing an article. You might spend a month or two writing a book. You could do it in a week. Better still, you could do a better book in a week than most people could do in a month or two. The decay really takes its toll and it takes its toll in terms of energy because now we're so tired that we can't do much. Of course, because we're working all the time we don't take breaks. I'm not even talking about weekend breaks or month-long breaks. I'm just talking about breaks during the day. Just half an hour here, an hour there, two hours there. We've entered a state of decay. We no longer have control over our lives. It's almo

Why did we have so many great artists, painters and sculptors in the Renaissance? Why does Brazil produce so many great soccer players? Is slow learning better than fast? Learn more by reading "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle. / / For more: http://www.psychotactics.com / / [email protected]

If you're struggling to get attention on your website or when you meet a client, it's because you're not using two core factors: novelty and consequences. When you use these two concepts back to back with each other, something magical happens?you get attention! http://www.psychotactics.com/dc (Finish Your Book Workshop in Washington DC) http://www.psychotactics.com/denver (Where I'm speaking at the Copyblogger conference). http://www.psychotactics.com/magic (for magic, of course) === Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to The Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. On January 15, 2008, Steve Jobs stood in front of an audience and in his hand he had something that seemed quite boring. It was just an envelope, a yellow envelope, a manila envelope but, still, quite boring. Then he proceeded to take out a computer from that envelope, and that's when the audience gasped. What did Steve Jobs do that was so amazing? It's what you should do as a presenter no matter where you stand in front of an audience. It's what you should do when you're presenting something, a product or a service, and that's something that you should work on. It's called attention. While we all seek attention, we don't seem to get as much of it as we'd expect. The reason why we don't get that attention is simply because we don't understand the elements of attention. Attention has two elements, novelty and consequences. We'll start off with the concept of novelty. What is novelty? Let's take the example of Sara Blakeley. She started this company called SPANX. SPANX is an undergarment that smoothes the contours of a woman's body, making clothes more flattering, making them more comfortable. Sara was having a problem. She was having trouble making her first sale. That's because when you're presenting something, it's usually in a boardroom and some buyer is looking at your stuff and you're in a list of seventeen buyers or seven hundred buyers. For some reason, Sara decided to change the tactics. She decided to go with novelty. Instead of making the presentation in the boardroom, she decided to take the buyer to the Ladies' Room. There she was at a Neiman Marcus in Dallas and they go to the Ladies' Room. To really make a point, Sara had worn some form-fitting white pants, and because it was form-fitting and white, well, you can tell it wasn't that flattering for a woman. Then she pulled out her product, which she had called SPANX, and she put it on and the buyer saw the before and after. Right there and then, there was a moment of conversion. There was this flashing bolt of light and suddenly she was able to sell this product that she was having so much trouble selling before. What she found or stumbled on or figured out was this factor of novelty. The whole scenario of the Ladies' Room, the white pants, it being form-fitting, all of that combined to form this moment where it was impossible for the buyer to ignore. That's really what you're doing. You're making it impossible for the buyer to ignore you. In this episode we look at the methods that you can use to get novelty going. We'll look at the length of the novelty and finally, we'll look at the connection. Once you've done your novelty act, how do you connect? How do you stay relevant? Where do you go from there? Let's start off with the first one, which is the methods that you need to use to get to novelty. When I make the Brain Audit presentation, I do something very odd. I'll step into the audience and pick up a chair that no one is sitting on. Then I will get the chair to the front of the room and I will say, "I'm going to sit on this chair, stand up." Sit on the chair, stand up. Sit on the chair and stand up. Then I turn to the audience and say, "Did any one of you expect this chair to break? Why didn't the chair break?" What you've seen there is a demonstration of novelty. It's breaking that cycle of whatever people are doing. The method that was used in this system of novelty was to use the demonstration. You can use stories, analogies, and demonstrations. Those are the most common uses of novelty. Whether you're writing an article, you're doing a presentation, you're in front of a client and you're selling some product or service, one of these three methods, stories, analogies, or demonstrations, are extremely powerful. The reason why they're powerful is more important, and that is because it breaks the pattern. When an audience or a client is expecting something and you've come out from left field, they are forced to pay attention. You are forced to pay attention when someone walks onstage and pulls out a computer from an envelope. You are forced to pay attention when someone starts to pull up a chair and sit on the chair and stand on it. In another example, when I was speaking in Chicago, there were about two hund

We often wonder why the sale gets killed. Why the customer walks away. Sometimes it's because we're doing a lousy presentation. Or we forget the facts. But often, we get everything perfectly right. And then it's time to ask for the deal. And we freeze. We get needy. We hope the neediness helps to get some empathy. And in reality, it kills the deal. Or at least puts us in a weak spot. So where does this neediness show up? And how do barriers help to avoid being needy? Workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Speaking at Copyblogger: http://www.psychotactics.com/denver Contact me: [email protected] Zany newsletter: http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps 00:00:20 Introduction 00:02:25 Table of Contents: Status and Urgency 00:04:27 The Story of 5000bc.com 00:07:58 How Good Should You Be To Put Up Barriers? 00:10:02 Increasing Level of Barriers 00:12:43 Final Announcements Transcript Sean D'Souza: Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. You've probably heard of Pilates, but maybe not of Joe Pilates. Who was Joe Pilates? He was the guy who started up the Pilates system, except when he got to the United States he wasn't that popular, so he rented a studio right under the studio of some dancers. They would practice, and as you'd expect, as you dance more frequently you get more injuries. Joe's system, of course, would make sure that you were more fit. Now the important part is that he didn't have any clients. Yet, when someone called in and wanted to make an appointment, this is what he'd say: I can't work with you right now. I'm busy and you'd have to wait for a couple of weeks. He was busy. He was busy doing nothing. That makes no sense, does it? Why not take someone who's willing to pay right now instead of waiting for a couple of weeks when they could change their mind? That's the whole point about neediness. If you are needy that's a deal killer. That's the number one deal killer no matter what you're selling, whether it be a service, a product, a workshop, just about anything. If you are needy, it's going to go down in flames. Why is neediness so bad? There are two reasons why neediness is terrible, and the first is that it reduces your status. The second is that it derails urgency. Let's talk about status for a second. We don't even have to go very far to look for examples of neediness. Let's say a friend of yours wants to go for ice cream, and they get needy at that point in time. They are trying to convince you to come for ice cream and you're not that keen on going for ice cream. Immediately their status level goes down and your status level goes up. They need you to come along. You don't need to go. But at the same time, the second factor kicks in, which is urgency. They want to have that ice cream right now, so the more urgent it is, the more they're going to pull you and the less urgency you feel. Yes, you might say, "Fine, we'll go for the ice cream," but notice how your status level has increased. Notice how your urgency has decreased. Whenever we're selling anything, the moment we're needy it doesn't work for us. We think that the buyer is going to feel a little empathy for us, they're going to feel a little sorry for us, but something else happens. A switch turns in their heads and suddenly they don't feel any urgency. They don't feel the need to buy anything from us. Instead, what happens is the other person, they feel this need to pull out. That is just human nature. The moment we feel that we're in control and the other person is not in control, we don't feel the need to go ahead and follow their agenda. We think our agenda is more important. It's all because of this little switch of turning needy. In 2003 we started out a website, a membership website, at 5000bc.com. Right at the start we decided that we were going to have only a fixed number of members. The second thing was that you needed to have read The Brain Audit, which is our book, before you joined 5000bc. Now think about it for a moment. It's a brand new website. Hardly anybody knows us. We've just started out in 2002. Psychotactics was brand new. Why would you put barriers in the way? Why would you tell them that they had to read a book before they could join? No matter where you go and what you read they tell you that you should reduce the friction. You should reduce that friction so that people can sign up for your product or service. Here you're getting barriers. The barriers is very important, because it removes that sense of neediness. It's like okay, we're going to have five people in this workshop. It doesn't matter. We're still going to go ahead and with the workshop. Today our copyrighting course, our article writing course, it fills up in about 30 minutes. Those courses are in excess of $2,500. Almost no one on the in

The hardest thing in business?or life is the factor of confidence. Whether you're in online marketing, selling products or services, or run a physical store, the confidence goes up and down. And yet, confidence is what creates sales. Sales, after all, is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. So how can we create this enthusiasm without confidence? And where do we start looking? http://www.psychotactics.com http://www.psychotactics.com/dc ===== / 00:00:20 Introduction: Biryani Disaster? / 00:02:36 Table of Contents / 00:03:14 Part 1: The Root of Confidence / 00:08:14 Part 2: Getting Confidence Back / 00:12:59 Part 3: Confidence is a Rechargable Battery / 00:16:01 Summary / 00:18:25 Announcements: Book on Pricing + US Workshop-InfoProducts ===== Transcript: There are lots of things that I like doing: dancing, painting, cartooning, but one of the things I like the most is cooking. Of course I invite people over to dinner. On this evening I'd invited one of my friends and I was making this very special dish. It's a multi-layered rice dish called a biryani. If you say the biryani to most people they get a little afraid because there's so much preparation involved, and you have to get so many things right. Anyway, I got a few things wrong that day, but only I knew that I'd got those things wrong Andd yet when I went to serve the dish I mentioned that it was not up to standard. Now this friend of mine, he had never had a biryani before. He didn't know what a biryani was supposed to taste like, but what I said, it really affected him. My lack of confidence spilled over and he didn't feel that the biryani was up to standard. For ages after that, whenever we met he wanted all the other dishes except the biryani What did I do wrong? The answer doesn't lie in the recipe for the biryani or the way the biryani was made that evening. What it lies is in a factor of confidence. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another, and that evening I wasn't transferring any enthusiasm, so I wasn't selling my dish. This is what we do a lot when we're at networking meetings, when we're at presentations, when we're selling a product or a product or a service to a client. We lack that enthusiasm. We don't appear confident, and then the client wants to think about it. They want to ask their mother, brother, sister about it before they decide. Today we're going to talk about three aspects of confidence We'll start out with the root of confidence. Where does the confidence come from? Is it inbuilt or do we have something that we have to learn? The second is how to deal with this whole set of confidence issues when things don't seem to be going your way. The third and most importantly, to realize how confidence is like a rechargeable battery, how you need to charge it up all the time. Let's start out with the first, which is the root of confidence Your background, that's the deepest, strongest root that you can have in confidence with anything. As you're growing up you don't realize it, but as you're sitting around reading some comics or watching TV and the adults are going about doing their own things, you get an education. When I was growing up my father ran a secretarial college and he used to train people to be secretaries. I used to sit around; I used to eat; I used to read some story books, type on the typewriters because he had a lot of them. Essentially I wasn't doing anything, yet a lot was happening. A lot of the information was going into my head and I was getting confident about teaching, about speaking, about meeting people, about doing a lot of things that I didn't realize until it was much later. Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because when you grow up in a different kind of family you have different experiences. If your family was largely job-oriented and it was about safety and not making mistakes and not taking too many risks, then it becomes quite hard for you to do that and you have to learn that confidence. If you grow up in a family where people are cooking, or they're painting, or they're doing some woodwork, what you're doing is you're getting the confidence just by sitting around. You're absorbing all that information but you also get information. For instance, when I'm sitting with my nieces and there's my palette in front of me and I'm painting some cartoons, they're getting information about what yellow ocher looks like, how the sky is not really blue but it is blue at the top and then blue and yellow ocher in the middle and then yellow ocher towards the horizon. They get all this information so they get confident. When you don't have that confidence then you have to build up that confidence. Because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm for one person to another, all the things that you're selling depends on you being confident about it because you project that energy. What I used to do is I used to go to networking meetings and I was quite terrified I was in a new co

It may seem like article writing is very hard. And it is. Good writing needs structure, it needs skill and it needs one more thing: input. Without input, nothing happens. So where do we get this input? And why bother with bad input? Finally, what if you don't like audio learning? Can't you just stick to books? Knowing these answers can dramatically change the way you approach article writing. And yes, make you a better writer. For more, go to http://www.psychotactics.com For the fun workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc For the Story Telling Product: http://www.psychotactics.com/story --------- Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to The Three Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Imagine you go to the café and you're sitting there and the barista is making this fabulous coffee. The machine is superb, the barista has just won the championship. This is the top of the line barista and then you get your coffee. You take one sip and you think, "Something is wrong with you," because it can't be. It can't be this bad. How come this coffee is so yucky. It's very simple. Bad input. In coffee land, that is bad coffee beans. Either they're over roasted or under roasted, or just inferior coffee beans. Input is what matters and the same thing applies when you're writing an article or a book. The most important thing of all is input. If you were to ask someone to write a story about their life, they probably could manage it. You would have to narrow it down, of course. You would have to say, "Tell me about when you were 10." You would have to narrow it down further, maybe some episode at school, but eventually, they would come up with some story and the story would have clear ups and downs. It would have a storyline, it would have everything in place. How did they do that? How did they conjure that up from nothing? Nothing is a silly word to use here, isn't it? They already had something. They had the whole story in their mind. They have the concept in their mind. That becomes input and then it's a matter of structuring it in an article, and you have to know that structure, or structuring it in the form of a book. Then, you have your material. Most of the time, when you sit down to write an article, we don't have enough input. We have knowledge but we don't have enough input. In this episode, we're going to look at what is input, where do you get it, and why structured and unstructured input is very important. Let's tackle the first burning question, which is: What is input? The thing with you and me and everyone is that we already have the answers. The problem is we don't have the questions. We don't have that thing that prods us in the side and gets us to answer the question. That is our problem. It doesn't matter if you're a lawyer or in real estate or fitness or any business. You already have the answers. The problem is you're not getting enough questions. People don't ask you enough questions and so to get those questions, you have to go elsewhere. That elsewhere is really other books, other material, and that is input. To give you an idea of what my day looks like, I start off the day with going for a walk. Usually, I have a few podcast, different types of podcasts and my phone is loaded with audio books as well. I know a lot of people have aversion to audio and obviously, you're listening to a podcast so you don't have this aversion, but a lot of people think that they're not going to listen to audio books or they're not going to listen to podcasts because they're not going to remember anything. You're not supposed to remember everything. You're supposed to remember just one thing. That one thing is something that the author says and this could be something brand new, something that you've never thought of. That's input. Now, your brain is churning. Now, your brain is moving faster than ever before. What if it's old material? Old material, when listened to or read a second or a third time, is different from when it was read the first time or listened to the first time because so much has changed. You have learned so much in between and now, that seems like mundane material could be very exciting. Both old material and new material make a big difference. That becomes input. That becomes like the coffee bean. That becomes the great stuff that you can work with. That is your starting point. You want that ignition point and that ignition point comes from input. Of course, when we think of input, the input could come from a report, it could come from a book, it could come from audio, it could come from video. Why audio? Because you're always traveling somewhere. You're always going to the supermarket. You're always walking around. You're always doing something that is just dead time. This is when you want to get that input. You want to start making notes, get mor

Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours? Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? He probably practices for two or three weeks, off and on, and then after that, he drives. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today? Several years ago, best-selling author Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called "Outliers". Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that's about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work. The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn't; but what if you hadn't? What if you hadn't put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented? Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don't understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all. In today's episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we're going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true? The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours? The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours?

If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing 70% right. You can always come back to do the 20% later. Yes, read it again, and no, the math isn't wrong. If you're going to build a website, a 70% effort is fine. If you're going to do a presentation a 70% effort is fine. If you're going to bake a cake, for that matter…do you need all the ingredients? The perfect cake? With all the perfecto ingredients? Or the cake with '70%' of the ingredients? Let's find out what the 70% principle is all about shall we? ==== LINKS: To subscribe: http://www.psychotactics.com To get to that amazing workshop: http://www.psychotactics.com/dc Storytelling? You want stories? http://www.psychotactics.com/story To subscribe to this podcast: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic ==== Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. I was sitting in the café minding my business when this woman was sitting across from me. She looked up a few times and made eye contact. Then she summoned up courage and moved across and she spoke to me. Apparently she was a writer. She had written three or four books and never got them published, so I asked her why. You probably know her answer. She said, "Well, I'm a perfectionist." This is the problem. We think that we are perfectionists, but everyone is a perfectionist. Everyone would like to do the best possible job, and yet some people get their job done and others don't. The reason why they do that is because of a simple concept called the 70% principle. This podcast is going to explore what is the 70% principle, how it helps you, and when you should stop. Let's start off with the first one, which is the 70% principle. What is it? In 2004 we were headed out from Auckland to Los Angeles. It was the first time we were having a Psychotactics workshop internationally. Of course everything had been sold. We'd booked the venue. We'd got people to sign up. We'd printed the notes. We'd done everything. There was only one little hitch. We still hadn't got a visa from the US embassy. It wasn't because we were delaying or procrastinating. It was just that they were giving out visas just a week before departure. You can imagine the situation, can't you? What if we didn't get the visa? What if something happened and the workshop couldn't go ahead? Life is full of so many what ifs. It becomes much simpler if you take a software developer's philosophy. A software developer's philosophy is very simple. It is get 70% right and come back and fix the rest later. So many of us don't complete our projects because we think that it's not good enough. Then having completed a project we don't sell it because, again, we feel somehow it could be improved. Of course it could be improved, but your 70%, the audience is already waiting for that right now. They're waiting for the information that you have and they don't care about the remaining 30%, not just yet. We went ahead with our first workshop simply because we thought that's the best we can do, 70%. When I wrote my first book, The Brain Audit, it was only 16 pages. Today it's 180 pages. What's the real size of the book? To me I think it's about 1,500 pages. Well, not as a single book but as different courses and books. The point is that if you wait for that perfect moment, if you wait to get everything down, it never happens. When you think like a software developer you go, "Okay, this is the maximum I can achieve." You go out there and you put it out there. Then you can come back and fix it. The brain audit started out with version 1 and then went to version 2, and is on version 3.2. Will there be a version 4? I don't know, but the point is very simple. You can always fix it later. We understand the 70% principle but why does it work? It works for a simple reason. That clients are waiting for your stuff right now. Your audience is waiting for your stuff right now. If you don't put it out there they still have to get it. They still have to get the information. There's a story about Jack Johnson, Jack Johnson the musician. In a Rolling Stone interview Jack Johnson said, "A song like "Bubble Toes," I don't know if I would have written that song if a million people we're going to hear it." He said, "It was like a joke to my wife around the house. Then a couple of friends liked it and then people asked for it at shows, and it became popular." We're going away from the point. The point is the middle that comes in the middle of the song. It goes like this: la da dada da da, da dada da da da da, la da dada da da. Jack had been planning to put in words but when the time came to release the song there were no words, so he ran it as la da dada da da. Today that's the most endearing part of that album. In fact, if you just play the la da dada da people know that's Jack Johnson. That's really what the

Clients aren't always keen to accept our ideas?no matter how brilliant or workable. And we have the same problem with product or services. The resistance is much too high and we struggle to get things moving. So how do we overcome this resistance from clients? How do we overcome the objections? / / 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:03:12 Part 1: Creating Expertise On Your Site / 00:04:48 Part 2: Pointing Clients To Existing Material / 00:06:48 Part 3: The Power of Demonstration / 00:11:33 Wrap Up + Information Products Workshop: Washington D.C. I don't know if you've ever heard the story of the white pants of Sara Blakely. Sara's product was an undergarment. It smoothed out the contours of a woman's body making your clothes more flattering, more comfortable but Sara was not able to sell the product. Yet as the legend goes she was at the store at Neiman Marcus in Dallas and she was wearing these form fitting white pants. She invited the buyer to join her in the lady's room. At this very unusual place that Sara proceeded to show how those white pants looked with the undergarments that she was selling which were called Spanx and then she proceeded to show how they looked without it. Sara didn't stop there she went on to sell to Bloomingdales to Saks, Bergdorf-Goodman and today that brand is worth over $250 million, but what was Sara really doing there? Was she selling a product or was she doing something different? Sara was actually fighting resistance. Often as we go about our day to day business selling products and services we run into clients who are convinced that they are right and often they're wrong. We then try to get into this debate, this mini argument as it were and that's not the way to convince a client. The way to convince the client is to show them proof. How do we go about this proof? In today's podcast we'll cover 3 ways in which you can get a client over to your side of the fence without any of that mini argument or debate. We'll talk about 1 the proof that you create, 2 the proof that other people create and finally irrefutable proof demonstration. Let's start off with the first type of proof which is the proof that you create. Let's say for instance you are a web designer and you're completely convinced that responsive sites are very, very important for clients. Responsive sites as you probably know are sites that you view on a mobile or on a tablet and they readjust to fit the width and the height of the mobile or the tablet. There you are in front of the client and the client is old school. They built their site in 2005 or 2007. They're not that keen to switch over to something that readjust their entire site. What are you going to do? The first thing that you need to have is you have to have content of your own because clients have objections and usually they don't have a lot of objections. They've had maybe 6, 7 different kinds of objections over the years and what you need to do is you need to put together information. A good form of information is a bunch of articles. You could have a booklet, you could have any kind of information that you've written and it's very important that it comes with your name attached to it because that makes you the expert. As the client is battling a bit not a lot but just a bit with you, you can point out that information on your website or maybe you've got a booklet that you can hand out to them. Now it's easy to think we'll I can just tell them. I can just speak to them right on the spot they are sensible people but a conversation doesn't have the elements of an article or a booklet that has structure and form. You can't just put together anything on a website. You have to have structure and form and you have to build that argument as it were. When they go and see that structure and form and it's signed with your name because it's on your website or your booklet that makes you the expert. That makes a big difference to have the client perceives you because now you've anticipated their objection and you've answered their question. That's only 1 way to do it. The second way you want to think of is external proof. Let's say the client decides that "Hey it's your website. You wrote all the information that's nice but I'm not convinced." At that point in time you'll have to have external proof. The external proof could be again booklets, could be books, could be information on other websites and this becomes third party proof. You may say "That's exactly the same as what I'm saying." but it's not. The moment it comes from a third party automatically it gets relevance. If it's already published in a book it has even more relevance. Even if you direct them to an authoritative site you will find that it's relevant enough and what you're doing now is bringing down that resistance. That's really all you're doing. The client has resistance and you're bringing down their resistance. When we assume being … see the same thing over and over and over again it becomes true f

For most of us life is about work, work and more work. And no matter whether you have a small business, are in the online marketing space or in consulting, you feel rushed and hassled. This podcast is about how to slow down using the three concepts of "meditation, relaxation and vacation". Sean:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy you work and enjoy your vacation time. Did you know that "medication" sounds a lot like "meditation"? Well, I didn't know that, and I've been playing around with it in my head, "Medication, meditation. Medication, medication, meditation." When we talk about the three-month vacation, it's very easy to just think of going away; but as you know, we don't have to leave the desk to go away. We could just be here. Should we go away, or should we stay? Do we really have to choose? As you know, it's summer in December here in New Zealand, and there's a lot of time because we take time-off around December the 20th, and then we don't get back to work till almost February, and this is pretty much the whole country. Imagine the entire country going on vacation. As you walk around on the streets of Auckland, well, there are no people around or very few people around. My wife, Renuka and I, we never go away when everyone else is going away because what's the point? Everything is more expensive, there are bigger crowds, you have to wait a long time in restaurants, so we stay back and we sit on the deck, get some beer. We have a good time, and we read. When I was reading, I ran into this book by author/speaker Pico Iyer. First, just to backtrack, before I ran into the book, I ran into his TEDTalk. In the TEDTalk, he was talking about how he started to meditate, how he started to relax. In his talk, he gets you to imagine gong to the doctor, and the doctor is saying, "Well, your cholesterol is up. Your blood sugar is up, etcetera, and you've got to exercise." He says, "Most of us will go to the gym. Most of us would go for a walk. Most of us would do stuff like that, but imagine the doctor said, 'You need to slow down. You need to take time off and meditate. Take about half an hour, maybe meditate.'" It's unlikely that any of us would feel the urgency to meditate, would we? I mean, we have so many things to do already. Really, that's what I'm going to talk about today. Three things, meditation, relaxation, and vacation. All the "tions" together. Now, of all these three, mediation is probably the only stuff I know of because it seems like you have to sit in one place or stay in one place, and then just be quiet; and so what I'd do is I'd go for a walk, and I'd hum the same song over and over again, almost like a chant. I was happy doing that, and I thought, "Well, that's meditation;" and it probably is. I don't know, but I found that with TheEndApp, it was much easier to do this, and that is to just clear your head of all the thoughts. I'm not very ambitious to begin with, and I don't suggest you get too ambitious because it's very, very hard to meditate. If you've ever tried meditating, you know exactly what I mean. It is extremely hard. The moment you decide, "Well, I'm going to be very quiet and clear my mind of all the thoughts," every single thought comes rushing through. It's like as if you opened the door and started screaming, "Come on, guys. Bring in all the thoughts." That's how meditation is. It's so weird, and yet time and time again, you read about it, and you're not sure how to go about it. I ran into this website at Calm.com. That's C-A-L-M-.com. They had a lovely app. It's free, and they also have a website. You don't need to have the app. You can just have your computer on, and they take you through a guided meditation. It's very hard at first. It's just this emptying out of your brain. Not sleeping, not dreaming, not doing anything, just completely blank. Just like looking at the clouds, one cloud after another, after another. Just completely blank, and so I'd recommend that you start there. What I started doing was every day, before I go for a walk, I meditate for 10 minutes. I just lie on the floor, and I go for 10 minutes. Then, I go to the café, and my wife started this. She says, "Okay, let's be quiet for two minutes." We close our eyes and sit at the café, and you can hear the coffee. When your mind is that quiet, you can hear everything. It just screams through, and it filters out those thoughts. It's very cool because in a day that's completely chaotic, we need to have these moments of meditation, and it's good for your brain. I mean, this is about business, but it's also about taking that time off, just those few minutes in a day. That brings us to the end of the first part which is mediation. It takes us to the second part which is relaxation. When you think of relaxation, you probably think, "Okay. I'm just

Clients can be great?or monsters! And once you have a client who's a monster, it's easy to blame them for all the issues. Often, the problem lies with us. We don't put things in place, in advance, and then get into all sorts of trouble. To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com TimeStamps 00:00:20 Start 00:01:35 The Riot Act 00:01:56 Part 1: The Barrier 00:06:57 Part 2: Your Philosophy 00:12:20 Part 3: Firing the Client 00:14:25 Summary 00:16:08 Your Action Plan 00:16:30 Final Comments + Psychotactics Workshop Transcript Sean D'Souza:The year was 1998, I think 1999, and I had a massive headache. The reason for my headache was that I wasn't being paid on time. Just to get paid, I had to follow up several times and then I was lucky if I got the full amount. These are clients that drive you crazy and often the question is, what are you going to do with clients like these? Whose fault is it? Our natural instinct is to say that it's the clients' fault. Really, is it? I think it's just our fault. Why is it our fault? How do we decide when do we get rid of the client? Shall we get rid of them now? Should we get rid of them 6 months from now? We're not very sure but The Riot Act puts everything into perspective and it saves you from the trouble that I had. I not only had headaches but I had hypertension and all kinds of things and I was not even 30 years old. If you want to avoid that kind of thing, you will need to know how to use The Riot Act. There are 3 parts to The Riot Act. The first is the form or the barrier, the second is the philosophy, and the third is the right to fire the client. Let's see how this all pans out. The first part of The Riot Act is the barrier. Without the barrier, without the form, nothing happens. When I started my career, I started out as a cartoonist and the clients always have the upper hand. I was just a teenager out of university; in fact I was still in university. At that point in time, the newspapers would tell me what to do and they would decide when they had to pay me and so I would spend a lot of time in this follow-up just trying to get my payments, just trying to get the jobs, just trying to just go crazy doing what I thought should have been easy and pleasurable. You get into this rock you think that there is never going to be another way. Then one day, I was sitting at the dentist and the dentist gave me a form. Here I was doing a transaction. I was going to pay this guy to drill my teeth. He wasn't going to do it until the form was filled. Later, I went to a yoga class that is several years later. They weren't going to allow me to the yoga class until I filled in this form and agreed to sit in a number of classes. I thought, "Wow, this is really cool." What's happening here is the expectations are being set right at the start. The barriers are being put in place. I thought, "This is incredibly powerful. I wonder if I could use this in our business." As you know, Psychotactics is mostly about books. It's about workshops. It's about training. What we had at that point in time was a consulting program. Because I live in New Zealand, this consulting is done by a telephone. Still, I got people to fill in the form. They had to fill in our big form and then get back and then we went ahead with the consulting. The same applied with the protege program. This was a year-long program. Again, they had to fill in a form. Because it was more detailed, more intensive as it were, they also had to go through a 45-minute interview. Think about it for a second. You are sitting there and you're about to take money from a client but you're putting them for a barrier. Would they agree to such a barrier? The answer is yes. When you look around you, most of the successful businesses have some contracted place. At that point in time, we only had a single document, a book called The Brain Audit and so we made that our biggest barrier. If you wanted to go to workshop, you had to read The Brain Audit. If you wanted to join our membership at 5000bc.com, again, you had to read The Brain Audit. You had to buy, you had to read it. At that point in time, I was still doing one-on-one consulting. What we had to do was put together a barrier and the simplest barrier of all is a form. You get the client to sit down and go through a whole bunch of questions. They answer the questions. They qualify themselves and that becomes the first barrier. That's it that dawned for the relationship. You may not want to have a form. You might want to have some other kind of barrier in place. Maybe they have to read through a couple of pages of something. Maybe they have to listen to an audio. It doesn't matter what it is. Having the barrier in place gets the client to qualify themselves and that is the first step towards getting rid of that headache. You know what's the sad thing? The sad thing is that

Whether you run an online or offline business, there's a point where the business will take control of you. And then it doesn't let go. All those marketing strategies and "four-hour workweek" formulas are totally useless. So what works? And why does it work? Here are three core steps that will get you out of the muck and back on dry land. And yes, on the road to the three month vacation. 00:00:00 Introduction: Getting More Control in Business 00:02:22 Element 1: Learning Core Skills 00:06:44 Element 2: Flying Solo is a Problem 00:12:19 Element 3: Input and Output 00:18:02 Summary 00:19:35 Ending Notes ===== Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. If you go to a restaurant, just about any restaurant, and if you go to sit down you would notice that some days the restaurant is absolutely full and on other days it's completely empty. What's really happening here? What you're noticing is the lack of control over the business. It doesn't matter whether you own a restaurant business or a gym or you just have a service, you have to have control over your business. How do you have this control over your business? I didn't have to answer to this several years ago. I'd run a cartooning business since I was in university and I ran a business for about ten or 12 years without any control. I didn't know where the next client would come from. While I did some amount of promotion, sometimes I had enormous amounts of work so I wouldn't get any sleep. At other times a whole month could pass and I'd have nothing to do. The only way to have complete control over your business is to use the concepts explained in the three prong system. Now if you didn't listen to episode number two then that's where you need to go right now, or just after you listen to this episode. That's because the three prong system has stood the test of time. When you look at all the religions of the world that have lasted 2,000 years they use the three prong system. When you look at businesses that have done really well over the years they too use the three prong system. You want to go back to episode two and listen to it. The three prong system brings strategy but to your business, but on a day to day business you need to some strategy as well. This episode talks about the strategy that you need on a day to day basis. As usual, we're going to cover three things, and the first thing we're going to cover is the factor of core skills. The second thing we're going to cover is about how to get help or why you should get help, and the third is input is equal to output. Let's start out with the first, which is learning the core skills. What is this all about? The biggest problem that we have and the reason why we can't earn more or take more time off is because we spend so much time not learning core skills. Let's say you were a golfer and you wanted to get really good on the golfing circuit. What would you do? It's pretty obvious, isn't it? You'd go out there and you'd practice and you'd get a coach, and you'd work that so that you were very good at golfing. Otherwise, you'd just your Sunday golfer, go there, hit some balls, and hope for the best. In a business, hoping for the best is not a good idea. It's not your hobby as it were. This is your passion. When you're passionate about something you have to be like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. When you're passionate about something you have to have that core skill in place. You know it's in place because you can do it exceedingly well and exceedingly quickly. For instance, if you had to write an article, say 800 to 1,000 words, how long would you take to write that? I'll tell you how long it used to take me to write it. I used to take two days. I'm not kidding. I would start on the first day and then write, and then stop and edit and write and stop and edit and write and stop and edit. By the end of the second day I was not really sure that the article would be any good. I was a cartoonist, not a writer. I spent a lot of time just trying to get into that writer mode, because I knew as a small business owner that's what I needed to do. I needed to write books. I needed to write articles. I needed to get the word out there. Article writing, which wasn't my core skill, had to become my core skill. I had to communicate that way. I got all the material I needed to study. I got a lot of information that I was deconstructing, and then that didn't help me at all. I still had to write the articles. Luckily for me, at that point in time there wasn't as much content on the internet. A website called marketingprops.com, they wrote to me and they said "Can you send us some articles?" Then every week the publisher would bug me and say "Can you send me some more articles?" Even though I was not keen on writing

Getting things done isn't as easy as it looks. So what gets in our way when we run our small businesses? Do we simply run out of ideas? The Three Month Vacation Podcast examines how to get out of your own way and get your online?or offline business working smoothly. The key to getting things done is the trigger. How do you create and sustain that trigger in your small business? To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Getting Things Done: 00:02:08 How Do We Make The Trigger Work? 00:04:03 Table of Contents 00:04:24 How To Activate The Trigger 00:09:29 How The Trigger Builds Momentum 00:14:33 Summary 00:17:47 Final Transcript: When I was little my uncle gave me a game. It was called Snoopy Tennis and it was a little console, a video game from Nintendo. All you had to do was play tennis. Lucy from Peanuts and Charlie Brown from Peanuts as well, they would hit the ball towards you and you as Snoopy had to return the service. Lots of people played those games. Millions of kids played those games across the globe, but mine was different, mine was unique. My console had a crack in it. It had fallen at some point in time, so I can see the ball heading towards me and I have to listen for it. It would go beep, beep, beep, and then I had to push down on the red button that would ensure that I hit the ball, got the service back over the net as it were. What was interesting was that I wasn't looking for the visual anymore. I was listening to the sound and responding. That sound was a trigger. One of the biggest reasons why we can take as much time off as we do is because we have these triggers in place. Without the triggers it's very hard for us to get anything done. That is because as adults we have so many things to do and so many responsibilities that when we try to do something, when we try to finish a book or write an article or do anything at all, we struggle. We struggle because we don't have that trigger in place. What is that trigger and how can we make it work for ourselves? Let's start with the things that I don't like very much. One of the things that really bug me is having to exercise. As I've mentioned before, I don't care much for exercise, and yet you'll notice that I'm reasonably fit. This is because I end up doing between 80,000 to 100,000 steps a week. You have to ask yourself how does someone who doesn't like exercise doing such a lot of walking. Well, I use a trigger. In fact, two triggers. The first trigger is just the coffee. that is when I get up in the morning I am not headed for a walk, I am headed for a coffee. I'll wake up, I'll get my iPhone on, put on the audio, and then head towards the café. When I reach the café that's my reward. What's really happening here is that the walk is not something that appeals to me that much. However, the coffee does appeal to me. That sense of reward, that carrot and stick as it were, is what helps me. That's the trigger. The second trigger that I have in place is I have a little pedometer called Fitbit. I have other friends who are also high achievers who do 70, 80, 100,000 steps a week. I want to compete against them so that becomes my second trigger. What I'm saying here is that I don't care much for walking. I would rather sit here and do a podcast and do some music and draw some cartoons, and do all kinds of stuff. Yet no matter what the weather, whether it's rainy or windy or hot or cold, I end up going for a walk - and that is because of the trigger. Triggers work both ways. They work for good and evil. What we are covering in today's episode are three things. The first is how to activate the trigger. The second is how it helps you build and sustain momentum. This is very important. The third thing is what happens when you go offtrack. How do you get back on track? Let's start off with the first one, which is how do you activate the trigger. Now in a normal day what I have to do is I have to write articles, I have to draw some cartoons, I have to do a whole lot of things. While a trigger might seem like a reward, because I was talking about coffee earlier, well it's not necessarily a reward. It's just that beep beep headed towards you. How do you install that beep? One of the things that I found very useful for me and to get things done is to keep things open. Now I draw a daily diary in my Moleskin diary. I do a painting every single day, and I've been doing this since 2010. How do I achieve this? It's a very busy day. It's quite easy to put it off. It takes a lot of time to do it. What I do is I don't keep the diary in my bag. I don't keep the paints in my bag. I don't keep the pencils in my bag. They're all ready on my desk and they're open. Just before I sit down for breakfast, every single day I will say "Well, let me just sit here for five minutes. Let me just do a little wash. Let me just paint a bit

When we set about creating a new product or service, we look for a catchphrase. And while a catchphrase or slogan is very useful, it's not a lot of use when it comes to driving home our uniqueness or positioning. So how do we create that USP or uniqueness? The best way to go about this exercise is to avoid the line completely, because really, your clients can't remember it any way. What you need to focus on, is the story. But how do you create this story line? What's the secret link between storytelling and uniqueness? ---------- Time Stamps 00:00:20 Uniqueness and Story: Introduction 00:02:11 Table of Contents 00:02:25 Element 1: How The Story Helps in Uniqueness 00:07:57 Element 2: How To Create The Story-Emperor 00:11:40 Example: Psychotactics Article Writing Course 00:14:39 Example: Golden Moon Tea 00:16:19 Element 3: Why Is the Story More Important Than The Slogan? 00:19:01 Summary 00:20:25 Final Resources + Goodies ---- Speaker 1:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. When someone tells you their name, do you remember it? Often when we meet someone they introduce themselves, we introduce ourselves, and then later we cannot remember their names. We think we're really bad with names, but as you know, that's not true at all; no one is good with names. The reason why we don't remember names is either because it's not important or we don't have a story. How important is this story when it comes to uniqueness? What I'll do right now is I'll read out a whole bunch of slogans from airlines and see if you can remember which airline they come from. I bet you won't remember any of them, or very few of them. That's because they don't have a story. Here it goes. Number one, making the sky the best place on earth. Number two, the proud bird with the golden tail. Number three, world class, world wide. Number four, we really move our tail for you. Number five, something special in the air. You're getting that blank feeling aren't you? It's like when you meet that person again and you can't remember their names. That's because there is no story to it. The key to remembering someones name is to assign a story to it. That's exactly what you have to do when you're creating your uniqueness. If there is no story, it becomes impersonal and you can't remember it. More importantly, your client can't pass it on to someone else. In today's episode we'll cover three points, as always, and that is: how does the story help, how to construct that story, and finally, why it's so important because it needs to be passed on to someone else. Let's start off with how the story helps. One of the worlds best know slogans is simply, "Thirty minutes or it's free", and that came from Dominos Pizza. That sounds like just a line, doesn't it? When you think about it, is it just a line? There is a story behind it. there is a story of this pizza guy desperately trying to get the pizza ready right after you've put the phone down, and then getting across to you and ringing your doorbell at the 29th minute. Then you hoping, somehow, they'll miss it by a couple of minutes and then you'll get it free. Notice how easy it is to tell this kind of story to a friend. The reason why this whole slogan seems to work is because the try is unfolding in your brain. You can actually see this story unfolding even with that single line. The line doesn't really matter, what really matters is the story behind the line. Let's take a product like ioSafe. These are indestructible, or seemly indestructible, hardware - external drives that you use for your computer. They sell for a lot more than the drives that you get anywhere else. What's the story behind it? It's boiled down to this one word, which is indestructible. I don't think they have a great line, but their story is really powerful. They take the drive to a shooting range and shoot at it, they take a road roller and run it over, they take it and throw it in the swimming pool, they do all kinds of things that would normally destroy the data in the drive. Yet that data is completely secure. We may not remember the line, and who cares if we remember the line or not, because we're now telling the story to someone else. We're telling them why they should buy this product or service. Every morning when I go for a walk I usually have an umbrella; it's a red umbrella. It rains a lot when I go for a walk, so I have to take an umbrella. What's different about this umbrella? For one it costs about $100, when the other umbrellas you can get them in the story for about 10 or $15. Why buy and umbrella for $100 when you can get one for $10? The answer lays in the uniqueness. Because New Zealand is a set of islands and it's pretty narrow, we get storms and winds and often the umbrella just turns inside out. Not the Blunt Umbrella.

So you're new. No one knows you from a bar of soap. And everything that needs to be said has already been said before. Whether you're in online marketing, health and fitness, or just about any small business, it's been done. Or has it? Why would customers continue to seek you out even if you're seemingly a nobody. It's because customers don't necessarily seek out just a name. Instead they seek out a voice; a system; and the way you explain that system. ======= Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Introduction 00:01:31 Table of Contents 00:01:57 Element 1: Your Voice Matters 00:06:39 Element 2: The System That You Follow 00:12:41 Element 3: Your Examples 00:16:40 Summary 00:19:52 Action Plan: The ONE Thing 00:20:42 Final Statements Including Info-Product Workshop in Washington D.C. + Goodies ======== Transcript Sean: One of the biggest things that we seem to battle with is our own minds. It doesn't matter how good we are or how good we get, there is always this battle in our own minds. We always wonder about the things that we are writing, about the audio that we're creating, of the video that we're creating because there is so much information out there isn't there? You think, "Well, surely someone has done this before. Surely, someone has covered this before. Surely my work is just going to be irrelevant. No one's going to pay attention. No one will want this." You know something? You would think that this feeling goes away. It never goes away. Here are the three main reasons why you should persist nonetheless. The three main reasons why you should continue to write, to create audio or video or a presentation is simply because people want to hear you. The three things that they want to hear are, your voice, your system, and the third is your examples. Let's go into a little detail about what these three things signify and why they are so important to your customer. The first thing that we're going to cover is just the factor of your voice. When I write an article, people know that that article has come from PsychoTactics. When I draw a cartoon, you know that you can recognize my cartoon from everyone else's cartoon. You know this for a fact because there are thousands or tens of thousands of cartoonists out there, probably even a few million considering the population of the world. Yet, when you see a cartoon from me, you know instantly this is Sean's cartoon or someone that is trying to copy the same style. If that were to apply to cartoons, that also applies to writing, to speaking, to video, to audio. This audio for instance is constructed in a completely different voice. It's a different way, there is no hype on it. There is no fanciness. But there are clear tiny increments that you can implement, things that help you move forward. You will notice for instance that when I'm speaking, I don't bring up money. Now, there are no how to make six figures, how to make seven figures, even if that is the case, it never comes up. That's because I believe that it's crass, it's low class to talk about money that way. Talking about money and making other people feel miserable or feel uncomfortable because they don't have the same situation, I think it's crass to do that. I also think that it's silly to have all these gaps. Today I was listening to a podcast and someone said, "OK you can build this product and all you have to do is just get one customer a day. The product costs $497 and you just have to have one customer a day." Wait a second, you don't even have to have one customer a day, you just have to have one customer every other day and you make all of this money and you gave her $191,000-something figure. He just managed to leave out, how are you supposed to have that [half 00:03:45] customer a day? I think those things are crass. It doesn't come out in my voice. It doesn't come out in my podcast. It doesn't come out in me audio, or my video, or my presentations. For the most part, we will stay within how do you actually move your skill ahead. How do you get these skills? That's my voice. For the most part it stays consistent. I'm not saying that I've never brought it up before. I'm saying for the most part, it stays consistent. This is what you've got to understand. That for the most part your voice is going to stay consistent and you're going to attract customers and clients that like that voice. It might be a voice that talks about money all the time. Yes, that's great because that attracts that kind of audience. Then yours might be about hard work. We talk about the article writing course, which is the toughest writing course in the world. Clients will write in and say, "You got me at that line." Why would I sign up for anything if it wasn't tough or if it weren't tough, that's right English. They tell me that this is what they want from life. They want to work hard, they want to create magic, that is the voice that I'm sending out. That's the voice that your clients are responding to, that's the voice that my clients

When you're a small business, you have what seems like a terrible choice: tactics or strategy. But do you really have to choose? How do online or offline strategies differ from tactics? Can you get by on marketing tactics alone? There is a difference and this podcast shows you how to not just tell the difference, but profit from it. To get hidden goodies, go to: http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to: http://www.psychotactics.com ===== Time Stamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:44 The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics 00:06:59 Strategy Leads to More Stress 00:08:39 How to Execute Tactics and Strategy 00:12:27 Summary 00:13:33 Action Plan 00:14:51 Final Notes. ===== Transcript Sean D.: Hi this is Sean D'Souza, from Psychotactics.com and you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. It's the new year and most of us are already thinking of not making new year resolutions so why do we hate new year resolutions so much? We hate it because it doesn't work and the reason why it doesn't work is because we're not doing it right. Today we're going to talk about strategy versus tactics. Your new year resolution so far has probably been a tactic, not a strategy. Back in 2008, I decided I wanted to play badminton. I wanted to lose a bit of weight, but I also enjoy sport. You see, I don't really like to do any exercise, I don't like going to the gym, I can barely tolerate walking, I only do it because I'm listening to something and it helps me pass the time, but sport? You ask me to play some soccer, or as I call it, football, or cricket, or badminton, well that's more up my street. I go to play badminton every day at 9 o'clock and then by 12 o'clock I'd be back. Now I wasn't playing all the three hours, I was playing just a couple of hours, but as you can tell, that's quite a decent workout. What happened at the end of a couple of months? I didn't lose any weight. How could that be the case? How can you run about like a crazy nut, for two hours, five days a week and not lose any weight? The problem was I was reading it as a tactic, not as a strategy. I'd go and play for those hours every day and then I'd get back and I'd eat a little of this and a little of that and pretty much I was consuming as many calories as I was burning and doing it every single day. After several months, I was exactly where I started, but not only did I goof up on the food, I was also goofing up on how I approached the game. After three months, I had so many aches and pains because I wasn't doing stuff right and I gave up the game. Now I still have my racket with me, I still have my shoes, I still have the badminton shuttle I was playing with when I went from C player to B player which was quite difficult by the way. That is what today's podcast is about. It's about the difference between strategies and tactics. You've probably figured out the difference between strategies and tactics anyway. Tactics are like a new year's resolution. You decide you want to stop smoking, you want to go on a diet, you want to do something and it's that instant moment of deciding that you want to do something and then you move in a different direction. Tactics might seem like just that one moment and strategy might seem like a longer period of time, but there's more to strategy than just the period of time and that is that there are different elements that feed into that strategy. When you look at something like what we're doing right now in podcasting, when I did podcasting back in 2010, I had what you call a tactic. I recorded a podcast and I put it up and people came there and they listened to it and that was it. However, this time around it's a strategy, so it's not just a podcast, it has different elements involved. There is the podcast, there is the cartoon that goes with the podcast, there are the transcripts, there are the pages that have to be created for the podcast. There is the music that has to be put in, the music has to be bought obviously, it has to be tailored, it takes a couple of hours to put in all the music and then in this age of distraction, we have to get people to go there, to listen to the podcast, to subscribe, to download, to continue to listen to them on a regular basis. This is something that I plan to be doing for a long time and that's the difference between a strategy and a tactic. You have to think about all of the elements that are going to make it work, just like in badminton. It didn't just involve me going there and playing for a couple of hours, it also involved what I was going to eat, how I would improve my game so I wasn't struggling all the time and also how to not injure myself, because I'm an expert at doing that. By simply showing up and playing badminton, that was a tactic. By this point, you're probably wond

What's the secret to getting results? Amazingly it's not some online marketing trick or strategy. It's just plain old follow up. But how do you follow up? And how can you have a marketing strategy—especially for your small business? In this episode of the Three Month Vacation from Psychotactics, you learn exactly how to follow up to get results. To get hidden goodies, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To also get the coolest headline report on "why headlines fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps 00:00:00 Introduction-My Story With Compaq 00:03:07 Table of Contents 00:04:09 Topic 1: Education and Sales to Follow Up 00:09:04 Topic 2: How Often Should You Follow Up 00:13:16 Topic 3: How Do Amazon and Apple Follow Up? 00:16:21 Summary 00:17:48 Final Details ==== Transcript Sean D'Souza:I've not always lived in New Zealand. I lived in Mumbai, India for a long time and back then, I used to be a cartoonist. I wasn't so much into marketing or not into marketing at all. Even as I say that, somehow it seems odd and the reason for that is because even without realizing it, I was using the concepts of marketing, so let me tell you this story. Even though I grew up in Mumbai, I mostly drew for newspapers and magazines and places like that. The pay is terrible there because all of the syndicates like Universal feature syndicate and all these syndicates that send out cartoons, they just mass dump the cartoons into other countries, including India. It's so cheap that a newspaper or a magazine can just bring dozens of them. If you look at the cartoon pages, they are there every single day, a whole page of cartoons. There I was competing against this absolutely dirt cheap, probably 20 cents a cartoon scenario and of course I couldn't make a living doing that, so I started looking out for companies because companies do presentations and within presentations, you can use cartoons. At one point I picked on this computer company called Compaq. They showed some initial interest in the cartoons, but then they went quiet. Now as I said, I wasn't doing any marketing back then, but I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and then I followed up and followed up. One day, their manager called up and he said, "Can you come over?" He took me to their boardroom and there I was in front of fifteen or twenty people sitting there and he said, "Tell them what you did." I'm completely confused now. It's like, "What did I do?" He says, "Tell them when you started communicating with me," and so I did and he says, "Tell them how many times you communicated with me," and of course I followed his instruction. I did want the job after all. Then he turned to the entire group which happened to be in sales and marketing and he said, "This is the difference. This is why he is standing here. This is why he's going to get the job. It not because of his skill, it's not because of pretty much anything I know about him, it's because he followed up and because he was persistent, that's why he's standing here and that is a lesson for you in sales and marketing." Yes, it was a lesson for me in sales and marketing too because when you're a small business especially, you don't know whether you should follow up. If you're a big business, you can just buy ads and flood them in the marketplace and repeat them ten thousand times and maybe they'll do the job and maybe they won't, but you have those deep pockets, but if you're a small business, what do you do? You follow up, but how do you follow up without becoming a pest? The first thing we're going to cover today is how do you follow up without becoming a pest. The second thing is how often do you follow up and then we'll look at some real life situations from Amazon and also from our site at Psychotactics and how it has made a difference to our business. When I say a difference, this has been the difference between a client buying nothing and ending up buying twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars worth of product and services over time. Let's start with the first topic which is what are the tools that you use to follow up? What are the systems that you're going to use to follow up? There are actually two tools that probably encompass everything that you need to do with follow up and that is to educate and the second one is to sell. Now both of them are incredibly important. You might think that the education is more important than the sales, but it's not. Both of them are very, very important, so when I first started out as a cartoonist and I just moved to New Zealand, I was not only a small business, but a small business with no clients and with no understanding of what people in New Zealand were buying and where to go. In short, it was like just being born in a business. It was brand new. Of course, you do what most businesses do. You get in touch with clients and this is a consulting business, a business that's not online. You get in touch with them, you go to some meet

The bikini concept or bikini principle works on a simple idea. That by giving away 90% of the concept, and keeping 10%, the attraction factor is just as strong, if not twice as strong. And yes, what the bikini didn't reveal, was the part the audience most want, and was the part they were willing to pay for. The same applies to your information products, webinars, workshops and yes, presentations. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/magic To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ----------------------- Time Stamp 00:00:20 Introduction: Bikini Principle 00:05:33 How The Brain Audit Workshop Helped 00:07:57 What You Can Give Away And What You Can Sell 00:09:20 Summary 00:11:04 Action Plan --------------- Transcript It's hard to think of a bikini when you are in a classroom and you're giving a speech and then someone asks you a question, but that's exactly what happened and how we came upon what we call the bikini principle. This bikini principle became one of the most read, most ever. The reason why it became so popular is probably because of the bikini, but also because it underlines a concept that's so obvious, and we probably are too scared to admit that it works. What is this bikini principle? To understand the bikini principle I have to go back in time. I have to go back all the way the Pittsburgh. Now Pittsburgh is a city in the United States; it's on the east coast. I had been invited to speak at an event. As it happened, we had just started Psychotactics.com a couple of years before that and I had written this book called The Brain Audit. The way I'd go about my speeches is I would cover only three things. I still do that; I still cover only three elements even in this podcast. The point was that in The Brain Audit the book consists of seven bags or seven elements. When I covered those three elements, of course everyone would be very interested in the elements and then they would ask the inevitable question. The question was: If you've told us about the three red bags, and there are seven red bags in The Brain Audit, what are the remaining red bags about? I was always un-eager, as it were, to answer this question. I was very reluctant because somehow I felt I was giving away the plot. I was giving away everything and then there would be no reason for the customers to buy anything. I was giving away all the seven red bags now, but if I gave away just three then maybe, just maybe, they would buy the book because that way they would have to find out what the rest of the red bags were. Now one of the people at this event was quite adamant. He was like "But surely you can tell us what the four red bags are about." Very reluctantly, I did. I put it up on the board and I explained what they were. I told them the seven red bags are the problem, the solution, the target profile, the objections, the risk reversal, the testimonials, and uniqueness. I laid it out for them and I thought that's it. I'm going back; I'm not going to sell anything; I've told them everything I know. Incredibly, we had the best sales ever. Of course we've gone on to sell a lot more since then but back then we were just starting out. It stunned me how many products we sold on that day. When I got back to New Zealand I wrote about it. I called it the bikini principle. It's not very hard to understand where that idea comes from. The bikini hides just a few parts, but what it reveals is enormous, and yet it's just the few hidden parts that make it so sexy. In effect, revealing a lot more wasn't causing customers to buy less. Instead, they were buying more. That totally took me by surprise. I just didn't expect it. Over the years I've realized that the people who end up buying stuff from us are people who get more information about a product or a service - and this is not just on the sales page, but when you look at, say, Amazon.com and you read the first chapter, what that does is it reveals a lot of the stuff in that first chapter or second chapter and then you get locked in. Earlier this year we sold the pre-sale course and then we took it off the shelves. In that short period we gave away one-fourth of the course. Now I know what you're thinking: One-fourth is not a bikini, but you get the idea. The idea is once you give away a substantial amount of your information, instead of the customer leaving and going elsewhere saying "Oh, I got all the information I need," they come back. This went to a completely different level when I did the first Brain Audit workshop. Now imagine this. Supposing you have a book and you wrote the book and everyone's read the book. Would they come to a workshop? Well, you're going to say yes, right? That's what we do. We buy a book, then we go to the workshop. But as a creator, as the writer, as the person who's running the business, that's not how we think. We think that if they've got everything, why would they bother

How much is enough? And where do you stop? It's easy to get all wrapped up in this whole concept of passive income and how smart it seems. Yet, you can work yourself crazy if you're not careful. You can work too much, do too much?but even vacation too much. Understanding the power of enough allows you to have a great business plan and a great vacation plan. Whether you're in online marketing or just have a small business, your strategy should be about "enough". ========== Some goodies To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ========= Time Stamp 00:00:20 Calvin and Hobbes Story 00:02:04 Keeping Up With The Joneses 00:03:37 Psychotactics: Our Definition of Enough 00:06:53 How Can You Overdo A Vacation? 0:09:25 Summary 00:10:40 Coming Up Next ======== Transcript: Power of Enough Sean D'Souza: There's a comic strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Obviously, many of you have read it. In one panel, Calvin is ramping up for Christmas and so is Hobbes. Calvin asks Hobbes, he says, "What did you get on your list for Santa for Christmas?" Hobbes says, "I asked him for a tuna sandwich," and Calvin goes ballistic. He's like, "How could you do that?! I asked him for a rocket launcher, a train," and he brings up a list that's a mile long. Of course, the scene shifts to the day that's Christmas Day and Calvin is stomping around the house shouting, "I'm going to sue Santa!" Obviously, because he's got nothing and there's Hobbes, ever the philosopher and saying, "Well, I got my tuna sandwich." At this point, I turn to people and ask them, "Do you know what your tuna sandwich is?" Before I get you all hungry for sandwiches, let's talk about the first episode. I don't know if you've listened to the first episode, but it was outsourcing versus magic. You need to go to number one and start listening from number one, not because they're in sequence, but just because the first episode is so important. It's just the philosophy and this is another philosophy piece. It's about the power of enough. What is the power of enough? What is our tuna sandwich? One of the things that probably drives us crazy is this keeping up with the Joneses. A good example would be just the three month vacation, so let's say you take three months off this year. Then what do you do next year? Do you take four months off? What about the year after next? Six months off? I could go on, but how long would I go on? Six, eight, ten, twelve? What is the limit? When we run our businesses, one of the quests is just customers. We want more and more and more customers and the reason for more and more customers is not because we love more and more customers, but because it represents money and it represents more money and more money and more money. For me, money is like fuel. It's like putting fuel in a car. It's finite. You have a fuel tank and you fill it up and then as it empties itself out, you make sure that you never run out of the fuel, but you don't go out there and you store up more and more and more and more because there is a price to pay and that price is that the whole thing might just blow up in your face one day. So we had to work out our own tuna sandwich. At Psychotactics, we had to define what was our enough. For instance, we have a membership site at 5000bc.com and when you go to 5000bc, you'll find that our membership hasn't dramatically increased from the year 2003, 2004. Considering the year that we are in right now, you'd say, "What's happened?", but the point is that we don't have to double or treble the number of members that we have currently. Sure, some members leave and you have to replace those members with other members, but there isn't enough. There is actually a benchmark at 5000bc of how many members we're willing to accept. The reason is very simple. It's like having kids around the place. I mean, you have x number of kids and you can handle them, you can look after them, but if you have an enormous number, you can't really give them your attention. The same thing applies to our courses. We do an article writing course. We do a cartooning course. We do copyrighting courses. We do a lot of courses online and we always have waiting lists. Now, when you consider that some of the courses are $3,000 or $5,000, it's very easy to sneak in a few and make another 10, 20, $30,000. Who's going to ask you? Who's going to say, "Hey, you've got three or four more." Who's going to say that? No one's going to say that. Still, we have a limit. We have our enough. If you come to a workshop like any workshop that we have; we don't have them very often because we know what is our enough, but when we do have a workshop, you have a maximum of thirty-five people in the room. Could we get more than thirty-five people in a room? Of course we could, but at thirty-five, we stop because once it goes beyond thirty-five, you stop bec

Should stories be dramatic? Incredibly, the answer is NO. Drama comes from the 90% principle. And this means that your audience needs to know 90% of your story in advance. And that's one of the elements that make storytelling incredibly powerful. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a short, yet beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com ==== Transcript: Sean D'Souza:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I'm his evil twin. Sean D'Souza:And you're listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Some people are considered to be natural born storytellers and that's all of us by the way. When you were five years old, you came back from school and you told a whole bunch of stories and you did it perfectly well. You put in the drama, you put in the suspense, you changed your tone, you did everything powerfully and wonderfully. Then as you grow up, you get a little more judgmental about your stories and you think that other people are better storytellers than you and it's true. Storytelling is a craft. When you're five years old, everyone listens to you because it's true, but as you grow up, you have to craft it. We'll take a little trip and find out what's involved in storytelling. Now this is just a little bit of the entire series that I've written on storytelling but it will give you a good gist of what to expect from that book, that series, and because these questions were put to me off-the-cuff, I am probably going to answer things that you probably won't find in those books or that series. It's a win-win situation and I think you should get the series from Psychotactics but for now listen in and let's get on this storytelling rollercoaster, shall we? In this series, we're going to cover a lot of topics, probably 10 in all but we'll start off with the main topic and that is what makes a good storyteller. There are clear attributes to be found in good storytelling. One of the attributes of a storyteller is they should know when to tell a story and when not to tell a story. You can't always tell a story just about anywhere. One of the good places to tell story is when you are starting up something. If I started off this thing with a story, you'll say let me tell you about the time we were in London. Immediately that gets your attention. The other place when you need to tell stories is once you have given some information. Stories almost act like an example, like a case study and so they help the listener understand, comprehend what you just said. A storyteller needs to know this. They need to know that it's not just about telling story after story after story. Instead they need to know where to tell the story, when to tell the story, how long that story needs to be. That's what makes a good storyteller. This takes us to our second point. What can you do to improve your storytelling? Let's find out. There's an amazing series on Africa and the narrator of that series, which is a BBC series, is David Attenborough. Now David Attenborough talks about the resurrection plant and he talks about how the resurrection plant is out there in the desert and how it starts to roll and roll, and then it could be like that, rolling for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, maybe even 100 years. Then at some point in time, it runs into a puddle of water and that's when the resurrection plant comes to life. Immediately, in a couple of hours, it starts to grow. It's almost like watching something on video in fast motion. Then the resurrection plant is not done. It has to wait for the second phenomenon which is the rain has to come, and the rain has to then hit the petals. The petals have to drop on the floor and new resurrection plants come up. Within a few days, all of them dry up. They shrivel up and then they become these little balls of resurrection plants that may go for another 50 or 100 years. What makes that story interesting? What makes that story interesting is simply that it has three elements. The first element being sequence; the second being suspense; and the third being a rollercoaster. A good storyteller needs to know these three things. If you want to improve your storytelling, you need to understand that there needs to be a sequence. It needs to unfold one step at a time. This happens and that happens, then that happens. The second thing is that there has to be a factor of suspense, so maybe the resurrection plant gets to the water but at that point in time, nothing is happening. It's growing but the petals don't fall off. How are the petals going to fall off? How is that momentous occasion going to come about? Then the rain comes along. Then you've created this ups-and-downs, this suspense, and that brings us to the third part which is rollercoaster. Now, what is a rollercoaster?

Storytelling isn't an art. It's a science. Every kid knows how to tell stories. And it's cute to be a storyteller when you're a kid. But when you put structure to writing and storytelling you take it from science to art. Find out how this works with story. To find more podcast options, go to http://www.psychotactics.com/podcast To get a beautiful headline report on "Why Headlines Fail", go to http://www.psychotactics.com Transcript: Sean D'Souza:Hi. This is Sean D'Souza from psychotactics.com. And you are listening to the three month vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less, instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Most stories start up with once upon a time, well at least the stories that we learned when we were kids. Well, imagine if Goldilocks and the Three Bears started right in the middle. That's what we're going to cover in this section. We're going to start off with stories that start right in the middle. How to keep stories fresh and engaging? We're going to look at the 90% principle and we will repeat that several times in this series in different ways, but you'll learn the 90% principle. Then, there's counterflow. What is counterflow? Flow and counterflow, but what does counterflow involve? Finally, the pivotal moment, how to turn the story on a dime? Let's get into story telling. Let's start off with, how to keep your stories fresh and engaging? If you ask a photographer to take a picture of say a glass. Well most of us will just stand up, take our phones out and take a picture from wherever we are standing. We don't go close to the glass. We don't bother to see the angle of the glass, we don't bother about anything. We just rip out the phone, rip out the camera, take a picture and we are done. That is not interesting. From a photographers point of view it is well you want me to take a picture of this glass, what kind of lighting, which angle. When you look at the glass there are about a million permutations, the type of light, the type of color, the type of angle. All these things come into play when a photographer is taking a picture of a single glass just an ordinary glass, and this is how you have to approach your content. When you are talking just about anything you have to understand what I am really going at. What angle am I going at? Why kind of lighting am I portraying? With story telling you have to know what is it that you are talking about? If you are talking about something that is immutable, insurmountable, well you have things like the Himalayas, and you have these mountains that cannot be moved. You also have other problems, other things that personal stories that talk about things that you could not move, that wouldn't budge, so you have case study where maybe a recording company didn't budge and the Beetles just had to find another way. Once you have got that kind of understanding of well, what I am really saying here. What is that word? What is that phrase? No you can keep your content fresh and engaging. You can tell the same story, that same glass and look at it at different angles and different light and different ways and you can approach that same story a million different ways and customers never get fed up. However, you also have to understand that we the storytellers get tired of our stories long before customers do. You look at someone like say Frank Sinatra, and he is saying, say 'New York, New York' and every time he went out people were happy to listen to the new songs, but they wanted New York, New York. They wanted him to sing that song or they wanted him to sing 'My Way.' They wanted those things that they could attach themselves to understand, and so yes there are million ways to represent a story or a million ways to represent a sales pitch but also remember that people love the way that you have always done it, so don't just change for the sake of changing. In summary, there are different ways to approach the story, just know what you're talking about and secondly once you have that run it. You don't have to keep changing it. This takes us to the second part which is how do we make the story more dramatic. Where do we start? When we are growing up we are accustomed to listen to stories that start off with once upon a time and the problem with stories that start off with once upon a time, it takes too much time to get to the main gist of the story. Let's think of a story like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and you know how that story runs. It starts out with once upon time there was Goldilocks and the Three Bears etc. You don't really want to start there. That is fine for a kid. That is fine for someone that is just falling off to sleep. Your audience is not falling off to sleep. You want to wake them up remember. Where does your story start? It starts right in the middle. The drama is right in the middle of the story. Goldilocks is there on the bed. She is looking up and suddenly there are

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

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

It's not easy to save time. We all know that. Yet, time management isn't just a factor of getting a fancy to-do list. Sometimes it involves some pretty odd things that you have to do. At Psychotactics, I didn't always have time. Now my workload has more than doubled, but I have a lot of time. How did that happen? More at http://www.psychotactics.com Time Stamps: 00:00:20 Introduction / 00:02:54 | Tip 1: Keep Stuff Open At All Times 00:08:22 | Tip 2: Leave the Office?And Plan Obsessively?And Weekly! 00:13:22 | Tip 3: Spend Two Hours To Save 5 Minutes 00:17:07 | Summary 00:18:40 Transcript Sean:Hi, this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com. Speaker 2:And I am his evil twin. Sean:And you're listening to the Three Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead, it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. I want to start today with just a little boast. I write several courses every year, like 200 pages and then we do the course where we have sometimes 20 or 30,000 posts on a single course. I'll write articles, I'll do workshops. Not lots them, maybe once a year, but it takes a lot of planning. Then I'll be in 5000bc.com which is our membership site. Yes, there's lots of other work-related activities but I also mentor my niece, which means that I stop work at about 12:00 every afternoon. I'll take a break, often take a nap, and I'll explain that in another show and why it's so important. Then I will work with my niece until 7:30 that evening. The point is that I was boasting there. The other point is that it's all true. Now granted, I do wake up at 4 AM but I also take three months off every year. Where do I find the time to do all this stuff? There are certain things that I've learned over the years, and when I go back to who I was back in 1990 or in the year 2000 or 2005, I was not the same person. I was always battling for time and always struggling with stuff. I had to figure out what am I going to do. How is this going to change? Why is it that I'm always battling with this factor of time? I realized that some people do things slightly differently. On today's show I'm going to talk about three things that would seem radical in a way. I would ask you to try it, because it works really well. The first thing that we're going to talk about is just the factor of keeping things ready. We'll find out what this is all about. The second thing we're going to cover in the show is just to leave the office, which sounds really odd. The third thing is to spend about an hour or two hours so that you can save five minutes. As you can see, this is pretty radical stuff, but it will save you enormous amounts of time during the year. Let's get on with the show, shall we? Back in 2010 I started watercolors. I went to a watercolor course nearby. In fact, it was my third or fourth watercolor course. I had never succeeded in painting and so I decided I'm going to get this done. But it was the guy who was conducting the watercolor course that made a difference to me. His name was Ted and he said "Sean, why don't you get a diary and why don't you just put your stuff in there everyday? Just draw what happened to you." I thought that's a good idea. I thought wow, that's a good idea. I could do that. I could just take something that happened to me that day and put it in the book, in the diary. Now the good thing was that I already had a whole bunch of Moleskine diaries that I'd put earlier a couple of years ago, never used them. Now I could use them. I started to use them, but soon enough chaos reigned. I would forget the diary somewhere and I would sometimes have to diary and not the pens. Then I realized that the reason why I wasn't getting anything done was I didn't have all my stuff with me open at all times. Now this sounds really odd but if you don't have your stuff open and ready to go, you simply lose momentum. If I we're to go into my bag, even if I had my drawing, and then get it out of the bag and then open the book and get to the right page, and then open the pencil box, and then sharpen the pencils, it's five or seven minutes or eight minutes - if I get everything right. What I started doing was I started keeping everything open. I started keeping all my watercolors there ready to go. I started keeping all my paints ready to go. As a result I have now done a watercolor almost every single day for four years. That's, wow, 365, but I end up doing a little more so maybe about 1,200, 1,500 watercolors that I wouldn't have done, had never done before. Where do you get this kind of time? Just the fact that you have to open stuff takes up a lot of time. I have Scrivener on my computer and when I do my courses, what I do is I keep Scrivener open all the time. I know this sounds crazy for people who want to close everything and keep it neat, but having to open Scrivener, find the file, put in all that assignments that I've written for the course, all of that takes

It's not enough to want to have passive income. You may think it's a smart way to go about things, but in fact, it's pretty shallow. You want to create magic, and to create that magic you need the help of the three-prong system. Businesses such as Harley Davidson, football, cricket, and of course, big organisations like religion have the three prong system at their very core. At Psychotactics, we've used the three-prong system the moment we figured it out. It's more than a business plan, it's a long-term understanding of where you business will be for years to come. You can see more at http://www.psychotactics.com or e-mail me at [email protected]. Chapters: 00:00:20 Introduction to Three-Prong / 00:01:43 The Three-Prong System / 00:04:38 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed / 00:04:46 Why Consulting, Training and Leverage are Needed / 00:08:45 Our Start at Psychotactics / 00:10:07 Why Bother With Consulting? / 00:11:39 Action Plan / 00:13:32 Final Recommendations / 00:14:51 Transcript ========== Sean D'Souza:Hi this is Sean D'Souza from Psychotactics.com. Speaker 1:I'm his evil twin. Sean D'Souza:You're listening to the Three-Month Vacation podcast. This podcast isn't some magic trick about working less. Instead it's about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Back in 1990 I used to work for an advertising agency and I had a great boss. Every time I ask my boss, "Can I take the day off?" She would give me the day off. Now you would think that was an ideal situation but it wasn't for me. I didn't like to ask for the day off. I got into my own business. But that didn't really solve my problem because I was a cartoonist back then and whenever I went on vacation, I would comeback and I would meet with my clients and they would say something like, "Oh where were you?" I would say, "Oh I just was on vacation." They'd say, "By the way we were looking out for you and we can't find you and so we gave the job to someone else." That could get me really stressed because now, no longer was I losing out on the jobs but I wasn't enjoying my vacations. I was always worried that I was losing out on money and I have competitors now because my client were going out and finding people while I was on vacation. I had to sit down and think about it, how do I overcome this problem? Interestingly, organizations that have lasted hundreds of thousands of years have a system that has worked amazingly well. I call it the Three-Prong System. What is Three-Prong System? No matter which business you look at it's built on three prongs or at least it should be built on three prongs. The first prong is consulting. The second prong is training. The third is leverage. Let's look at consulting. What is consulting? Consulting is just a fancy name for one-on-one. Effectively when you go out there and you speak to a client then what you're doing is you're physically going out there. You have to be there for the transaction to happen. That Speaker 1:Yes, there is such a thing because you have to go through this meeting after meeting after meeting, [inaudible 00:02:41], it's such a pain. Sean D'Souza:There are meetings but I also enjoyed it a lot. Consulting could be something like meeting with a client for coffee or for lunch. When you physically have to go across and you have to be there in person. That is one-on-one, that's what you see, lots of [inaudible 00:03:04] people doing, they come to your house, they fix up the plumbing or they do some carpentry. Effectively what they're doing is consulting. They have to be there because if they're not there, they don't get paid. This is the most tedious way to get paid. That's [inaudible 00:03:23] to the second one which is training. What is training? Training is one-to-many. When you do a workshop for instance, you're one person and there are many people at the same time. Courses, webinars, anything that is live and needs you to be there at a specific time and specific place is what you call training. That is less intensive than consulting because now you are dealing with a whole bunch of people. But it's not as great as leverage. You already know what leverage means. Leverage is just, you don't have to be there. It's an Elvis business. You've left the building as it were. You're at the beach, you're somewhere else, you are at the café or you're just asleep or on vacation. The point is that when you have books or recorded podcast or products or services that are selling while you're not around, that is a leverage business. It's very easy to come to a conclusion that the leverage business is the best business going. It's not. It's only one of three prongs. Let's take an example to find out just what this means. When we look at organizations such as religious organizations, we see the best structure of the three-prong system. They have consulting where someone can meet with you one-on-one. They have training which is one -to-many. Then they have leverage, where the

There's a difference between the "four-hour workweek" and magic. You can create revenue in a short week. You can't create magic. Magic is what we all want to create with our work. Most of us love our work. It gives us purpose and satisfaction. And yes, we'd love a "three-month" paid vacation—or just any vacation at all. And that's the goal. The goal is to work hard, but to also have a great time. Yup, it's the Psychotactics Website ===== Why You Can't Outsource Magic I don't mow the lawns. I outsource it. I don't do my accounts. It's what keeps my accountant in business. I bake my own bread, cook my own food, but at least half of the time it's all outsourced. In fact, when I think about it, a good chunk of my life is outsourced. I don't build my own computers, code my own programs, generate my own electricity. I didn't even bother to weave my own carpet. So yes, you could safely say that outsourcing is a good part of my life. What I don't outsource is magic It's magical to write my own articles. Do my own books. Draw my own cartoons. Answer my own email. When I think about those who keep yearning for a "four-hour" work week, I find it incredibly weird and unsettling. I think of Leonardo da Vinci spending only four hours a week, painting. I think of Michelangelo goofing off on David and just putting in the least amount of time. I think of the wine I drink and how it would taste if the wine maker decided not to put in 50-60 hours a week. I remember the movies that moved me, the food that tantalised my taste buds, the books that have elevated my senses. I think of all the magic the world has seen, felt and experienced over the years and a "four hour" workweek makes zero-sense to me. You can create money in four hours You can't create magic. Money isn't magic. It may seem that way, when you're slogging in a job that you have no control over. A life that seems to pull and push you in all directions. At that point, money and magic may seem like one and the same thing. And yet it's not. Work is magic Work well done, is something we all yearn for. And try as you may, you can't outsource the important stuff in life. So when some internet marketer comes along and tells you that a four-hour work week is magical, they're just equating work with money. That somehow you could work for four hours in a week, and make all the money and you'd be happy. I can assure you that you'd be happy for a while, but then you'd seek magic. And magic yup, that takes a lot more time and effort. I wake up at 4 am every day and have done so for many years I don't have to wake up. We've done well over the years. We have a business which attracts really phenomenal customers. Some of them have been with us for over 12 years (considering we're Internet-based, that's like a hundred years). Our workshops are always full. Our courses often sell out in an hour or so sometimes 20 minutes. We've banked enough, own enough, travel three months in a year. Truly speaking, if we were to stop working now, we could go for at least another 20-30 years, living our comfortable lifestyle. So why wake up at 4 am? Why put in 99 cartoons in a book when people are happy to just buy text? Why bother to re-write, re-engineer our courses by 20-30% every year? It's all extra work, isn't it? More hours in a day, month and year that seems to slip by increasingly faster. The answer lies in magic You can outsource some stuff, and you should. But to create the Mona Lisa, David and some fine wine yup, that's going to take a chunky 50-60 hours a week. Get used to it!