The Three Month Vacation Podcast

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!