There are only 3 ways to make more money.
Of these, one of the ways is one that every one tries to do, one is a step always ignored and one of the ways is usually procrastinated on or avoided. 1. You can sell more - this is the one everyone wants to do. How do I sell more to more customers? How do I convert more? I do I sell more products to each customer? This step is the one we all want because we think it is the easiest, but getting new customers is hard and expensive and there is a limit to how much one customer will take. The more products, the more customers, the more potential profit, but there is more to it than this one step. 2. You can charge more. We all avoid this one. I have been through and help set up do many price increases and each and every time sales swore it wouldn't work. It always did. People avoid this one because you gave to lay the ground work, show customers why you deserve a price increase, and then sell it. It is done every day, trust me and you need to learn it. I know companies that haven't increased prices in four years! Do you know what the price if gas was four years ago? Think of the money left on the table by you avoiding the work. 3. This is the one everyone forgets, particularly when talking about on line business, and it is the most important one; you need to do it for less. You make money when you buy, not when you sell. Find ways to buy raw materials for less, improve freight, server costs, hosting, virtual assistants, travel costs, any that takes your hard earned money. Any money saved goes straight to the bottom line, aka, your profit margin. The more efficient, the more cost effective, the more money you make. D The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated)
by Timothy Ferriss Notes Part 1 This has to be the most requested book here on the site, but it is also one of those books that I think are misunderstood. Where many of the fans of the book picked up on creating a business on a laptop, and working "four hour" weeks, if you read the book closely you see the normal job deconstructed, and a defense of your time. He states at one point, the book is not for people who want to run businesses, it is for those that want to own them. It is for people who want to control their own time. The book is almost a stereotype, but is definitely worth reading. It is one of those books that today it is hard to understand how different it was when it came out, because the book helped make what is the new entrepreneur today. People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. (Time and experience are the only things that matter.) ..... this book is not about finding your “dream job.” I will take as a given that, for most people, somewhere between six and seven billion of them, the perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is. Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical. Focus on being productive instead of busy. Conditions are never perfect. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way. If it isn’t going to devastate those around you, try it and then justify it.(Simply said Do. Test. Correct. Do Again.) It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair. People who avoid all criticism fail. Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. —BENJAMIN DISRAELI, former British Prime Minister I realized that on a scale of 1–10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3 or 4. I believe this is true of most people and most would-be “holy sh*t, my life is over” disasters. Keep in mind that this is the one-in-a-million disaster nightmare....best-case scenario, or even a probable-case scenario, it would easily have a permanent 9 or 10 positive life-changing effect. In other words, I was risking an unlikely and temporary 3 or 4 for a probable and permanent 9 or 10, and I could easily recover my baseline workaholic prison with a bit of extra work if I wanted to. This all equated to a significant realization: There was practically no risk, only huge life-changing upside potential, and I could resume my previous course without any more effort than I was already putting forth. You have comfort. You don’t have luxury. And don’t tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort. —JEAN COCTEAU Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do. - (By far my favorite phrase from the book, and one that pops in my head many times a day.) The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated) What are you waiting for? If you cannot answer this without resorting to the previously rejected concept of good timing, the answer is simple: You’re afraid, just like the rest of the world. Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and re-pairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason. ....fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals. Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement. This brings us full circle. The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?” When I started BrainQUICKEN LLC in 2001, it was with a clear goal in mind: Make $1,000 per day whether I was banging my head on a laptop or cutting my toenails on the beach. It was to be an automated source of cash flow. (Definite specific goals matter) Dreamlining is so named because it applies timelines to what most would consider dreams. It is much like goal-setting but differs in several fundamental respects: The goals shift from ambiguous wants to defined steps. The goals have to be unrealistic to be effective. It focuses on activities that will fill the vacuum created when work is removed. Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things. Now it’s your turn to think big. ...... The goal is to start a dialogue so they take the time to answer future e-mails—not to ask for help. That can only come after at least three or four genuine e-mail exchanges.” (to meet new people, to get advice) Life is too short to be small. —BENJAMIN DISRAELI Dreamlining (Setting Goals) Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.) in that order. Do not limit yourself, and do not concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. For now, it’s unimportant. This is an exercise in reversing repression. If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following: one place to visit one thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime) one thing to do daily one thing to do weekly one thing you’ve always wanted to learn Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. Identify an action that would characterize this state of being or a task that would mean you had achieved it. People find it easier to brainstorm “being” first, but this column is just a temporary holding spot for “doing” actions. Using the 6-month timeline, star or otherwise highlight the four most exciting and/or important dreams from all columns. Repeat the process with the 12-month timeline if desired. Determine the cost of these dreams and calculate your Target Monthly Income (TMI) for both timelines Last, calculate your Target Monthly Income (TMI) for realizing these dreamlines. This is how to do it: First, total each of the columns A, B, and C, counting only the four selected dreams. Some of these column totals could be zero, which is fine. Next, add your total monthly expenses x 1.3 (the 1.3 represents your expenses plus a 30% buffer for safety or savings). This grand total is your TMI and the target to keep in mind for the rest of the book. I like to further divide this TMI by 30 to get my TDI—Target Daily Income. I find it easier to work with a daily goal. Online calculators on our companion site do all the work for you and make this step a cinch. The objective of this exercise isn’t, therefore, to outline every step from start to finish, but to define the end goal, the required vehicle to achieve them (TMI, TDI), and build momentum with critical first steps. From that point, it’s a matter of freeing time and generating the TMI, which the following chapters cover. Once you have three steps for each of the four goals, complete the three actions in the “now” column. Do it now. Each should be simple enough to do in five minutes or less. If not, rachet it down. If it’s the middle of the night and you can’t call someone, do something else now, such as send an e-mail, and set the call for first thing tomorrow. The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same. It’s not hard. One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity. (Bruce Lee Quote) Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. I would consider the best door-to-door salesperson efficient—that is, refined and excellent at selling door-to-door without wasting time—but utterly ineffective. He or she would sell more using a better vehicle such as e-mail or direct mail. Here are two truisms to keep in mind: Doing something unimportant well does not make it important. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important. What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it. Efficiency is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things. Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers. 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio The next morning, I began a dissection of my business and personal life through the lenses of two questions: Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness? Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness? Make no mistake, maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the primary goal. I duplicated my strengths, in this case my top producers, and focused on increasing the size and frequency of their orders. Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest. .....the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities You don’t need 8 hours per day to become a legitimate millionaire—let alone have the means to live like one. Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. It is the magic of the imminent deadline. There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law). The best solution is to use both together: Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to income and schedule them with very short and clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you (or invented, in the case of the entrepreneur) will swell to consume time until another bit of minutiae jumps in to replace it, leaving you at the end of the day with nothing accomplished. I just asked him to do one simple thing consistently without fail. At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? 6. Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?” Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening. I don’t recommend using Outlook or computerized to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. I use a standard piece of paper folded in half three times, which fits perfectly in the pocket and limits you to noting only a few items. There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact. If you are stuck trying to decide between multiple items that all seem crucial, as happens to all of us, look at each in turn and ask yourself, If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day? Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. —ALBERT EINSTEIN From an actionable information standpoint, I consume a maximum of one-third of one industry magazine (Response magazine) and one business magazine (Inc.) per month, for a grand total of approximately four hours. That’s it for results-oriented reading. I read an hour of fiction prior to bed for relaxation. (I truly believe he reads much more than this.) 1. I picked one book out of dozens based on reader reviews and the fact that the authors had actually done what I wanted to do. If the task is how-to in nature, I only read accounts that are “how I did it” and autobiographical. No speculators or wannabes are worth the time. 2. Using the book to generate intelligent and specific questions, I contacted 10 of the top authors and agents in the world via e-mail and phone, with a response rate of 80%. How to Read 200% Faster in 10 Minutes 1. Two Minutes: Use a pen or finger to trace under each line as you read as fast as possible. Reading is a series of jumping snapshots (called saccades), and using a visual guide prevents regression. 2. Three Minutes: Begin each line focusing on the third word in from the first word, and end each line focusing on the third word in from the last word. This makes use of peripheral vision that is otherwise wasted on margins. For example, even when the highlighted words in the next line are your beginning and ending focal points, the entire sentence is “read,” just with less eye movement: 3. Two Minutes: Once comfortable indenting three or four words from both sides, attempt to take only two snapshots—also known as fixations—per line on the first and last indented words. 4. Three Minutes: Practice reading too fast for comprehension but with good technique (the above three techniques) for five pages prior to reading at a comfortable speed. This will heighten perception and reset your speed limit, much like how 50 mph normally feels fast but seems like slow motion if you drop down from 70 mph on the freeway. Develop the habit of asking yourself, “Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?” .....complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading e-mail as a postponement excuse Create systems to limit your availability via e-mail and phone and deflect inappropriate contact. Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones. Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results. Here is a sneak preview of full automation. I woke up this morning, and given that it’s Monday, I checked my e-mail for one hour after an exquisite Buenos Aires breakfast. Sowmya from India had found a long-lost high school classmate of mine, and Anakool from YMII had put together Excel research reports for retiree happiness and the average annual hours worked in different fields. Interviews for this week had been set by a third Indian virtual assistant, who had also found contact information for the best Kendo schools in Japan and the top salsa teachers in Cuba. In the next e-mail folder, I was pleased to see that my fulfillment account manager in Tennessee, Beth, had resolved nearly two dozen problems in the last week—keeping our largest clients in China and South Africa smiling—and had also coordinated California sales tax filing with my accountants in Michigan. The taxes had been paid via my credit card on file, and a quick glance at my bank accounts confirmed that Shane and the rest of the team at my credit card processor were depositing more cash than last month. All was right in the world of automation. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I closed my laptop with a smile. For an all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast with coffee and orange juice, I paid $4 U.S. The Indian outsourcers cost between $4–10 U.S. per hour. My domestic outsourcers are paid on performance or when product ships. This creates a curious business phenomenon: Negative cash flow is impossible. Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning. (I love this story. It is here just because I love it.) Eliminate before you delegate. Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. It is tempting to immediately point the finger at someone else and huff and puff, but most beginner bosses repeat the same mistakes I made. 1. I accepted the first person the firm provided and made no special requests at the outset. 2. I gave imprecise directions. 3. I gave him a license to waste time. 4. I set the deadline a week in advance. 5. I gave him too many tasks and didn’t set an order of importance. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON His business model is more elegant than that. Here is just one revenue stream: 1. A prospective customer sees his Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on Google or other search engines and clicks through to his site, www.prosoundeffects.com. 2. The prospect orders a product for $325 (the average purchase price, though prices range from $29–7,500) on a Yahoo shopping cart, and a PDF with all their billing and shipping information is automatically e-mailed to Doug. 3. Three times a week, Doug presses a single button in the Yahoo management page to charge all his customers’ credit cards and put cash in his bank account. Then he saves the PDFs as Excel purchase orders and e-mails the purchase orders to the manufacturers of the CD libraries. Those companies mail the products to Doug’s customers—this is called drop-shipping—and Doug pays the manufacturers as little as 45% of the retail price of the products up to 90 days later (net-90 terms). This chapter is not for people who want to run businesses but for those who want to own businesses and spend no time on them. People can’t believe that most of the ultrasuccessful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers. There are hundreds of companies that exist to pretend to work for someone else and handle these functions, providing rentable infrastructure to anyone who knows where to find them. Before we create this virtual architecture, however, we need a product to sell. If you own a service business, this section will help you convert expertise into a downloadable or shippable good to escape the limits of a per-hour-based model. If starting from scratch, ignore service businesses for now, as constant customer contact makes absence difficult. To narrow the field further, our target product can’t take more than $500 to test, it has to lend itself to automation within four weeks, and—when up and running—it can’t require more than one day per week of management. Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time. That’s it.22 I will call this vehicle a “muse” whenever possible to separate it from the ambiguous term “business,” which can refer to a lemonade stand or a Fortune 10 oil conglomerate—our objective is more limited and thus requires a more precise label. So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible. (I think there is a third one, your network) Here’s how you do it in the fewest number of steps. Step One: Pick an Affordably Reachable Niche Market The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated) Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them. Ask yourself the following questions to find profitable niches. 1. Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to, have you belonged to, or do you understand, Which of the groups you identified have their own magazines? Step Two: Brainstorm (Do Not Invest In) Products Pick the two markets that you are most familiar with that have their own magazines with full-page advertising that costs less than $5,000. There should be no fewer than 15,000 readers. This is the fun part. Now we get to brainstorm or find products with these two markets in mind. The goal is come up with well-formed product ideas and spend nothing; The Main Benefit Should Be Encapsulated in One Sentence. People can dislike you—and you often sell more by offending some—but they should never misunderstand you. The main benefit of your product should be explainable in one sentence or phrase. It Should Cost the Customer $50–200. The bulk of companies set prices in the midrange, and that is where the most competition is. Pricing low is shortsighted, because someone else is always willing to sacrifice more profit margin and drive you both bankrupt. Besides perceived value, there are three main benefits to creating a premium, high-end image and charging more than the competition. Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units—and thus manage fewer customers—and fulfill our dreamlines. It’s faster. Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers (better credit, fewer complaints/questions, fewer returns, etc.). It’s less headache. This is HUGE. Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer. I personally aim for an 8–10x markup, which means a $100 product can’t cost me more than $10–12.50.27 I have found that a price range of $50–200 per sale provides the most profit for the least customer service hassle. Price high and then justify. It Should Take No More Than 3 to 4 Weeks to Manufacture. This is critically important for keeping costs low and adapting to sales demand without stockpiling product in advance. It Should Be Fully Explainable in a Good Online FAQ. Understanding these criteria, a question remains: “How does one obtain a good muse product that satisfies them?” There are three options we’ll cover in ascending order of recommendation. Option One: Resell a Product Purchasing an existing product at wholesale and reselling it is the easiest route but also the least profitable. It is the fastest to set up but the fastest to die off due to price competition with other resellers. The profitable life span of each product is short unless an exclusivity agreement prevents others from selling it. Reselling is, however, an excellent option for secondary back-end28 products that can be sold to existing customers or cross-sold29 to new customers online or on the phone. Option Two: License a Product Option Three: Create a Product Creating a product is not complicated. “Create” sounds more involved than it actually is. If the idea is a hard product—an invention—it is possible to hire mechanical engineers or industrial designers on www.elance.com to develop a prototype based on your description of its function and appearance, which is then taken to a contract manufacturer. If you find a generic or stock product made by a contract manufacturer that can be re-purposed or positioned for a special market, it’s even easier: Have them manufacture it, stick a custom label on it for you, and presto—new product. This latter example is often referred to as “private labeling.” Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate. Consider that the top-selling non-information infomercial products—whether exercise equipment or supplements—have a useful life span of two to four months before imitators flood the market. Information, on the other hand, is too time-consuming for most knockoff artists to bother with when there are easier products to replicate. It’s easier to circumvent a patent than to paraphrase an entire course to avoid copyright infringement. Three of the most successful television products of all time—all of which have spent more than 300 weeks on the infomercial top-10 bestseller lists—reflect the competitive and profit margin advantage of information products. No Down Payment (Carlton Sheets) Attacking Anxiety and Depression (Lucinda Bassett) Personal Power (Tony Robbins If you aren’t an expert, don’t sweat it. First, “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best—just better than a small target number of your prospective customers. Second, expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators. 1. How can you tailor a general skill for your market—what I call “niching down”—or add to what is being sold successfully in your target magazines? Think narrow and deep rather than broad. 2. What skills are you interested in that you—and others in your markets—would pay to learn? Become an expert in this skill for yourself and then create a product to teach the same. If you need help or want to speed up the process, consider the next question. 3. What experts could you interview and record to create a sellable audio CD? These people do not need to be the best, but just better than most. Offer them a digital master copy of the interview to do with or sell as they like (this is often enough) and/or offer them a small up-front or ongoing royalty payment. Use Skype.com with HotRecorder (more on these and related tools in Tools and Tricks) to record these conversations directly to your PC and send the mp3 file to an online transcription service. 4. Do you have a failure-to-success story that could be turned into a how-to product for others? Consider problems you’ve overcome in the past, both professional and personal. The Expert Builder: How to Become a Top Expert in 4 Weeks How, then, do we go about acquiring credibility indicators in the least time possible? 1. Join two or three related trade organizations with official-sounding names. 2. Read the three top-selling books on your topic (search historical New York Times bestseller lists online) and summarize each on one page. 3. Give one free one-to-three-hour seminar at the closest well-known university, using posters to advertise. 4. Optional: Offer to write one or two articles for trade magazines related to your topics, citing what you have accomplished in steps 1 and 3 for credibility. 5. Join ProfNet, which is a service that journalists use to find experts to quote for articles Income Autopilot II The moral is that intuition and experience are poor predictors of which products and businesses will be profitable. To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy—ask them to buy. Step Three: Micro-Test Your Products Micro-testing involves using inexpensive advertisements to test consumer response to a product prior to manufacturing. The basic test process consists of three parts, each of which is covered in this chapter. Best: Look at the competition and create a more-compelling offer on a basic one-to-three-page website (one to three hours). Test: Test the offer using short Google Adwords advertising campaigns (three hours to set up and five days of passive observation). Divest or Invest: Cut losses with losers and manufacture the winner(s) for sales rollout. Sherwood first tests his concept with a 72-hour eBay auction that includes his advertising text. He sets the “reserve” (the lowest price he’ll accept) for one shirt at $50 and cancels the auction last minute to avoid legal issues since he doesn’t have product to ship. He has received bids up to $75 and decides to move to the next phase of testing. Johanna doesn’t feel comfortable with the apparent deception and skips this preliminary testing. Sherwood’s cost: <$5. Both register domain names for their soon-to-be one-page sites using the cheap domain registrar www.domainsinseconds.com. Sherwood chooses www.shirtsfromfrance.com and Johanna chooses www.yogaclimber.com. For additional domain names, Johanna uses www.domainsinseconds.com. Cost to both: <$20. Sherwood uses www.weebly.com to create his one-page site advertisement and then creates two additional pages using the form builder www.wufoo.com. If someone clicks on the “purchase” button at the bottom of the first page, it takes them to a second page with pricing, shipping and handling,43 and basic contact fields to fill out (including e-mail and phone). If the visitor presses “continue with order,” it takes them to a page that states, “Unfortunately, we are currently on back order but will contact you as soon as we have product in stock. Thank you for your patience.” This structure allows him to test the first-page ad and his pricing separately. If someone gets to the last page, it is considered an order. Johanna is not comfortable with “dry testing,” as Sherwood’s approach is known, even though it is legal if the billing data isn’t captured. She instead uses the same two services to create a single webpage with the content of her one-page ad and an e-mail sign-up for a free “top 10 tips” list for using yoga for rock climbing. She will consider 60% of the sign-ups as hypothetical orders. Cost to both: <$0. Both set up simple Google Adwords campaigns with 50–100 search terms to simultaneously test headlines while driving traffic to their pages. Their daily budget limits are set at $50 per day Sherwood will use Google’s free analytical tools to track “orders” and page abandonment rates—what percentage of visitors leave the site from which pages. Johanna will use www.wufoo.com to track e-mail sign-ups on this small testing scale. Johanna has done well. The traffic wasn’t enough to make the test stand up to statistical scrutiny, but she spent about $200 on PPC and got 14 sign-ups for a free 10-tip report. If she assumes 60% would purchase, that means 8.4 people x $75 profit per DVD = $630 in hypothetical total profit. This is also not taking into account the potential lifetime value of each customer. The results of her small test are no guarantee of future success, but the indications are positive enough that she decides to set up a Yahoo Store for $99 per month and a small per-transaction fee. Her credit isn’t excellent, so she will opt to use www.paypal.com to accept credit cards online instead of approaching her bank for a merchant account.46 She e-mails the 10-tip report to those who signed up and asks for their feedback and recommendations for content on the DVD. Ten days later, she has a first attempt at the DVD ready to ship and her store is online. Her sales to the original sign-ups cover costs of production and she is soon selling a respectable 10 DVDs per week ($750 profit) via Google Adwords. She plans to test advertising in niche magazines and blogs and now needs to create an automation architecture to remove herself from the equation. 1. Market Selection 2. Product Brainstorm 3. Micro-Testing 4. Rollout and Automation Income Autopilot III MBA—MANAGEMENT BY ABSENCE Once you have a product that sells, it’s time to design a self-correcting business architecture that runs..... The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Expanded and Updated) I love this book by Chris Guillebeau so I thought I would post a part I thought really helpful to the starting entrepreneur. If you like it, check it out on Amazon through this affiliate link.
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future D “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” —PETER F. DRUCKER "There’s nothing wrong with planning, but you can spend a lifetime making a plan that never turns into action. In the battle between planning and action, action wins. Here’s how you do it. A marketable idea doesn’t have to be a big, groundbreaking idea; it just has to provide a solution to a problem or be useful enough that other people are willing to pay for it. Don’t think innovation; think usefulness. Seven Steps to Instant Market Testing 1. You need to care about the problem you are going to solve, and there has to be a sizable number of other people who also care. 2. Make sure the market is big enough. 3. Focus on eliminating “blatant admitted pain.” The product needs to solve a problem that causes pain that the market knows it has. 4. Almost everything that is being sold is for either a deep pain or a deep desire. 5. Always think in terms of solutions. Make sure your solution is different and better. 6. Ask others about the idea but make sure the people you ask are your potential target market. 7. Create an outline for what you are doing and show it to a subgroup of your community. KEEP COSTS LOW. By investing sweat equity instead of money in your project, you’ll avoid going into debt and minimize the impact of failure if it doesn’t work. GET THE FIRST SALE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. In a microbusiness built on low costs and quick action, you don’t need to do much formal planning. Mostly, you need the elements we’ve discussed throughout the book: a product or service, a group of customers, and a way to get paid." The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It by Mark Cuban
Love him or hate him, Mark Cuban is a very smart guy, who has made a career out of being outspoken and doing things his way. I read his blog, which is great, and this book is a collection of some of the best. I have highlighted the parts that gave what I thought was the best advice. D "I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time, and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better. And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there? The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don’t. The thing you do need to do is learn. Learn accounting. Learn finance. Learn statistics. Learn as much as you can about business. Read biographies about businesspeople. You don’t have to focus on one thing, but you have to create a base of knowledge so you are ready when it’s time. School isn’t the end of the learning process, it’s purely a training ground and beginning. In my humble opinion, once you have learned how to learn, then you can try as many different things as you can, recognizing that you don’t have to find your destiny at any given age—you just have to be prepared to run with it when you do.R Of course, there is always a caveat to destiny, and that’s obligation. The greatest obstacle to destiny is debt, both personal and financial. Never settle. There is no reason to rush. If you aren’t happy with where you are, simplify your life and go out and try as many things as it takes to find what you may be destined to be. If there is such a thing. In basketball you have to shoot 50 percent. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In baseball you have to get a hit 30 percent of the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover of every magazine, lead off every SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame. In business, the odds are a little different. You don’t have to break the Mendoza Line (hitting .200). In fact, it doesn’t matter how many times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once. One single time and you are set for life. That’s the beauty of the business world. The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and from those around you because … All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are. You said, and I’m paraphrasing: “Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare that do win.” In a lifetime of running businesses I have developed a lot of rules that have been almost infallible. Here are a few of them that I use religiously to this day: 1. Everyone is a genius in a bull market 2. Win the battles you are in before you take on new battles It’s a huge lesson for entrepreneurs. Win the battles you are in first, then worry about expansion internationally or into new businesses. 3. You can drown in opportunity Few businesses only have one opportunity. Every entrepreneur’s mind goes crazy with the new and exciting things she can do beyond the new and exciting things she is already doing. The risk is that you can drown in all these opportunities. So let’s start at the beginning. In this post I am only going to provide you with the very first and most important of all the rules for anyone starting a business. Rule #1: Sweat equity is the best startup capital The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that began with little or no money. There weren’t 100-page-long business plans. In all of my businesses, I started by putting together spreadsheets of my expenses, which allowed me to calculate how much revenue I needed to break even and keep the lights on in my office and my apartment. I wrote overviews of what I was selling, why I thought the business made sense, an overview of my competition, why my product and/or service would be important to my customers and why they should buy or use it. All of it went down on a piece of yellow paper or in a word processing file, and none of it cost me more than the diet soda I was drinking while I was writing it up. I remember the foundation for each of my businesses. Once I could put the idea on paper, I gave the company a name. From there, I took the most important step: I tried to find people to shoot holes in the name. Each inquiry cost me next to nothing to get great feedback. Each enabled me to check the foundation of my business idea to see if it was easy to shoot holes in, and most importantly, they all served as sales calls. Each company eventually became a customer of ours. There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs: your own pocket and your customers’ pockets. Success is about making your life a special version of unique that fits who you are—not what other people want you to be. How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It It was Aaron Spelling, I believe, who said, “TV is the path of least resistance from complete boredom.” Which is another way of saying that it’s easier to watch TV than to sit there and do nothing. Which describes exactly how people make most of their choices in life. They take the easy way. They take the path of least resistance. There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time. In every case, all things being equal, we choose the path of least resistance. Understanding this concept is key to making good business decisions. Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that. 5. Start the day motivated with a positive attitude You are going to screw up. We all do. I can’t tell you how many times I did and continue to. It happens too often. But no matter what happens, every morning, the minute after you wipe away the crust from your eyes, remind yourself that you are going to enjoy every minute of the day. You are going to enjoy the twenty interviews you have. You are going to enjoy waiting in the heat for your roommate to pick you up afterward. You are going to enjoy realizing how frayed your collar has become and how sick you are of your one, lonesome tie. You are going to enjoy all the bullshit you have to deal with as you chase your goals and dreams, because you want to remember them all. Each and every experience will serve as motivation and provide great memories when you finally make it all happen. It’s your choice. Entrepreneurs always need to be reminded that it’s not the job of their customers to know what they don’t. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don’t spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed. Instead, part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future. I also call it “kicking your own ass.” Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have. If there is someone out there who can “kick your ass” by doing it better, it’s part of your job as the owner of the company to stay ahead of them and “kick your own ass” before someone else does. 1. Time is more valuable than money You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money. 3. No balls, no babies This is something a blackjack dealer once told me when I asked him if I should hit or stick. It is also my favorite line and probably the thing I tell myself the most. Once you are prepared and you think you have every angle of preparation covered, you have to go for it. No balls, no babies 9. It’s not whether the glass is half empty or half full, it’s who is pouring the water This is one of my favorites. The key in business and success at any endeavor is doing your best to control your destiny. You can’t always do it, but you have to take every opportunity you can to be as prepared as—and ahead of—the competition as you possibly can be. Take the lead, and you can control your own destiny." How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It Today’s technology is constantly evolving and improving. What seemed impossible fifteen years ago, is now completely known world-wide and a basic part of life.
You have the tools to run a business today that the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies didn’t have ten years ago. You have an iPhone in your hand that has more computing power than the computers used to land a man on the moon. You have access to knowledge and tools that the greatest minds of history not only didn’t have, but didn’t dream of having. You need to use these tools. Know them. Own them, and once you can, you can grow and make your business do anything. That is what the starting of these business experiments is all about. There is a huge potential in on line business, it truly has just started, and starting a simple business on line taught me the basics so that I began to learn what questions to ask and what to do next. The best way to learn is to decide to do a project and then find a way to make it happen, learn those specific skills you need to make it happen. Join the mailing list, give us siome ideas, and let us show you what we have learned to make you and your business better. I plan on running different Business experiments, basing them off what I havwe read or learned, and letting you find out what I find out. In between the notes and the reading, let's also learn by doing. If you want to make your business better, you need to make yourself better. Let's go. D 1. Tropical Talk Radio - this is guerilla business radio at its best, Dan and Ian are out there calling in radio dispatches from the front lines of business from Bali, Hong Kong, Manila, and San Diego. The podcast has a raw quality, a little rough, that gives it character and the advice is more real and more useful that just about any other podcast. The podcast episodes come and go, and is very sporadic, sometimes the two hosts are awol for weeks, and then, bam, they come back, speaking to all of us about trying to make it in business and what they have learned while they were away. The conversations between the two hosts are real, funny, informative, and the entrepreneurs these two meet are always interesting and smart.
Ian and Dan are two guys who really love to live and talk business, who live the lifestyle, and it shows. 2.Lifestyle Business Podcast - this is the more popular bigger brother of the Tropical Talk Radio, and I was tempted to put them together, as both are run by Ian and Dan, but the LBP is more formulaic than the TTR and Dan and Ian do love themselves a good list. There are a lot of lists. They are always entertaining and informative. I like like rawness of the Tropical Talk Radio, so to me it has the edge, but this is the podcast that got me hooked. 3. Foolish Adventure - Tim Conley is not smooth, he is not a polished voice, and sometimes his delivery makes me cringe, but he is very real and getting better each podcast. Every time I hear him in a interview, particularly in a panel, he always comes up with an angle or insight on the question asked that is unique and original. Most advice I hear sounds like it was read from a text book, or they have only sold ebooks, but Tim has done it and it shows. Tim is better answering questions and bouncing off others than he is just talking, and his podcast has him hitting his stride. 4. Mixergy - Andrew Warner interviews just about anyone, and some stories are good, some okay, and others simply life changing. Proof that if you want to do something great, the more swings at bat, the more likelihood of a home run. I have made copious notes listening to this show. 5. Smart Passive Income - Pat Flynn has a kind of low key approach that sneaks up on you until after about 30 minutes in when you realize that he is doing some simply amazing things, and he is telling you how he did it. What brought it home for me, is that he did a podcast on affiliates, and about how he makes a lot of money being an affiliate, and his podcast was about how to do it, while at the same time he listed and discussed all his affiliate products, so you could see them and buy them if you like. Pat went meta, and I was impressed. He probably did very well with his affiliate sales while at the same time showing how he did it. 6.WTF with Marc Maron - no not a business podcast per se, it is comedy podcast, but he is funny, has amazing guests, and he has built a business while he did it. Out of a less than stellar comedy stand up career, Marc Maron has built something amazing. Listening to him pop in his ads, without jarring transitions, listening how he creates narratives of his guests, and his life, and watching him build a following is amazing to behold. I have listened to him from the beginning, and listening you realize how powerful the medium is, and the valuable lesson that the money isn't in the selling, it is in the following. He has built a following that is amazing. 7. BlogCast FM - is a new addition to my podcast master list. It has gotten better each episode, and each episode is a great interview. They do all types and sizes of businesses and blogs, and because oif that they have tips and ideas you don't normally hear. These gentlemen are much smarter than I am, and certainly far more successful than I am, so perhaps my opinion matters a little less to you, but I am concerned that they are pushing a message that is wildly popular now, and it is one that is being misunderstood and I believe is dangerous to the individual and also our future.
Their simple message is, "it makes no sense to go to college, and instead you should just start a business." This is simply wrong. Their intentions are good, and I understand what they are trying to do, but I believe their message is at best, being misunderstood, or maybe it just isn't valid. This viewpoint on college will not make the world a better place nor will it make a person's life as rich as it could be if they follow that advice. Also each one of these men graduated college. We tend to undervalue what we have, and each of these men have a college education, and they are not thinking that each step they took built the path that lead them to make themselves succeed. Each of these men use the tools they learned in college, and probably they still know and work with some of the people they met there. Today, we do not need more people selling ebooks. That will not build growth or opportunity. The Internet is full of opportunity, and squandering it by promoting the latest lifestyle guide just isn't going to do it. You have to build something, you need to create. We do not need to reinvent the wheel each day. We all stand on the work and thoughts of the people born before us. To know those ideas, you need to learn them. I have made a career out of applying history to today's problems, because whatever problem you have, someone has had it before. Find out how they solved it. We need more people creating value and less people consuming mindlessly. The engine that drives the future and the economy is creativity and imagination, smart people taking risks. The elite group above are all stating that today you shouldn't even consider college but I believe that message serves no value. If you do not have a better opportunity, you should go to college, and stay in college until you find a better way to leverage your skills and learn. We don't need more ebook marketers. We need people to solve the world's problems and make this a better world. You are bigger than that and I think some balance in your life is important. I am sure they do not mean it this way, these are very smart men who have shown that they are curious and love to learn, but the message generally being copied and reported over and over on the internet, through blog posts and twitter, is that it is smart to reject education and start a business. The real goal is to get as much education as possible, to reject debt and to remember to always go with the best opportunity at hand that has the best opportunity cost for you. Here is why you should consider going to college. 1. The issue isn't that education is bad, or that you shouldn't go to college, it is that you shouldn't go into debt to get it. You should learn as much as you can, from anywhere you can. If you didn't know what you wanted to do, and I said I know a place where you can try many different disciplines and things and experiences, where you can meet people from all over the world, would you go? 2. Right now in all the other countries of the world, people in those other countries are getting as much education as they can. You are competing in a global market, and there are Phd's in India ready to do anything to succeed. Ignorance is not a competitive tool. Get as much education as you can afford. Always keep learning. Learn new skills constantly. Competition in China is brutal, and today we are in the same global market as they are. Are we ready to hustle as much as they are? 3. Take the "college is bad" thought to its extreme. Is the United State's biggest problem today is that we are too educated? No. We certainly do not suffer from over education. If anything, we need more education. Knowledgable people would not have thought that when the housing market was hot, that every house everywhere, was worth a fortune. They would know history and know about the tulip boom and bust. We need more knowledge not less. The biggest problem today is that we need better education regarding debt, something education can fix. You go in to debt because you are uneducated. I know this very well, as this is a lesson I learned the hard way. 4. If you don't know what you want to do, going to school is a great place to see the options and meet people. Don't quit school until you have better options. It is all about opportunity costs. 5. Most entrepreneurs went to school, maybe didn't finish, but went to school, including those in the subject line. They found the resources or met the people who would help them succeed at school. 6. Business is an art. Just like a writer, or film maker, and if you have nothing to say, you can have all the skills and talent in the world but in the end you say or accomplish nothing. Life is an art, and if you have a passion, a belief, and you are a well rounded person, you will always be more adaptable than some single minded individual. Survival is about adaption. 7. The world is more than just business. Business brings opportunity, but the world also has art, philosophy, and science. The more of the world you know, the better you will be at what you do. Going to school opens up doors that you don't know exist today, that you don't even think to look for, that you don't even know you want, until it is there. 8. View schools like stocks, look at the ROI on what you estimate that you think it will return. If you want to be a teacher, and start at $40,000 don't spend $200,000 going to Stanford, pay $20,000 at a smaller school, who will probably get you a more personalized education and help ou pay for it. Pick stocks that matter to you and will make you and your life better. Pick a school or program that makes your life better and gives you a good return on your money. 9. Colleges, all schools for that matter, allow the young in rural areas to see thoughts and ideas and other people that starting a business in their area wold never get them. The world is not all urban centers, most of the United States is not, and colleges allow young people a first glimpse of a world that is bigger than just Chickasha, Oklahoma. 10. You need to be careful about insulating yourself. In a world where you pick your reading, from your twitter feed, to Facebook, you pick what you search in Google which edits results based on what you previously liked, it is important to get information and other viewpoints you did not select. Most successful business people I know always have one advisor that is the opposite of them, to give them a viewpoint that counters their own. 11. The educational process needs to be improved, not ignored or rejected. Where there is a need to improve, there is business opportunity, and to find that opportunity, you need to know what needs to be changed, and how better than seeing first hand what needs to be changed. Get in it, see what needs to change, and then start your business to fix it. Each one of these men graduated college. So did I. D Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months by Robert Skrob
This book, that I am still reading, is more interesting than I thought it would be. It had a forward by Dan Kennedy, and I thought the book was by him. Once I started reading I understood it was not him, but the author is very knowledgeable, and the book is interesting, and as you can see below, I found many things to capture. The point is this: You make the rules. You bend this business to your preferences. You need sacrifice nothing for enormous financial success. How did that quote go? The world is made by unreasonable people. Make it the way you want it. It does take work. You won’t become successful or wealthy without work, but success is not a result of working harder than everyone else. It’s about building a business with specific attributes that enable you to accumulate wealth. People all around you are getting rich. Within your neighborhood. Why are they getting rich? Because they are doing things that generate more money than they spend, allowing them to accumulate wealth. Wealth isn’t produced by thinking, dreaming, or imagining what you want. Money doesn’t care what you think about most. Money is attracted to you when you create a business that produces value for paying customers. Before you launch a new business, you need to ask yourself these five questions: 1. Is it formulaic? Has the business been proven to generate wealth for others in the past? For instance, if you don’t see anyone getting rich as a plumbing contractor or by running a sandwich shop, it’s a good guess that you won’t get wealthy that way either. Instead, look for a consistent pattern of a good percentage of business owners getting rich within the industry; technology, real estate, and publishing are proven winners from the past. 2. Does it have a large business scope? Businesses dedicated to one community or one county can get destroyed with one flood or one plant closing. Instead, serve customers nationwide or even internationally to diversify and expand your marketplace. 3. Are there high margins? Selling products at higher prices with a low production cost allows you to do much more marketing. I had a client who sold frozen yogurt. With new customers spending only $5.00 to $10.00, it took a lot of them to pay for any advertising. Instead, get into businesses with high margins to make it easier for you to generate a healthy profit. 4. Is there a low startup investment? Too many business owners invest their entire life savings into a venture only to discover there is no market for their new products. Instead, keep your investments low, to $10,000.00 or even less. This way, even if you make a mistake, it won’t be financially devastating to you. Plus, it will allow you to start multiple businesses over time to generate more wealth as your skills improve. 5. Are there any professional licenses? Government-issued licenses are one way competitors control each other. Industry lobbyists conspire with politicians to “protect consumers” by passing new restrictions and threatening to take your license away. These laws do nothing for consumers. They are designed to protect your competitors. Stay away from professions that require a professional license, such as insurance, financial advising, law, or medicine. That license is used to control what you say in your marketing and to restrict your ability to generate wealth. There are six advantages of an information marketing business: 1. Replaces manual labor by “multiplying yourself” and leveraging what you know. 2. Buyers of your information products will buy more. 3. A small amount of interaction with buyers is possible. 4. Few staff members are necessary. 5. Little investment is needed to get started. 6. Large profit potential exists. People who buy your information products are much more likely to hire you to perform services than other customers you market to. Quite simply, having your own published information product makes you the obvious expert. You just need to leverage the information you already know. How? By 1) identifying a market of people who are excited about the information you have, 2) creating a product those people want, and 3) offering it to them in a persuasive way. That’s why you can get into the information marketing business with a relatively low startup budget. One word of caution: Many info-marketers do not invest enough in their marketing and end up with a very slow start. Investing money in marketing when you are launching your business increases revenue more quickly. You can take a “stair-step” approach by investing a small amount in your first campaign and reinvesting your sales revenues into the next campaign. You can increase your marketing investments as you continue to have success in selling your product. That way you can start with a very modest investment, but by continuing to reinvest profits into making new sales and getting new customers, you can build your business. This is a business with a lot of profitability, but you will not create a business that generates more than $1 million a year by investing nothing. You must be willing to test a marketing strategy to find new customers (known in the business as a front-end marketing funnel) and test it until it produces positive results. When you get positive results, you must invest in expanding that marketing campaign and growing your customer base. Many info-marketers are making million-dollar incomes through their information marketing businesses. Each one started out like you, with no products and no customers, and they gave it a shot. Information marketing is responsive to and fueled by the ever-increasing pressure on people’s time. For me, information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. When I create an information product, I spend a lot of time studying a market, examining the problems its members face, and designing my offering as the solution to that problem. Information marketing is providing solutions to problems in a convenient and useful format. ..... you have the free content you offer to attract new customers to you. Your free content could be articles you publish, videos you make available on your website, or an e-mail auto responder series that provides ongoing free content. You’ll have your largest number of users at this level. It’s free, so there is a low barrier to entry. Your next step of your Information marketing .......is an introductory product. For some info-marketing businesses, this is a $199.00 product consisting of six CDs and a binder of materials. For others, it could be a book that’s available in bookstores. This book provides customers with an easy first step to try out your products to see if your information is right for them. Here is also where e-books fit in. You’ve seen a lot of online marketers marketing e-books on their websites. To maximize the number of e-books you can sell, you must invest in marketing. When you build the rest of your pyramid, you increase the revenue you generate from each customer, allowing you to invest more in marketing to get a new customer than you could with an e-book as your only product. Once your customers experience your product, you offer them the opportunity to receive ongoing information through a monthly continuity program. These continuity programs are monthly subscription programs where you provide interviews, newsletters, and/or access to a membership site where your customers can get more of the information they loved in your introductory product. The pricing for these programs can be from $9.95 a month for a membership site to $199.00 a month for a program that includes newsletters, group coaching calls, and expert interviews on CD. The next step is high-priced specialty products shown in Figure 3-4. It’s impossible to build one product that provides all the information any of your customers could want or need about a particular topic. Instead, you provide a high-quality introductory product that outlines your strategies and provides useful examples to follow. Then for different areas of expertise, you provide additional products that provide additional details about that particular aspect. You will be able to sell these specialty products for much higher prices, from $495.00 to $1,995.00 or more. Large info-marketing business includes seminars. There’s nothing as powerful as being face to face with your members. The next area is seminars, shown in Figure 3-5. Many info-marketers choose not to offer seminars, and that’s fine. But for those who do offer them, it can be a lucrative part of their business. Info-Marketing seminars are usually priced between $750.00 and $1,995.00 per person or more. The next section is a coaching program. I talk a lot about moving your customers up your pyramid into group coaching and seminars in Chapter 10, but for now, recognize this is an important level of your pyramid. Group coaching gives your customers the opportunity to receive personal help implementing your teaching in their own lives. At the top you’ll find personal coaching. Some customers will invest in all your products and still want to sit down with you for one-on-one, personal assistance. And the best part for you is they will be willing to pay you for that privilege. So you need to keep these three factors in the forefront of your mind as you begin your business: Marketing Research Continuity Income Marketing Systems to Generate New Customers. The single most common reason information marketing businesses fail is inadequate market research. Many of us get caught up in creating just the right marketing strategy, writing the perfect sales letter, or building the perfect product, but in fact, very few of those things can have as much impact on your business as thorough market research. Researching your market and interviewing potential customers is the shortcut to launching a profitable business quickly. Continuity income is revenue you receive from your members on an ongoing basis Start every month of the year with customers already buying products from you with monthly continuity programs. Just think about this: If only 5 percent of your new customers participate in your continuity program, then every month your monthly continuity income continues to grow. The power of these programs is in providing monthly cash flow for your business. So when you have a big promotion or a seminar and make a large amount of money, you can pull it out in profit because your monthly continuity income is paying your monthly bills. You start each month billing customers’ credit cards so you can provide the newsletters, products, or services you’ve committed to those subscribers. It’s a great way to start in business every month—with revenue already in the bank. The real secret to the information marketing business is to build a marketing process, a funnel if you will, that generates new customers over and over again. This process generates leads, and those leads go into a sales system that helps potential customers learn about you and how you can solve their problems before inviting them to make a purchase. Once they’ve made a purchase, the sales system invites them to make other purchases based on their interests. That helps increase the value of every customer. And in addition to their purchases, you invite these new customers to participate in your monthly continuity programs so you can grow your monthly income as well. Every new business needs new customers to grow. Information marketers unlock the “business owner” lifestyle by creating an automated process to generate new customers every month from a variety of sources. New customer generation is one of the most difficult parts of any business and often can be the most expensive as well. This is why so many new info-marketers move on to other areas of their businesses once they get their businesses going. They become focused on product creation or putting on a new seminar, for example. However, as an information marketer, it’s crucial that you set up ongoing systems and processes to help you generate new customers. You need to have a marketing funnel that helps put new customers into your business on a continual basis Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months Even in a set-it-and-forget-it situation, you still are going to have to innovate; you still need to replace, update, correct, improve, monitor, and build new processes as you go. Internet marketing provides a lot of great tools information marketers can use to create, sell, and deliver products. However, internet marketing tools do not create a business. Instead, your focus has to be on creating a business first and then using internet marketing tools to allow you to grow more quickly. Membership websites can be an important part of an info-business. Plus, they can be a useful forum for members to exchange ideas. However, you may have seen marketers promoting how to create membership sites where everybody interacts and communicates, with members contributing all the content so you don’t have to do any of the work. Those membership sites are very rare, making up less than 1 percent of the sites that are created. Most membership sites are a great tool to help facilitate a membership program that also provides printed content and monthly teleseminars, and they also serve as forums for delivering content for coaching programs. The membership site that stands alone, generates new customers by itself, and generates content by itself because all the participants are communicating with each other on message boards and uploading samples? That site is a very rare beast. First of all, in the information marketing business, the customers who love you are going to want to invest in more products and services from you. If you have a business that is simply selling a particular product over a website, you’re not maximizing the marketing investment you made in generating new customers by selling them additional products and services. You need a way of providing those customers additional products, additional programs, and additional systems so they are able to solve additional problems in their lives and you are able to make more money from your business. Any business that doesn’t have that element is not generating as much profit as it should be. Well, the reason they’re doing it that way is because customers often prefer seminars to digital downloads. And the internet marketer can make a lot more money by having those seminars. For you, it’s better to go ahead and get into business with the expectation that you’re going to be interacting with your people because eventually you are—if you want to generate the real money you want and unlock the lifestyle you desire. Finally, there’s the issue of human interaction. I know one of the elements that really attracted me to the information marketing business was limited interaction. And it actually is a benefit, as mentioned in Chapter 1, but my picture of limited human interaction was that I never had to interact with customers at all. They would consult my frequently asked questions if they needed something; otherwise, they’d go to the site, buy, receive the product, and I would never have to interact with them. Well, the fact is many of the people who buy your products will want additional help and support from you or your team. While many customers go to the website to buy, many others browse the website and then pick up the phone to place their orders with live operators. If I didn’t have someone there ready to take their orders, I would lose those sales. It’s not important for you to become the foremost expert in all topics; instead, become an expert in one topic that’s useful to your target market. They’ll become your customers even though they may know more than you in other areas of expertise. You’ve got to find the market that is excitedly expecting what you have to offer, or you have to offer what your target market is already excitedly expecting. The most important factor in a successful info-business is finding a market with customers who eagerly desire information. “Everyone says to go find a target market and research it, but not too many people go into as much detail as I did. But it’s so beneficial.” As you plan your information marketing venture, be sure you start with the market first. Find out what the market desperately wants before you create a product and a marketing campaign to sell it. Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing: Build a Million Dollar Business Within 12 Months Find your niche, know it - being everything to everyone will make you in the end, lonely and poor. The more you drill down to a market, and get very specific, usually go three levels down. The better you know that market the better your business will do. Know your market, who they are, what they look for, and most importantly, what they need and want to buy. The market isnít about you, it doesnít care what your passions are, so it is critical that you understand this. You need to get your customer what they want, and what you want is secondary.
On the plus side, what the internet has shown us all, is that no matter what we like, what odd quirky thing we find interesting, we now know there are similar people with similar interests out there online. The more we understand that, the better the business. D The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It by Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal
I loved this book, it was a book that I literally made myself slow down and read only one chapter a week. I would find myself thinking about it off and on all week. Definitely a book to make your self better. (I am now reading The Power of Habit and it is having the same impact.) TO SUCCEED AT SELF - CONTROL , YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW YOU FAIL I believe that the best way to improve your self-control is to see how and why you lose control. Knowing how you are likely to give in doesn’t, as many people fear, set yourself up for failure. It allows you to support yourself and avoid the traps that lead to willpower failures. Self-knowledge—especially of how we find ourselves in willpower trouble—is the foundation of self-control. One thing the science of willpower makes clear is that everyone struggles in some way with temptation, addiction, distraction, and procrastination. These are not individual weaknesses that reveal our personal inadequacies—they are universal experiences and part of the human condition. I’m a scientist by training, and one of the very first things I learned is that while theories are nice, data is better. This is so how I live my life. Before you can change something, you need to see it as it is. Although you could read this whole book in one weekend, I encourage you to pace yourself when it comes to implementing the strategies. Students in my class take an entire week to observe how each idea plays out in their own lives. They try one new strategy for self-control each week, and report on what worked best. I recommend that you take a similar approach, especially if you plan to use this book to tackle a specific goal such as losing weight or getting control over your finances. Give yourself time to try out the practical exercises and reflect. Pick one strategy from each chapter—whichever seems most relevant to your challenge—rather than trying out ten new strategies at once. First time I ever actually did this. When people say, “I have no willpower,” what they usually mean is, “I have trouble saying no when my mouth, stomach, heart, or (fill in your anatomical part) wants to say yes.” Think of it as “I won’t” power. But saying no is just one part of what willpower is, and what it requires. “Just say no” are the three favorite words of procrastinators and coach potatoes worldwide. At times, it’s more important to say yes. All those things you put off for tomorrow (or forever)? Willpower helps you put them on today’s to-do list, even when anxiety, distractions, or a reality TV show marathon threaten to talk you out of it. Think of it as “I will” power—the ability to do what you need to do, even if part of you doesn’t want to. “I will” and “I won’t” power are the two sides of self-control, but they alone don’t constitute willpower. To say no when you need to say no, and yes when you need to say yes, you need a third power: the ability to remember what you really want. Willpower is about harnessing the three powers of I will, I won’t, and I want to help you achieve your goals We may all have been born with the capacity for willpower, but some of us use it more than others. People who have better control of their attention, emotions, and actions are better off almost any way you look at it. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They even live longer. When pit against other virtues, willpower comes out on top. Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than intelligence (take that, SATs), a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma (sorry, Tony Robbins), and more important for marital bliss than empathy (yes, the secret to lasting marriage may be learning how to keep your mouth shut). If we want to improve our lives, willpower is not a bad place to start. For most of evolutionary history, the prefrontal cortex mainly controlled physical movement: walking, running, reaching, pushing—a kind of proto-self-control. As humans evolved, the prefrontal cortex got bigger and better connected to other areas of the brain. As the prefrontal cortex grew, it took on new control functions: controlling what you pay attention to, what you think about, even how you feel. Many temporary states—like being drunk, sleep-deprived, or even just distracted—inhibit the prefrontal cortex, (Makes me wonder if mine even works at all) Some neuroscientists go so far as to say that we have one brain but two minds—or even, two people living inside our mind. There’s the version of us that acts on impulse and seeks immediate gratification, and the version of us that controls our impulses and delays gratification to protect our long-term goals. (I believe this is actually bigger than this, we are many people.) This is what defines a willpower challenge: Part of you wants one thing, and another part of you wants something else. Or your present self wants one thing, but your future self would be better off if you did something else. Every willpower challenge is a conflict between two parts of oneself. For your own willpower challenge, describe these competing minds. What does the impulsive version of you want? What does the wiser version of you want? Some people find it useful to give a name to the impulsive mind, like “the cookie monster” to the part of you that always wants instant gratification, “the critic” to the part of you that likes to complain about everyone and everything, or “the procrastinator” to the person who never wants to get started. Giving a name to this version of yourself can help you recognize when it is taking over, and also help you call in your wiser self for some willpower support Neuroeconomists—scientists who study what the brain does when we make decisions—have discovered that the self-control system and our survival instincts don’t always conflict. In some cases, they cooperate to help us make good decisions. To have more self-control, you first need to develop more self-awareness. A good first step is to notice when you are making choices related to your willpower challenge. For at least one day, track your choices. At the end of the day, look back and try to analyze when decisions were made that either supported or undermined your goals. Trying to keep track of your choices will also reduce the number of decisions you make while distracted—a guaranteed way to boost your willpower. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Ask your brain to do math every day, and it gets better at math. Ask your brain to worry, and it gets better at worrying. Ask your brain to concentrate, and it gets better at concentrating. Not only does your brain find these things easier, but it actually remodels itself based on what you ask it to do. Some parts of the brain grow denser, packing in more and more gray matter like a muscle bulking up from exercise. For example, adults who learn how to juggle develop more gray matter in regions of the brain that track moving objects. Areas of the brain can also grow more connected to each other, so they can share information more quickly. For example, adults who play memory games for twenty-five minutes a day develop greater connectivity between brain regions important for attention and memory. I love this paragraph. I believe it really is the heart of what I do. Or you could do something a lot simpler and less painful: meditate. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness. People who meditate regularly aren’t just better at these things. Over time, their brains become finely tuned willpower machines. One study found that just three hours of meditation practice led to improved attention and self-control. After eleven hours, researchers could see those changes in the brain. The new meditators had increased neural connections between regions of the brain important for staying focused, ignoring distractions, and controlling impulses. Another study found that eight weeks of daily meditation practice led to increased self-awareness in everyday life, as well as increased gray matter in corresponding areas of the brain. It may seem incredible that our brains can reshape themselves so quickly, but meditation increases blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, in much the same way that lifting weights increases blood flow to your muscles. The brain appears to adapt to exercise in the same way that muscles do, getting both bigger and faster in order to get better at what you ask of it. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT:A FIVE-MINUTE BRAIN-TRAINING MEDITATION Breath focus is a simple but powerful meditation technique for training your brain and increasing willpower. Here’s how to get started: 1. Sit still and stay put . Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground, or sit cross-legged on a cushion. Sit up straight and rest your hands in your lap. It’s important not to fidget when you meditate—that’s the physical foundation of self-control. If you notice the instinct to scratch an itch, adjust your arms, or cross and uncross your legs, see if you can feel the urge but not follow it. 2. Turn your attention to the breath. Close your eyes or, if you are worried about falling asleep, focus your gaze at a single spot (like a blank wall, not the Home Shopping Network). Begin to notice your breathing. Silently say in your mind “inhale” as you breathe in and “exhale” as you breathe out. When you notice your mind wandering (and it will), just bring it back to the breath. 3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders. After a few minutes, drop the labels “inhale/exhale.” Try focusing on just the feeling of breathing. You might notice the sensations of the breath flowing in and out of your nose and mouth. Start with five minutes a day. When this becomes a habit, try ten to fifteen minutes a day. If that starts to feel like a burden, bring it back down to five. A short practice that you do every day is better than a long practice you keep putting off to tomorrow. It may help you to pick a specific time that you will meditate every day, like right before your morning shower. If this is impossible, staying flexible will help you fit it in when you can. Even when he was focused on his breath, other thoughts sneaked in. He was ready to give up on the practice because he wasn’t getting better at it as quickly as he hoped, and figured he was wasting his time if he wasn’t able to focus perfectly on the breath. Most new meditators make this mistake, but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective. Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology. It’s a temporary state of both mind and body that gives you the strength and calm to override your impulses. you have inherited from your ancestors an instinct that helps you respond to any threat that requires fighting or running for your life. This instinct is appropriately called the fight-or-flight stress response. You know the feeling: heart pounding, jaw clenching, senses on high alert. the fight-or-flight stress response is an energy-management instinct. It decides how you are going to spend your limited physical and mental energy. For your willpower challenge, identify the inner impulse that needs to be restrained. What is the thought or feeling that makes you want to do whatever it is you don’t want to do? Heart rate variability is such a good index of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist temptation, and who will give in. For example, recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability goes up when they see a drink are more likely to stay sober. These findings have led psychologists to call heart rate variability the body’s “reserve” of willpower—a physiological measure of your capacity for self-control. If you have high heart rate variability, you have more willpower available for whenever temptation strikes. Many factors influence your willpower reserve, from what you eat (plant-based, unprocessed foods help; junk food doesn’t) to where you live (poor air quality decreases heart rate variability—yes, L.A.’s smog may be contributing to the high percentage of movie stars in rehab). Anything that puts a stress on your mind or body can interfere with the physiology of self-control, and by extension, sabotage your willpower. Anxiety, anger, depression, and loneliness are all associated with lower heart rate variability and less self-control. Chronic pain and illness can also drain your body and brain’s willpower reserve. But there are just as many things you can do that shift the body and mind toward the physiology of self-control. The focus meditation you learned in the last chapter is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the biological basis of willpower. It not only trains the brain, but also increases heart rate variability. Anything else that you do to reduce stress and take care of your health—exercise, get a good night’s sleep, eat better, spend quality time with friends and family, participate in a religious or spiritual practice—will improve your body’s willpower reserve. WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: BREATHE YOUR WAY TO SELF-CONTROL You won’t find many quick fixes in this book, but there is one way to immediately boost willpower: Slow your breathing down to four to six breaths per minute. That’s ten to fifteen seconds per breath—slower than you normally breathe, but not difficult with a little bit of practice and patience. Slowing the breath down activates the prefrontal cortex and increases heart rate variability, which helps shift the brain and body from a state of stress to self-control mode. A few minutes of this technique will make you feel calm, in control, and capable of handling cravings or challenges. Research shows that regular practice of this technique can make you more resilient to stress and build your willpower reserve. One study found that a daily twenty-minute practice of slowed breathing increased heart rate variability and reduced cravings and depression among adults recovering from substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. Heart rate variability training programs (using similar breathing exercises) have also been used to improve self-control and decrease the stress of cops, stock traders, and customer service operators—three of the most stressful jobs on the planet there are many things you can do to support the physiology of self-control, this week I’m going to ask you to consider the two strategies that have the biggest bang for their buck. Both are inexpensive and immediately effective, with benefits that only build with time Exercise turns out to be the closest thing to a wonder drug that self-control scientists have discovered. For starters, the willpower benefits of exercise are immediate. Fifteen minutes on a treadmill reduces cravings, as seen when researchers try to tempt dieters with chocolate and smokers with cigarettes. The long-term effects of exercise are even more impressive. It not only relieves ordinary, everyday stress, but it’s as powerful an antidepressant as Prozac. Working out also enhances the biology of self-control by increasing baseline heart rate variability and training the brain. When neuroscientists have peered inside the brains of new exercisers, they have seen increases in both gray matter—brain cells—and white matter, the insulation on brain cells that helps them communicate quickly and efficiently with each other. Physical exercise—like meditation—makes your brain bigger and faster, and the prefrontal cortex shows the largest training effect If you want a quick willpower fill-up, your best bet may be to head outdoors. Just five minutes of what scientists call “green exercise” decreases stress, improves mood, enhances focus, and boosts self-control. Green exercise is any physical activity that gets you outdoors and in the presence of Mama Nature. Here are some ideas for your own five-minute green exercise willpower fill-up: • Get out of the office and head for the closest greenery. • Cue up a favorite song on your iPod and walk or jog around the block. • Take your dog outside to play (and chase the toy yourself). • Do a bit of work in your yard or garden. • Step outside for some fresh air and do a few simple stretches. • Challenge your kids to a race or game in the backyard. If you tell yourself that you are too tired or don’t have the time to exercise, start thinking of exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy and willpower.exercise as something that restores, not drains, your energy GAIN WILLPOWER IN YOUR SLEEP! If you are surviving on less than six hours of sleep a night, there’s a good chance you don’t even remember what it’s like to have your full willpower. Being mildly but chronically sleep deprived makes you more susceptible to stress, cravings, and temptation. It also makes it more difficult to control your emotions, focus your attention, or find the energy to tackle the big “I will” power challenges Why does poor sleep sap willpower? For starters, sleep deprivation impairs how the body and brain use glucose, their main form of energy. When you’re tired, your cells have trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream. This leaves them underfueled, and you exhausted. With your body and brain desperate for energy, you’ll start to crave sweets or caffeine. But even if you try to refuel with sugar or coffee, your body and brain won’t get the energy they need because they won’t be able to use it efficiently. This is bad news for self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks your brain can spend its limited fuel on. The kind of relaxation that boosts willpower is true physical and mental rest that triggers what Harvard Medical School cardiologist Herbert Benson calls the physiological relaxation response. Your heart rate and breathing slow down, your blood pressure drops, and your muscles release held tension. Your brain takes a break from planning the future or analyzing the past. To trigger this relaxation response, lie down on your back, and slightly elevate your legs with a pillow under the knees (or come into whatever is the most comfortable position for you to rest in). Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths, allowing your belly to rise and fall. If you feel any tension in your body, you can intentionally squeeze or contract that muscle, then let go of the effort Science also points us to a critical insight: Stress is the enemy of willpower. one of the most robust, if troubling, findings from the science of self-control: People who use their willpower seem to run out of it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It This finding has important implications for your willpower challenges. Modern life is full of self-control demands that can drain your willpower. Researchers have found that self-control is highest in the morning and steadily deteriorates over the course of the day. In study after study, no matter what task he used, people’s self-control deteriorated over time. A concentration task didn’t just lead to worse attention over time; it depleted physical strength. Controlling emotions didn’t just lead to emotional outbursts; it made people more willing to spend money on something they didn’t need. Resisting tempting sweets didn’t just trigger cravings for chocolate; it prompted procrastination. It was as if every act of willpower was drawing from the same source of strength, leaving people weaker with each successful act of self-control. These observations led Baumeister to an intriguing hypothesis: that self-control is like a muscle. When used, it gets tired. If you don’t rest the muscle, you can run out of strength entirely, like an athlete who pushes himself to exhaustion. other research teams have supported the idea that willpower is a limited resource. Trying to control your temper, stick to a budget, or refuse seconds all tap the same source of strength. And because every act of willpower depletes willpower, using self-control can lead to losing control. Many things you wouldn’t typically think of as requiring willpower also rely on—and exhaust—this limited well of strength. Trying to impress a date or fit into a corporate culture that doesn’t share your values. Navigating a stressful commute, or sitting through another boring meeting. Anytime you have to fight an impulse, filter out distractions, weigh competing goals, or make yourself do something difficult, you use a little more of your willpower strength. If your brain and body need to pause and plan, you’re flexing the metaphorical muscle of self-control Luckily there are things you can do to both overcome willpower exhaustion and increase your self-control strength. That’s because the muscle model doesn’t just help us see why we fail when we’re tired; it also shows us how to train self-control. If you never seem to have the time and energy for your “I will” challenge, schedule it for when you have the most strength. Even though the brain is an organ, not a muscle, it does get tired from repeated acts of self-control. Neuroscientists have found that with each use of willpower, the self-control system of the brain becomes less active. boosting blood sugar restored willpower. Low blood sugar levels turn out to predict a wide range of willpower failures, from giving up on a difficult test to lashing out at others when you’re angry. It is as if running low on energy biases us to be the worst versions of ourselves. In contrast, giving participants a sugar boost turns them back into the best versions of themselves: more persistent and less impulsive; more thoughtful and less selfish. How much energy, exactly, was getting used up during acts of mental self-control? And did restoring that energy really require consuming a substantial amount of sugar? University of Pennsylvania psychologist Robert Kurzban has argued that the actual amount of energy your brain needs to exert self-control is less than half a Tic Tac per minute. This may be more than the brain uses for other mental tasks, but it is far less than your body uses when it exercises. So assuming you have the resources to walk around the block without collapsing, the absolute demands of self-control couldn’t possibly deplete your entire body’s store of energy. The human brain has, at any given time, a very small supply of energy. It can store some energy in its cells, but it is mostly dependent on a steady stream of glucose circulating in the body’s bloodstream. Special glucose-detecting brain cells are constantly monitoring the availability of energy. When the brain detects a drop in available energy, it gets a little nervous. What if it runs out of energy? Like the banks, it may decide to stop spending and save what resources it has. It will keep itself on a tight energy budget, unwilling to spend its full supply of energy. The first expense to be cut? Self-control, one of the most energy-expensive tasks the brain performs. To conserve energy, the brain may become reluctant to give you the full mental resources you need to resist temptation, focus your attention, or control your emotions. University of South Dakota researchers X. T. Wang, a behavioral economist, and Robert Dvorak, a psychologist, have proposed an “energy budget” model of self-control. They argue that the brain treats energy like money. It will spend energy when resources are high, but save energy when resources are dropping. Importantly, it wasn’t the absolute level of blood sugar that predicted a participant’s choices—it was the direction of change. The brain asked, “Is available energy increasing or decreasing?” It then made a strategic choice about whether to spend or save that energy The brain may have a second motivation behind its reluctance to exert self-control when the body’s energy levels are dropping. Our brains evolved in an environment very different from our own—one in which food supplies were unpredictable. (Remember our trip to the Serengeti, when you were scavenging for antelope carcasses?) Dvorak and Wang argue that the modern human brain may still be using blood sugar levels as a sign of scarcity or abundance in the environment. To an energy-monitoring brain, your blood sugar level was an indicator of how likely you were to starve in the near future if you didn’t find something to eat, quick. A brain that could bias your decisions toward immediate gratification when resources are scarce, but toward long-term investment when resources are plenty, would be a real asset in a world with an unpredictable food supply. He who takes the biggest risks—from exploring new land to trying new foods and new mates—is often the most likely to survive (or at least have his genes survive). What appears in our modern world as a loss of control may actually be a vestige of the brain’s instinct for strategic risk-taking. To prevent starvation, the brain shifts to a more risk-taking, impulsive state. Indeed, studies show that modern humans are more likely to take any kind of risk when they’re hungry. For example, people make riskier investments when they’re hungry, and are more willing to “diversify their mating strategies” (evolutionary psychologist–speak for cheating on their partner) after a fast. But when your blood sugar drops, your brain will still favor short-term thinking and impulsive behavior. Your brain’s priority is going to be getting more energy, not making sure you make good decisions that are in line with your long-term goals. better plan is to make sure that your body is well-fueled with food that gives you lasting energy. Most psychologists and nutritionists recommend a low-glycemic diet—that is, one that helps you keep your blood sugar steady. Low-glycemic foods include lean proteins, nuts and beans, high-fiber grains and cereals, and most fruits and vegetables—basically, food that looks like its natural state and doesn’t have a ton of added sugar, fat, and chemicals. It may take some self-control to shift in this direction, but whatever steps you take (say, eating a hearty and healthy breakfast during the workweek instead of skipping breakfast, or snacking on nuts instead of sugar) will more than pay you back for any willpower you spend making the change. Researchers have put this idea to the test with willpower-training regimes. We’re not talking military boot camp or Master Cleanses here. These interventions take a simpler approach: Challenge the self-control muscle by asking people to control one small thing that they aren’t used to controlling. For example, one willpower-training program asked participants to create and meet self-imposed deadlines. Other studies have found that committing to any small, consistent act of self-control—improving your posture, squeezing a handgrip every day to exhaustion, cutting back on sweets, and keeping track of your spending—can increase overall willpower. And while these small self-control exercises may seem inconsequential, they appear to improve the willpower challenges we care about most, including focusing at work, taking good care of our health, resisting temptation, and feeling more in control of our emotions. The important “muscle” action being trained in all these studies isn’t the specific willpower challenge of meeting deadlines, using your left hand to open doors, or keeping the F-word to yourself. It’s the habit of noticing what you are about to do, and choosing to do the more difficult thing instead of the easiest WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A WILLPOWER WORKOUT If you want to put yourself through your own willpower-training regime, test the muscle model of self-control with one of the following willpower workouts: • Strengthen “I Won’t” Power: Commit to not swearing (or refraining from any habit of speech), not crossing your legs when you sit, or using your nondominant hand for a daily task like eating or opening doors. • Strengthen “I Will” Power: Commit to doing something every day (not something you already do) just for the practice of building a habit and not making excuses. It could be calling your mother, meditating for five minutes, or finding one thing in your house that needs to be thrown out or recycled. • Strengthen Self-Monitoring: Formally keep track of something you don’t usually pay close attention to. This could be your spending, what you eat, or how much time you spend online or watching TV. You don’t need fancy technology—pencil and paper will do. But if you need some inspiration, the Quantified Self movement (www.quantifiedself.com) has turned self-tracking into an art and science. Timothy Noakes, a professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town, had a different idea. Noakes is known in the athletic world for challenging deeply held beliefs. (For example, he helped show that drinking too many fluids during endurance competitions could kill an athlete by diluting the essential salts in the body.) Noakes is an ultra-marathon competitor himself, and he became interested in a little-known theory put forth in 1924 by Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill. Hill had proposed that exercise fatigue might be caused not by muscle failure, but by an overprotective monitor in the brain that wanted to prevent exhaustion. This theory says it is just a feeling generated by the brain to motivate us to stop, in much the same way that the feeling of anxiety can stop us from doing something dangerous, and the feeling of disgust can stop us from eating something that will make us sick. But because fatigue is only an early warning system, extreme athletes can routinely push past what seems to the rest of us like the natural physical limits of the body. These athletes recognize that the first wave of fatigue is never a real limit, and with sufficient motivation, they can transcend it. Some scientists now believe that the limits of self-control are just like the physical limits of the body—we often feel depleted of willpower before we actually are. In part, we can thank a brain motivated to conserve energy. Just as the brain may tell the body’s muscles to slow down when it fears physical exhaustion, the brain may put the brakes on its own energy-expensive exercise of the prefrontal cortex. This doesn’t mean we’re out of willpower; we just need to muster up the motivation to use it. Based on these findings, the Stanford psychologists have proposed an idea as jarring to the field of self-control research as Noakes’s claims were to the field of exercise physiology: The widely observed scientific finding that self-control is limited may reflect people’s beliefs about willpower, not their true physical and mental limits. The research on this idea is just beginning, and no one is claiming that humans have an unlimited capacity for self-control. But it is appealing to think that we often have more willpower than we believe we do. It also raises the possibility that we can, like athletes, push past the feeling of willpower exhaustion to make it to the finish line of our own willpower challenges. When your willpower is running low, find renewed strength by tapping into your want power. For your biggest willpower challenge, consider the following motivations: 1. How will you benefit from succeeding at this challenge? What is the payoff for you personally? Greater health, happiness, freedom, financial security, or success? 2. Who else will benefit if you succeed at this challenge? Surely there are others who depend on you and are affected by your choices. How does your behavior influence your family, friends, coworkers, employees or employer, and community? How would your success help them? 3. Imagine that this challenge will get easier for you over time if you are willing to do what is difficult now. Can you imagine what your life will be like, and how you will feel about yourself, as you make progress on this challenge? Is some discomfort now worth it if you know it is only a temporary part of your progress? this left them vulnerable to what psychologists call moral licensing. When you do something good, you feel good about yourself. This means you’re more likely to trust your impulses—which often means giving yourself permission to do something bad. Moral licensing doesn’t just give us permission to do something bad; it also lets us off the hook when we’re asked to do something good. For example, people who first remember a time when they acted generously give 60 percent less money to a charitable request than people who have not just recalled a past good deed. In a business simulation, managers of a manufacturing plant are less likely to take costly measures to reduce the plant’s pollution if they have recently recalled a time when they acted ethically. Simply put: Whenever we have conflicting desires, being good gives us permission to be a little bit bad. if the only thing motivating your self-control is the desire to be a good enough person, you’re going to give in whenever you’re already feeling good about yourself. The worst part of moral licensing is not just its questionable logic; the problem is how it tricks us into acting against our best interests. Don’t mistake a goal-supportive action for the goal itself. You aren’t off the hook just because you did one thing consistent with your goal. Notice if giving yourself credit for positive action makes you forget what your actual goal is. Ayelet Fishbach, professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Ravi Dhar, professor at the Yale School of Management, have shown that making progress on a goal motivates people to engage in goal-sabotaging behavior. In one study, they reminded successful dieters of how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight. They then offered the dieters a thank-you gift of either an apple or a chocolate bar. Eighty-five percent of the self-congratulating dieters chose the chocolate bar over the apple, compared with only 58 percent of dieters who were not reminded of their progress. A second study found the same effect for academic goals: Students made to feel good about the amount of time they had spent studying for an exam were more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong with friends. But when they also asked the participants to remember why they had resisted, the licensing effect disappeared—69 percent resisted temptation. Like magic, the researchers had discovered a simple way to boost self-control and help the students make a choice consistent with their overall goals. Remembering the “why” works because it changes how you feel about the reward of self-indulgence. That so-called treat will start to look more like the threat to your goals that it is, and giving in won’t look so good. Remembering the why will also help you recognize and act on other opportunities to accomplish your goal. The next time you find yourself using past good behavior to justify indulging, pause and remember the why. The researchers were intrigued by reports that when McDonald’s added healthier items to its menu, sales of Big Macs skyrocketed. The researchers found the same effect for vending machine choices. When a reduced-calorie package of cookies was added to a set of standard junk-food options, participants were more likely to choose the least healthy snack (which, in this case, happened to be chocolate-covered Oreos). Sometimes the mind gets so excited about the opportunity to act on a goal, it mistakes that opportunity with the satisfaction of having actually accomplished the goal. And with the goal to make a healthy choice out of the way, the unmet goal—immediate pleasure—takes priority. This illustrates a fundamental mistake we make when thinking about our future choices. We wrongly but persistently expect to make different decisions tomorrow than we do today. I’ll smoke this one cigarette, but starting tomorrow, I’m done. I’ll skip the gym today, but I’m sure I’ll go tomorrow. I’ll splurge on holiday gifts, but then no more shopping for at least three months. Such optimism licenses us to indulge today—especially if we know we will have the opportunity to choose differently in the near future. We look into the future and fail to see the challenges of today. This convinces us that we will have more time and energy to do in the future what we don’t want to do today. We feel justified in putting it off, confident that our future behavior will more than make up for it. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It Behavioral economist Howard Rachlin proposes an interesting trick for overcoming the problem of always starting a change tomorrow. When you want to change a behavior, aim to reduce the variability in your behavior, not the behavior itself. Apply Rachlin’s advice to your own willpower challenge this week: Aim to reduce the variability of your behavior day to day. View every choice you make as a commitment to all future choices. So instead of asking, “Do I want to eat this candy bar now?” ask yourself, “Do I want the consequences of eating a candy bar every afternoon for the next year?” Or if you’ve been putting something off that you know you should do, instead of asking “Would I rather do this today or tomorrow?” ask yourself, “Do I really want the consequences of always putting this off?” Rather than giving himself permission to be good on some days and bad on others (which, predictably, led to more bad days than good), he decided to take the challenge of reducing the variability in his behavior. He settled on the strategy of “vegetarian before dinner.” He would stick to vegetarian foods until six p.m., then eat whatever he wanted to for dinner. Using a daily rule also helps you see through the illusion that what you do tomorrow will be totally different from what you do today. Jeff knew that if he broke his rule one day, he would—according to the experiment’s instructions—have to break it every day for the rest of the week. When a halo effect is getting in the way of your willpower challenge, look for a the most concrete measure (e.g., calories, cost, time spent or wasted) of whether a choice is consistent with your goals. • Virtue and vice. Do you tell yourself you’ve been “good” when you succeed at a willpower challenge, then give yourself permission to do something “bad”? • Are you borrowing credit from tomorrow? Do you tell yourself you will make up for today’s behavior tomorrow—and if so, do you follow through? • Halo effects. Do you justify a vice because of one virtuous aspect (e.g., discount savings, fat-free, protects the environment)? • Who do you think you are? When you think about your willpower challenge, which part of you feels like the “real” you—the part of you who wants to pursue the goal, or the part of you who needs to be controlled? As you will see, it’s not just electrodes in the brain that can trigger this system. Our whole world is full of stimuli—from restaurant menus and catalogs to lottery tickets and television ads—that can turn us into the human version of Olds and Milner’s rat chasing the promise of happiness. When that happens, our brains become obsessed with “I want,” and it gets harder to say, “I won’t.” When the brain recognizes an opportunity for reward, it releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine tells the rest of the brain what to pay attention to and what to get our greedy little hands on. A dopamine rush doesn’t create happiness itself—the feeling is more like arousal. We feel alert, awake, and captivated. We recognize the possibility of feeling good and are willing to work for that feeling. In the last few years, neuroscientists have given the effect of dopamine release many names, including seeking, wanting, craving, and desire. But one thing is clear: It is not the experience of liking, satisfaction, pleasure, or actual reward. The joy of winning was registered in different areas of the brain. Knutson had proven that dopamine is for action, not happiness. The promise of reward guaranteed that participants wouldn’t miss out on the reward by failing to act. What they were feeling when the reward system lit up was anticipation, not pleasure. The flood of dopamine marks this new object of desire as critical to your survival. When dopamine hijacks your attention, the mind becomes fixated on obtaining or repeating whatever triggered it. When we add the instant gratification of modern technology to this primitive motivation system, we end up with dopamine-delivery devices that are damn near impossible to put down. There are few things ever dreamed of, smoked, or injected that have as addictive an effect on our brains as technology. This is how our devices keep us captive and always coming back for more. The definitive Internet act of our times is a perfect metaphor for the promise of reward: We search. And we search. And we search some more, clicking that mouse like—well, like a rat in a cage seeking another “hit,” looking for the elusive reward that will finally feel like enough. Importantly, even if the reward never arrives, the promise of reward—combined with a growing sense of anxiety when we think about stopping—is enough to keep us hooked. If you’re a lab rat, you press a lever again and again until you collapse or starve to death. If you’re a human, this leaves you with a lighter wallet and a fuller stomach, at best. At worst, you may find yourself spiraling into obsession and compulsion. In one study, participants who sampled something sweet were more likely to purchase indulgent foods such as a steak or cake, as well as items that were on sale. The food and drink samples amplified the appeal of products that would typically activate the reward system. There was no effect, however, on utilitarian items like oatmeal and dishwasher liquid, demonstrating that even a hit of dopamine cannot make toilet paper irresistible to the average consumer (sorry, Charmin). The Stanford researchers who ran this study asked twenty-one food and nutrition experts to predict the results, and shockingly, 81 percent believed that the opposite would be true—that samples would decrease a shopper’s hunger and thirst, and satiate their reward seeking. This just goes to show how unaware most of us—experts included—are of the many environmental factors that influence our inner desires and behavior. Since it’s unlikely we’ll ever outlaw the promise of reward, we might as well put it to good use. We can take a lesson from neuromarketers and try to “dopaminize” our least favorite tasks. An unpleasant chore can be made more appealing by introducing a reward. And when the rewards of our actions are far off in the future, we can try to squeeze a little extra dopamine out of neurons by fantasizing about the eventual payoff (not unlike those lotto commercials). The promise of reward has even been used to help people overcome addiction. One of the most effective intervention strategies in alcohol and drug recovery is something called the fish bowl. Patients who pass their drug tests win the opportunity to draw a slip of paper out of a bowl. About half of these slips have a prize listed on them, ranging in value from $1 to $20. Only one slip has a big prize, worth $100. Half of the slips have no prize value at all—instead, they say, “Keep up the good work.” This means that when you reach your hand into the fish bowl, the odds are you’re going to end up with a prize worth $1 or a few kind words. This shouldn’t be motivating—but it is. In one study, 83 percent of patients who had access to fish bowl rewards stayed in treatment for the whole twelve weeks, compared with only 20 percent of patients receiving standard treatment without the promise of reward. Eighty percent of the fish bowl patients passed all their drug tests, compared with only 40 percent of the standard treatment group. When the intervention was over, the fish bowl group was also far less likely to relapse than patients who received standard treatment—even without the continued promise of reward. Amazingly, the fish bowl technique works even better than paying patients for passing their drug tests—despite the fact that patients end up with far less “reward” from the fish bowl than they would from guaranteed payments. This highlights the power of an unpredictable reward. Our reward system gets much more excited about a possible big win than a guaranteed smaller reward, and it will motivate us to do whatever provides the chance to win. This is why people would rather play the lottery than earn a guaranteed 2 percent interest in a savings account, and why even the lowest employee in a company should be made to believe he could someday be the CEO. But dopamine does have a dark side, one that’s not hard to see if we pay close attention. If we pause and notice what’s really going on in our brains and bodies when we’re in that state of wanting, we will find that the promise of reward can be as stressful as it is delightful. Desire doesn’t always make us feel good—sometimes it makes us feel downright rotten. That’s because dopamine’s primary function is to make us pursue happiness, not to make us happy. It doesn’t mind putting a little pressure on us—even if that means making us unhappy in the process. To motivate you to seek the object of your craving, the reward system actually has two weapons: a carrot and a stick. The first weapon is, of course, the promise of reward. Dopamine-releasing neurons create this feeling by talking to the areas of your brain that anticipate pleasure and plan action. When these areas are bathed in dopamine, the result is desire—the carrot that makes the horse run forward. But the reward system has a second weapon that functions more like the proverbial stick. When your reward center releases dopamine, it also sends a message to the brain’s stress center. In this area of the brain, dopamine triggers the release of stress hormones. The result: You feel anxious as you anticipate your object of desire. The need to get what you want starts to feel like a life-or-death emergency, a matter of survival. The promise of reward is so powerful that we continue to pursue things that don’t make us happy, and consume things that bring us more misery than satisfaction. Because the pursuit of reward is dopamine’s main goal, it is never going to give you a “stop” signal—even when the experience does not live up to the promise. Mindfully indulge, but don’t rush through the experience. Notice what the promise of reward feels like: the anticipation, the hope, the excitement, the anxiety, the salivation—whatever is going on in your brain and body. Then give yourself permission to give in. How does the experience compare with the expectation? Does the feeling of the promise of reward ever go away—or does it continue to drive you to eat more, spend more, or stay longer? When, if ever, do you become satisfied? Or do you simply reach the point of being unable to continue, because you’re stuffed, exhausted, frustrated, out of time, or out of the “reward”? People who try this exercise commonly have one of two results. Some people find that when they really pay attention to the experience of indulging, they need far less than they thought they would to feel satisfied. Others find that the experience is completely unsatisfying, revealing a huge gap between the promise of reward and the reality of their experience. Both observations can give you greater control over what has felt like an out-of-control behavior. When you’re feeling down, what do you do to feel better? If you’re like most people, you turn to the promise of reward. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the most commonly used strategies for dealing with stress are those that activate the brain’s reward system: eating, drinking, shopping, watching television, surfing the Web, and playing video games. The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Neuroscientists have shown that stress—including negative emotions like anger, sadness, self-doubt, and anxiety—shifts the brain into a reward-seeking state. You end up craving whatever substance or activity your brain associates with the promise of reward, and you become convinced that the “reward” is the only way to feel better. The stress hormones released during a fight-or-flight response also increase the excitability of your dopamine neurons. That means that when you’re under stress, any temptations you run into will be even more tempting. Stress points us in the wrong direction, away from our clear-headed wisdom and toward our least helpful instincts. That’s the power of the one-two punch of stress and dopamine: We are drawn back again and again to coping strategies that don’t work, but that our primitive brains persistently believe are the gateway to bliss. According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.) The main difference between the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t? Rather than releasing dopamine and relying on the promise of reward, the real stress relievers boost mood-enhancing brain chemicals like serotonin and GABA, as well as the feel-good hormone oxytocin. As part of our class experiment, Denise committed to doing yoga at least once. When she did, she felt even better than she had remembered and couldn’t believe she had talked herself out of it for almost three years. Knowing that she was likely to forget again and fall into her old routine, she made a voice memo on her phone after class one evening, describing how good she felt after doing yoga. When she was tempted to skip yoga, she listened to the memo to remind herself, knowing that she could not trust her impulses when she was stressed. We don’t just cling to guns and God when we’re scared; many of us also cling to credit cards, cupcakes, and cigarettes. Studies show that being reminded of our mortality makes us more susceptible to all sorts of temptations, as we look for hope and security in the things that promise reward and relief. This, no doubt, is how we end up with half the purchases that clutter our homes and pad our credit card bills. We’re feeling a little down, we come across an opportunity to purchase something, and a little voice—OK, a few dopamine neurons—in our head tell us, “Buy this—it’s everything you never knew you wanted!” Terror management strategies may take our minds off our inevitable demise, but when we turn to temptation for comfort, we may inadvertently be quickening our race to the grave. Case in point: Warnings on cigarette packages can increase a smoker’s urge to light up. A 2009 study found that death warnings trigger stress and fear in smokers—exactly what public health officials hope for. Unfortunately, this anxiety then triggers smokers’ default stress-relief strategy: smoking. Oops. It isn’t logical, but it makes sense based on what we know about how stress influences the brain. Stress triggers cravings and makes dopamine neurons even more excited by any temptation in sight. Sometimes terror management leads us not into temptation, but procrastination. Many of the most put-off tasks have a whiff of mortality salience about them: making a doctor’s appointment, filling a prescription and taking it when we’re supposed to, taking care of legal documents such as wills, saving for retirement, even throwing out things we’re never going to use again, or clothes we’ll never fit into. If there’s something you’ve been putting off or keep “forgetting” to do, is it possible that you are trying to avoid facing your vulnerability? If so, just seeing the fear can help you make a rational choice—the motivations we understand are always easier to change than the influences we cannot see. people who drank too much the previous night felt worse in the morning—headaches, nausea, fatigue. But their misery wasn’t limited to hangovers. Many also felt guilty and ashamed. That’s where things get disturbing. The worse a person felt about how much they drank the night before, the more they drank that night and the next. If you think that the key to greater willpower is being harder on yourself, you are not alone. But you are wrong. Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both “I will” power and “I want” power. In contrast, self-compassion—being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure—is associated with more motivation and better self-control. Surprisingly, it’s forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience. Below is an exercise that psychologists use to help people find a more self-compassionate response to failure. Research shows that taking this point of view reduces guilt but increases personal accountability—the perfect combination to get you back on track with your willpower challenge. 1. What are you feeling? As you think about this failure, take a moment to notice and describe how you are feeling. What emotions are present? What are you are feeling in your body? Can you remember how you felt immediately after the failure? How would you describe that? 2. You’re only human. Everyone struggles with willpower challenges and everyone sometimes loses control. This is just a part of the human condition, and your setback does not mean there is something wrong with you. Consider the truth of these statements. 3. What would you say to a friend? Consider how you would comfort a close friend who experienced the same setback. What words of support would you offer? A WRITER CHALLENGES THE VOICE OF SELF-CRITICISM Ben, a twenty-four-year-old middle-school social studies teacher with literary aspirations, had set the goal to finish writing his novel by the end of summer vacation. This deadline required him to write ten pages a day, every day. In reality, he would write two to three pages one day, then feel so overwhelmed by how far behind he was that he skipped the next day completely. Realizing that he wasn’t going to finish the book by the start of the school year, he felt like a fraud. If he couldn’t make the effort now, when he had so much free time, how was he going to make any progress when he had homework to grade and lessons to plan? Ben started to doubt whether he should even bother with the goal, since he wasn’t making the progress he thought he should be. “A real writer would be able to churn those pages out,” he told himself. “A real writer would never play computer games instead of writing.” In this state of mind, he turned a critical eye to his writing and convinced himself it was garbage. Ben had actually abandoned his goal when he found himself in my class that fall. He had enrolled in the class to learn how to motivate his students, but he recognized himself in the discussion about self-criticism. When he did the self-forgiveness exercise for his abandoned novel, the first thing he noticed was the fear and self-doubt behind his giving up. Not meeting his small goal to write ten pages a day made him afraid that he did not have the talent or dedication to realize his big goal of becoming a novelist. He took comfort in the idea that his setbacks were just part of being human, and not proof that he would never succeed. He remembered stories he had read about other writers who had struggled early in their careers. To find a more compassionate response to himself, he imagined how he would mentor a student who wanted to give up on a goal. Ben realized he would encourage the student to keep going if the goal was important. He would say that any effort made now would take the student closer to the goal. He certainly would not say to the student, “Who are you kidding? Your work is garbage.” From this exercise, Ben found renewed energy for writing and returned to his work-in-progress. He made a commitment to write once a week, a more reasonable goal for the school year, and one he felt comfortable holding himself accountable to. Unrealistic optimism may make us feel good in the moment, but it sets us up to feel much worse later on. The decision to change is the ultimate in instant gratification—you get all the good feelings before anything’s been done. But the challenge of actually making a change can be a rude awakening, and the initial rewards are rarely as transformative as our most hopeful fantasies (“I lost five pounds, and I still have a crappy job!”). As we face our first setbacks, the initial feel-good rush of deciding to change is replaced with disappointment and frustration. Failing to meet our expectations triggers the same old guilt, depression, and self-doubt, and the emotional payoff of vowing to change is gone. Polivy and Herman call this cycle the “false hope syndrome.” As a strategy for change, it fails. But that’s because it was never meant to be a strategy for change. It’s a strategy for feeling better, and these are not the same thing. If all you care about is the feeling of hope, this is not an irrational strategy. Resolving to change is, for most people, the best part of the change process. It’s all downhill after that: having to exert self-control, saying no when you want to say yes, saying yes when you want to say no. The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to the rush of imagining that you will change. And so it’s not only easier, but also much more fun, to milk the promise of change for all it’s worth, without the messy business of following through. That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good. The high we get from imagining our own extreme makeovers is a difficult drug to quit. There is a fine line between the motivation we need to make a change, and the kind of unrealistic optimism that can sabotage our goals. We need to believe that change is possible; without hope, we’d resign ourselves to the way things are. But we must avoid the common trap of using the promise of change to fix our feelings, not to fix our behaviors. Otherwise, we can turn what looks like willpower into just another version of a rat pressing a lever, hoping this is the time we get the reward. Optimism can make us motivated, but a dash of pessimism can help us succeed. Research shows that predicting how and when you might be tempted to break your vow increases the chances that you will keep a resolution. For your own willpower challenge, ask yourself: When am I most likely to be tempted to give in? How am I most likely to let myself get distracted from my goal? What will I say to myself to give myself permission to procrastinate? When you have such a scenario in mind, imagine yourself in that situation, what it will feel like, and what you might be thinking. Let yourself see how a typical willpower failure unfolds. Then turn this imaginary failure into a willpower success. Consider what specific actions you could take to stick to your resolution. Do you need to remember your motivation? Get yourself away from the temptation? Call a friend for support? Use one of the other willpower strategies you’ve learned? When you have a specific strategy in mind, imagine yourself doing it. Visualize what it will feel like. See yourself succeed. Let this vision of yourself give you the confidence that you will do what it takes to reach your goal. Planning for failure in this way is an act of self-compassion, not self-doubt. When that moment of possible willpower failure hits, you will be ready to put your plan into • Forgiveness when you fail. Take a more compassionate perspective on your setbacks to avoid the guilt that leads to giving in again. • Optimistic pessimism for successful resolutions. Predict how and when you might be tempted to break your vow, and imagine a specific plan of action for not giving in. Economists call this delay discounting—the longer you have to wait for a reward, the less it is worth to you. Even small delays can dramatically lower the perceived value. With a delay of just two minutes, six M&M’s became worth less than two immediate M&M’s. The value of each M&M shrank as it became more distant. For your willpower challenge, ask yourself what future rewards do you put on sale each time you give in to temptation or procrastination. What is the immediate payoff for giving in? What is the long-term cost? Is this a fair trade? If the rational you says, “No, it’s a lousy deal!” try to catch the moment you reverse your preferences. What are you thinking and feeling that lets you put the future on sale? We only prefer the short-term, immediate reward when it is right there staring us in the face, and the want becomes overwhelming. This leads to bounded willpower—we have self-control until we need it. The good news is, temptation has a narrow window of opportunity. To really overwhelm our prefrontal cortex, the reward must be available now, and—for maximum effect—you need to see it. As soon as there is any distance between you and the temptation, the power of balance shifts back to the brain’s system of self-control. This time, the students were much more likely to choose the larger, delayed reward. Not being able to see the immediate reward made it more abstract and less exciting to the reward system. This helped the students make a rational choice based on mental calculations, not primal feelings. This is good news for those who want to delay gratification. Anything you can do to create that distance will make it easier to say no. For a cooler, wiser brain, institute a mandatory ten-minute wait for any temptation. If, in ten minutes, you still want it, you can have it—but before the ten minutes are up, bring to mind the competing long-term reward that will come with resisting temptation. If possible, create some physical (or visual) distance as well. If your willpower challenge requires “I will” power, you can still use the ten-minute rule to help you overcome the temptation to procrastinate. Flip the rule to “Do ten minutes, then you can quit.” When your ten minutes are up, give yourself permission to stop—although you may find that once you get started, you’ll want to keep going. When “never again” seems too overwhelming a willpower challenge to tackle, use the ten-minute delay rule to start strengthening your self-control. One reason is that most people are loss-averse—that is, we really don’t like to lose something we already have. Losing $50 makes people more unhappy than getting $50 makes them happy. When you think about a larger, future reward first and consider trading it in for a smaller, immediate reward, it registers as a loss. But when you start with the immediate reward (the $50 check in your hand) and consider the benefits of delaying gratification for a larger reward, it also feels like a loss. You can use this quirk of decision making to resist immediate gratification, whatever the temptation: 1. When you are tempted to act against your long-term interests, frame the choice as giving up the best possible long-term reward for whatever the immediate gratification is. 2. Imagine that long-term reward as already yours. Imagine your future self enjoying the fruits of your self-control. 3. Then ask yourself: Are you willing to give that up in exchange for whatever fleeting pleasure is tempting you now? The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |