These tips are not complicated, but they’ve proven very effective for myself and countless others. You’ve probably heard these before, so if that’s the case, consider this a refresher/reminder to put these ideas into practice today.

1. Work in a field you love.

“Do what you love” is perhaps the most basic productivity tip of all. You’ll be much more productive when you do work you enjoy. Unfortunately, this tip is as obvious as it is ignored.

Doing work you love is not remotely the same thing as doing work you find moderately pleasant either. When you’re working in a field you love, your motivation is usually high because you feel passionate about what you’re doing. You don’t have to push yourself just to get going each day.

When you enjoy your work, you’ll tend to enjoy a fast tempo. You’ll also do better quality work, and high-quality work is more efficient than low-quality work. Low-quality work generates inferior results and often has to be redone.

Don’t waste your time trying to become more productive in a field you don’t enjoy. Such a struggle is a complete waste of your life. You deserve better than to subject yourself to such punishment.

I’ve heard hundreds of different excuses for why people claim they can’t do what they love — not enough money, no time, not good enough, wife won’t let me, etc. They can all be condensed down to two words: “I’m scared.”

The people who are doing what they love were also scared. They could all come up with the same excuses. But at some point they decided it was unacceptable to have their lives dictated by fear, so they opted to face their fear and push through it. They decided to overcome their problems instead of turning them into excuses. Those who remain stuck still allow their fear to rule them.

Ultimately it’s a choice. Either you commit to doing what you love, or you don’t. Which side do you think involves the most suffering?

2. Take advantage of audio learning.

Make a habit of listening to educational audio programs, ideally every day. It’s so easy to fill in the gaps in your day with education time. Listen to audio programs when you’re driving, shopping, exercising, preparing meals, or just walking around. Load up your iPod to capacity, so you’ll always have them on hand.

You don’t even have to pay for the audio programs. There are tons of free educational podcasts online, including mine. Your local public library should also carry a selection of audio programs that you can check out for free.

Just by adopting this simple habit, you can gain the equivalent of multiple college degrees. If you want to expand your knowledge and skills, this habit is an absolute must. It doesn’t even cost any extra time if you combine audio learning with physical activities as already suggested.

The benefit of listening to educational audio programs goes far beyond the content. The simple act of feeding your mind with positive information will help you stay motivated and upbeat as well. If you feel depressed, lazy, or unmotivated, it’s a safe bet you aren’t taking advantage of daily audio learning opportunities. They will help you feel much more positive and driven.

When I was in college, I used to listen to educational audio programs on cassette tape with a Walkman radio. I listened while walking to and from school and in the short breaks between classes. In a typical day I might get through two hours of material. I learned some good ideas from those tapes, but the habit also kept me thinking positively. This practice was extremely instrumental in enabling me to graduate with two degrees in three semesters. Back then everyone around me said I would fail; no one was very encouraging. But I drowned out all that negative feedback by constantly plugging in to positive, can-do messages. Those tapes kept my mind thinking about how to achieve my goals instead of wondering if I could achieve them. So the benefit of audio learning is not just for the educational content; it’s also for the attitude adjustment.

3. Eliminate interruptions.

If you do any creative or information processing work, it’s imperative that you set aside blocks of time where you know you won’t be interrupted. This means no external interruptions as well as no interrupting yourself. You need serious blocks of time (2-3 hours minimum) with no email checking, no instant messaging, no web surfing, no phone calls, no drop-in visitors, etc.

Just knowing that you won’t be interrupted makes it so much easier to enter a flow state where you can get a lot of highly productive work done. Every time you get interrupted for a few minutes or longer, you can expect it to take at least 15 minutes to return to the flow state. A few seemingly minor interruptions each day adds up to a huge amount of wasted time every month — and for no benefit whatsoever.

When I’m working on a project or writing an article, I don’t check email. If the phone rings, I let it go to voicemail. I lock my office door and put up a Post-It note that says, “Writing Troll – Get Back!” which has a picture of a troll on it. When Erin and the kids see the troll, they know not to disturb me unless there’s a serious emergency. The troll is a warning. They know if that if they bypass the troll, they’ll be confronted by an ogre.

I routinely write new articles at a rate of 1000-1500 words per hour, measured from the time I get inspired by an idea to the time I click Publish. To write a 5000-word article might take me about 4 hours total. If I think I might be interrupted, I can’t write nearly as fast. I have to tune out the whole world and put myself in a place where nothing else exists but the topic I’m writing about. When I enter that flow state, writing becomes effortless. I’m usually not even conscious of the fact that my fingers are typing.

You set your own boundaries, so don’t even think about trying to blame others for your lack of productivity. If other people don’t respect your time, it’s because you’ve trained them to behave that way, if only through the mechanism of silent approval. Start showing more respect for time, and clarify your boundaries with others. You don’t have to be an ogre about it, but you do need to be firm. On the other hand, if people refuse to comply, then you have to ask yourself why you’d even want such disrespectful productivity vampires in your life.

When you use your work time wisely, you’ll have more free time to invest in your personal life. Erin knows that when I’m done writing this article, we’ll enjoy watching a movie together tonight (The Wrestler), and I also promised her a glorious foot massage. If she interrupts me and it takes me longer than expected to finish the article, we don’t get to spend as much time together.

4. Log your time usage.

For a few days in a row, keep track of where all your time is going. From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, log your time usage. Whenever you switch activities, write down the time and the new activity. You don’t have to go high-tech here unless you really want to. A pen and paper works just fine.

At the end of each day, take note of where your time went. You’re sure to notice many inefficiencies, so it won’t be hard to find areas for improvement. If you’re like most people, don’t be surprised to discover that 50-75% of your time each day is essentially being wasted.

You’ll likely discover that you spend way too much time on low priority tasks, you succumb to too many distractions, you task-switch way too often, and you waste a lot of time online.

Don’t beat yourself up when you see how you did. Use this information to make improvements, not to blame yourself for wasting time.

Try different approaches to managing your daily routine. Try some experiments to see if you can boost your efficiency.

The mere act of measuring your time usage will probably raise your productivity more than enough to compensate for the time logging activity. So even if you don’t make major changes based on what you learn, just log your time usage to raise your awareness. You’ll find that what gets measured gets improved.

Even if you’ve done time logging before, it’s a good idea to return to it every few months, at least once a year. You’ll discover that new inefficiencies and bad habits spring up like weeds, and you need to pull them out from time to time.

5. Use timeboxing.

Timeboxing is a great way to deal with tasks where you’d otherwise procrastinate. With timeboxing you only commit to working on a task or project for a fixed length of time, normally 30-90 minutes. 10-15 minutes is perfectly acceptable.

Once you get past the first 15 minutes, you’ll often want to stick with the task. Timeboxing is a good way of coaxing yourself through the initial task resistance. You tell yourself, “It’s only 30 minutes. How bad could it be? I can handle anything for 30 minutes.” But then when you get through that first 30 minutes, it’s easy to keep going.

This past weekend my kids and I decided to clean out a closet under our staircase. The closet was overloaded with waist-high piles of stuff. There was a Star Wars marathon on that day (all 6 episodes), so I figured we’d work on the closet until the end of one of the episodes — a fixed period of time of about an hour. Then we could stop and work on it some more at another time. No one wanted to clean out that closet, but at least we could make a reasonable dent in the task.

What actually happened is that we got so into the task that we finished the whole closet and completely reorganized it, including installing some shelves. That took us 3-4 hours. Then we did another closet. And then some drawers. And then another room… and another. Then we proceeded to clean out and reorganize the garage. By the end of the day, we’d put in a solid 12 hours of home decluterring and re-organizing. Erin was at a conference that day, and when she returned home around 8pm, she said she thought she had the wrong house — she didn’t recognize the garage when she pulled the car in.

This momentum even carried into the next day, with Erin and the kids doing more home organizing for several hours.

This was a major project, and if we thought about putting in 18-20 solid hours into it, it would have seemed too overwhelming, but timeboxing was a great way to get started because we could say to ourselves, “It’s only an hour. Then we can stop.”

You won’t always want to go longer than the initial time period you decide upon. That’s perfectly fine. You must give yourself full permission to stop. You can always kick off another timeboxed period later and make another dent in the task. If you keep working on it little by little, eventually you’ll finish.

* * *

These are all pretty basic productivity tips, but they’re very effective. These are proven winners that have withstood the test of time. When it comes to productivity, simple habits tend to be much more effective than complicated systems.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Do you ever go to the gym, stare at all the dumbbells lining the wall, and exclaim, “Dammit! Why are there so many weights here? I can’t possibly lift all of them! Look at how heavy they are! Why can’t they just have a few easy weights and let that be enough?”

Of course that sounds silly, but this is precisely how many people react to the various problems that surface in their lives.

“Dammit! Why do I have to be overweight? Why can’t I just be thin and fit? Why are there so many delicious foods that make me gain weight? Why does exercise have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being fat!”

“Dammit! Why does it have to be so hard to make money? How am I supposed to get out of debt when I can barely pay my bills? Why does it seem like every time I start to pull ahead, my car breaks down again? I’m so sick of being broke!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a girlfriend (boyfriend)? I’m a nice person, aren’t I? I’m tired of lame dates with total idiots! Maybe I should just be celibate. Why does this have to be so hard? I’m so sick of being alone!”

“Dammit! Why can’t I find a job I like? Why do I have to do stupid work I hate just to make money? What kind of life is this? How am I supposed to do what I love when I don’t even know what that is? I’m so sick of my job!”

Any of this sound familiar?

Problems as Obstacles

The attitudes reflected above depict problems as obstacles. They are roadblocks, annoyances, and irritations. They get in the way of living. They interfere with your peaceful enjoyment of life.

Given this mindset, you should do your best to prevent problems from arising whenever possible. If a problem occurs, it means something went wrong. It should have been anticipated and avoided. An unavoidable problem represents bad luck or a cruel twist of fate. Or perhaps it suggests you held the wrong thoughts and somehow attracted it via the Law of Attraction.

If you currently have problems on your plate, then you should try to eliminate them if you can. Aim for the delicious nirvana of a problem-free existence — everything in its proper place and nothing to worry about.

This is a terrible mindset to hold. The longer you think this way, the weaker you’ll become. This mindset puts you on a path with two primary branches.

The first branch leads to overwhelm. Eventually your life gets filled with problems you can’t easily solve. You’ll probably resort to some form of escapism to cope (such as via TV, web surfing, video games, excessive reading, alcohol and drugs, etc). You’ll get that slow sinking feeling that your life is slipping away from you. When new problems arise, you’ll become stressed, worried, or anxious.

The second branch leads to withdrawal. You gradually check out from the world in order to reduce the problems you’ll face. You may justify this with words like simplification and minimalism. If some part of your life gives you too much trouble, you try to surgically remove it. You probably live alone and have few friends. You favor work that’s easy, unchallenging, and unrewarding. The thought of living in a cave somewhere or meditating for days on end starts to sound like a good idea. All you want is peace, peace, peace, but you never seem to be able to stay there for long. Some annoyance always comes up.

There are other branches as well as variations of the two above, but for the most part, you’re either headed toward stressful overtraining or long-term atrophy. Either way, the longer you run these patterns, the weaker you become. Eventually problems that didn’t seem so big five years ago now feel like terrible burdens. “Dammit! Why did that light bulb have to burn out? Oh crap, I’m outta bulbs too. Now I have to go to the store. Ehhh… I’ll do it later. I just don’t have the energy to deal with this now.”

Problems as Opportunities

Let me offer you a different way of thinking about problems that’s a lot more empowering and a lot less whiny.

Problems do not exist to beat you down. They exist to help you grow stronger. Problems are like the dumbbells at the gym. If you attempt to lift them, you may feel tired in the short run, but you’ll grow stronger in the long run.

When you think about the various problems and challenges you’re facing in life, you may be tempted to assume that the goal is to reach the solution state — to get past the problem. But that’s a very narrow and largely disempowering perspective. That’s like saying that the point of going to the gym is to reach the end of your workout.

A more productive perspective is to consider that the activity of solving problems is what really matters. It’s the activity, not the final solution state, that helps you grow.

Suppose that one of your problems is that you’re broke and in debt. If so, I imagine that’s a problem you’d very much like to solve. You may feel desperate to arrive at a solution as quickly as possible. But the greatest value is found in the activity of solving this problem, not in the end result.

One of the reasons I’m doing well financially today is that I solved the problem of being broke about 10 years ago. It was definitely not an easy problem to solve. I had to go through a lot of difficult intermediate steps to become strong enough to solve it. I made many adjustments to my attitude. By lifting those weights, I grew stronger mentally, and my finances soon followed.

Consequently, I know that if I ever found myself broke at some point in the future, I could solve that problem again, probably much more quickly than I did the first time. Even though I have more to lose these days from a financial perspective, I don’t fear losing it. I know I have the strength to bounce back. My real gain wasn’t money. My real gains were inner strength, knowledge, and skill.

What would my life be like if I jumped instantly to the solution state without actually solving the problem on my own? Suppose I won the lottery. At first it might appear that all my financial troubles were solved. But I’d actually be in a far worse position.

As I was going through that period of financial scarcity, I prayed that I didn’t experience a cash windfall. I knew I had to solve the problem on my own. I didn’t want to accidentally get a big inheritance and rob myself of crucial financial lessons and training. When someone gave me lottery tickets as a gift, I got nervous because I was worried I might win.

It was hard dealing with some of those challenges, but I could see that my problems served a greater purpose. They were helping to train me up.

Another benefit is that by solving these problems for myself, I’ve been able to write many articles to share what I’ve learned. I couldn’t have done that if I bypassed all those difficult lessons.

Physical problems build physical strength. Mental problems build mental strength. Social problems build social strength. And all problems will on some level build spiritual strength (or strength of character).

This mindset has a positive long-term outlook. The longer you hold it, the stronger you become.

Problem-Solving Attitude Adjustment

I’m pretty sure I learned the value of problem solving from my Mom. For pretty much my entire life, she was a college math professor (and still is). She would often buy me books filled with problems to solve — math problems, visual problems, word problems, logic problems, etc. You can find these books in any local bookstore. That was her way of keeping me busy during summer vacation.

I grew to like these books, so I was exposed to lots of different problems as a child. At first I was baffled by most of the problems in these books, and I could solve very few of them. But I gradually got better.

When I was in the the fifth grade, I started learning BASIC computer programming, so that exposed me to even more problems. I began to see problem-solving as something to do for fun and as a way to get smarter over time.

By the time I was in high school, I really enjoyed solving interesting problems. If a teacher assigned more problems for extra credit, I would always do them — just for fun. It was almost an addiction. If I saw a problem, I got really curious and felt compelled to solve it.

Other students would sometimes come to me in the morning before school to ask for help with their math or science homework. And I’d help them. Often we weren’t even in the same class, but I had a school-wide reputation as a good problem solver. With the encouragement of one of my teachers, I also did some tutoring in math. That was even better because I got paid to teach people problem-solving skills.

One morning my physics teacher walked up to me at my locker before school and asked me to step inside his classroom. He presented me with a physics problem that he couldn’t seem to solve. I solved it easily, not because I was better than him at physics but because I’d been exposed to such an enormous variety of problems that my mind just saw the solution. That physics problem fit the pattern of a class of problems I already knew how to solve. My solution was unusual for a physics problem, but it wasn’t that unusual for a math problem.

During Christmas break in my senior year, I was bored during the two weeks off from school… partly because I had no serious problems to deal with. So I opened my calculus textbook and started reading ahead and working through some problems. I did it simply because I enjoyed the challenge.

After the holiday break (at the start of my final semester of high school), I went up to my calculus teacher and handed him a big stack of papers. I told him that during the holiday break, I completed all the homework he would assign for the rest of the year.

He said, “But how did you know which problems I’d assign?” I said, “I didn’t, so I just did them all.”

Typically he’d assign 12-15 problems from each chapter for homework. I probably did about four times that amount.

Of course that left my calculus teacher wondering, “Now what the heck am I supposed to do with Steve for the next five months? He’ll be sitting in class twiddling his thumbs the whole time.” He actually found creative ways to push me, giving me special assignments and take-home exams to do on my own. During classes, I mostly tuned out from the lectures and wrote a blackjack game for my programmable calculator. More problem solving.

It was only later in life that I realized how helpful it is to generalize this attitude beyond math, science, and logic problems and into the realm of practical daily existence.

For example, it’s no secret that I despise accounting work. I find it to be the most boring part of running a business. I outsource most of it by using an accountant, but you can never totally disengage yourself from the numbers and financial obligations when running a business… unless you’re in a position to request a government bailout because you’re “too big to fail.”

Instead of resisting the accounting work, I decided to see it as a training exercise. The point isn’t to get to the end of the work and be done with it. The point is to use the work to grow stronger. Keeping the financial side of my business in good order helps me become more organized and efficient. I know that if I can get really good at managing the financial side of my business, that training will serve me well for many years to come.

I could outsource more of this work, but right now I don’t want to. It wouldn’t be a good idea to do that yet. This work is teaching me important lessons I need to personally integrate at this time in my business life. Otherwise I risk screwing things up when I have more money and more business complexity to manage. I can outsource more of it later, but right now I can tell that this training is still helping me get stronger. I have to master the 20-lb dumbbells before I can progress to 25 lbs.

Overcoming Overwhelm

If you’ve been slacking off due to escapism, when you pull your head out of the sand, you may find yourself surrounded by problems that seem too heavy to lift — deep in debt, a dead-end job, a sucky relationship situation, a big belly, no sense of purpose, etc. That’s okay. Just start with the lightest weights, and train up from there. As you clear some of those minor problems, you’ll begin feeling stronger and more hopeful. Eventually you’ll be ready to tackle some mid-sized problems… and then the really big ones.

Cleaning, organizing, and minor repairs are great places to begin. Straighten your desk. Clean the toilet. Organize one shelf. Clear your email inbox. Hang that picture. Remove the expired food from your fridge.

You can also use timeboxing for this. Set aside a fixed period of time, say 30-90 minutes, and just make a dent in some of your problems. When the time is up, you’re free to stop, regardless of how much progress you’ve made. I often use timeboxing for tedious tasks like cleaning up a hard drive that needs better structuring of its folders. I’ll chip away at it for 30 minutes every few days until it’s complete. That way the task never feels too overwhelming. The long-term benefit of dealing with little problems is that you get good at processing them quickly. My parents are masters at this. Every weekend they would tackle little problems in batches, so the house was clean, neat, and in good order at all times.

Think of a problem-solving session as a short workout for your mental discipline, much like going to the gym. If you conduct these problem-solving workouts regularly, you’ll gradually get stronger, and little problems will no longer seem so troublesome.

Getting Stronger

Solving problems increases your resourcefulness. The more problems you solve, the better you get at problem solving.

This attitude adjustment can be very effective. If you start seeing your problems as training exercises intended to make you stronger, you’ll be able to face your problems with a can-do attitude. You know it will be hard, and you accept that it’s supposed to be hard. The weight is supposed to be heavy, and the workout is supposed to be tiring. If it was too easy, it wouldn’t help you grow.

You may feel some stress and strain when you’re in the thick of a tough problem, but you’d feel the same way doing a tough workout at the gym.

Don’t bemoan your problems. Be grateful for them. They’re training you to become smarter and stronger. Learn to enjoy the training you’re receiving. Years from now you’ll be grateful you had to deal with these problems because of how much stronger you’ve grown.

Don’t resist resistance training.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

The people who hear your elevator pitch could be potential business partners or clients, or they could be strangers you meet at a party or on the street. Even when it seems like no serious business relationship is likely to develop, there are lots of people out there that can help advance your career indirectly. For example, they might personally know someone who’s looking for the service you provide, so your elevator pitch could lead to a referral or two.

Unfortunately most people totally flub their elevator pitch, so they’ll typically receive a reply like, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” At best the other person may ask a few follow-up questions, but deep down they don’t really care about your answers. They’re just making polite conversation. They’ll probably never do business with you, and they won’t refer you any new clients or customers.

The Challenge of Crafting a Good Elevator Pitch

I’ve struggled with crafting a good elevator pitch because I do a lot of different things. For starters I’m a blogger, an author, a speaker, and an entrepreneur. But I don’t identify with any of those exclusively.

Often when someone asks me what I do for a living, I’ll say, “Well, it’s a bit complicated because I do a lot of different things.” Then I’ll mention some of the things I do. Typically the other person will give me a strange look while they process this overload of information, and then they’ll say something, “Ok, so you’re a writer?” And then I’ll have to explain some more.

Sometimes I’ll say, “I run a popular personal development website.” That’s usually a good conversation starter, but all too often it backfires — it leads some people (usually people who aren’t very web-savvy) to think of me as a web consultant. A week later I’ll get a call asking if I can help them solve an issue they’re having with their small business website. I definitely don’t want people thinking that I’m their go-to guy for tech support. I have no interest in that whatsoever.

I’ve had great success in delivering elevator pitches that stimulate conversation, but not the right kind. Too often my response leads to a dull conversation about blogging, writing, building websites, or professional speaking. Sometimes those discussions are interesting, but they rarely help me grow my business or attract new readers.

Ironically, I tend to have more stimulating discussions when I talk about the food I eat instead of the work I do. At least then we can get into a discussion about diet and health, and I can offer some value by talking about my raw food diet experiences, juice feasting, polyphasic sleep, etc. This leads to referrals that are actually relevant — such as people who desire to experience greater health and vitality. It’s also led to a few business deals with people who work in the health field. Those deals didn’t make a ton of money, but they did create some new passive income streams.

Attracting Relevant Referrals

On the other hand, people that actually understand the work I do are constantly referring high-quality leads to me. The main reason my website exploded with traffic is because of so many personal referrals. People told their friends, family, and co-workers about the work I was doing, and those new visitors became long-term readers and soon started referring others as well.

To date I’ve never spent a dime on advertising or promotion. My business has grown mainly by word of mouth. Lots of people have been referred here by their friends and family via face-to-face conversations, phone calls, or emails.

The interesting thing about these organic referrals is that they also involve simple elevator pitches, but the pitches are given by someone other than me. More often than not, people refer others to specific articles, not to my home page or main blog page. So they’re pitching specific content, not the overall website. However, when people come and read one article, they often like it so much that they continue to read more and eventually become long-term subscribers.

This gave me a clue as to how to craft a better elevator pitch, but it didn’t bring me all the way there. My individual articles tend to focus on specific, narrow topics. But I write about so many different things that I can’t turn my general elevator pitch into a pitch for a single article. Close… but no cigar.

15 Second Marketing

Eventually I figured out how to resolve these problems, but I didn’t figure it out on my own, so I have to give credit where credit is due. I found the answer I was looking for in an information product called Insider Secrets to 15 Second Marketing by Charlie Cook. In fact, I found it so helpful that I decided to formally recommend it here on my site, so I recently joined Charlie’s affiliate program. Charlie really gave me a critical mindset shift — one of those gorgeous a-ha moments – so I give this product a big thumbs up.

15 Second Marketing is both a book and an audio program — the content of both is the same. It covers how to write your own marketing message and how to use it to effectively attract more business and make more money. Your marketing message is even shorter than an elevator pitch. It’s basically a single sentence — something you can say in 15 seconds or less.

When I saw how long the book was, I wondered how anyone could create a whole book about something that seemed so basic. But Charlie does a great job of explaining why an effective marketing message is crucial to your career or business. I could certainly relate to what he was saying because of my own challenges in this area. At one time or another, I made all the classic mistakes in the “what not to do” section.

The concept of a marketing message is general enough that you can also use it to develop your career, build new contacts, and even to attract new romantic partners. So you don’t have to run a business to benefit from it.

The basic idea is that when someone asks what you do for a living, you want to offer a response that stimulates the right kind of discussion. So if you’d like to grow your business, you need a marketing message that serves as a good lead-in to a discussion that will help you generate new leads and attract more clients. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Your marketing message isn’t just something you say to people. It’s also something you can use on your website, in your newsletter, on your business cards, in your email signature, etc.

When someone asks what you do for a living, imagine they’re really asking, “What are you here to contribute, and why should I care?”

The mistake I made was that I used labels to describe my work (blogger, author, etc), but I didn’t convey the real value I delivered to people. If you tell people you’re a blogger, consultant, real estate agent, or salesperson, most people simply won’t care. Your answer doesn’t do anything for them. There are millions of people doing all of these things, and you’re just another professional with a boring job title. You may still get some business this way, but you could be doing much, much better if you had a more effective marketing message. This is especially true during a recession.

Your Marketing Message

15 Second Marketing provides a 7-step process to craft a strong marketing message as well as a checklist of characteristics your message should have. I can’t summarize the whole book in a single blog post, but I can share the big picture ideas with you.

The overall solution is that instead of describing what you do or telling people your credentials, you should instead share the actual value you provide. What value do you deliver to people? Why do people pay you? Why should I care?

What I really like about Charlie’s program is that it connects the dots between your elevator pitch and your life purpose. Your marketing message is NOT a sales pitch. It’s simply a statement of the value you can offer people. I like to think of it as a statement of your life purpose filtered through your career.

If you tell people that you’re an independent consultant, a realtor, or a web developer, your answer offers no value. It’s boring. You just drained all the life out of the conversation.

But if you offer an answer that states the value you can offer to people, now you’ve opened the door to an interesting conversation. You don’t have to do any selling because the right type of conversation will naturally get people interested in your service. This can lead to direct business as well as referrals. It can also lead to new relationships.

Crafting Your Marketing Message

Crafting an effective marketing message is tricky. There are a lot of aspects to consider. If you really want to do a thorough job of this, I highly recommend you go through the 15 Second Marketing program step-by-step. It packs in a lot more advice than I can cover in a blog post. But I can give you some tips to get you thinking in the right direction.

My advice is to think about what kind of conversation you’d like to stimulate. Tossing out labels to describe your work is usually a dead end. Instead, think about what kind of value you can provide to people.

As I tried to craft my own marketing message, I brainstormed a lot of variations and eventually settled on this one:

I teach people who are living below their potential how to feel energized and motivated, how to earn lots of money doing what they love, and how to make a real contribution to humanity, so they can finally enjoy the life that deep down they know they were meant to live.

A few days later, I had a phone call with Charlie Cook — I like to talk to people one-on-one before I commit to recommending their products — and during our conversation, I shared my marketing message with him. He said it was a good start but that it was too long. He suggested I make it much shorter, on the order of 10-12 words. He said that the goal isn’t to provide a bullet list — that can come later.

Perhaps I should have asked him this before I pasted this marketing message on my home page, Facebook page, Twitter page, etc.

What he said made sense to me, so I came up with some shorter variations, but I quickly realized that I’ll never perfect my marketing message sitting at my desk. I have to test these in the field to see how well they work.

For example, I might test some variations like these:

I help people grow.

I help people live more consciously.

I help people overcome their fears.

… and so on.

The key is that good marketing messages go beyond labels. As soon as someone labels you as falling into a particular career bucket, it gives them the opportunity to dismiss you. They tune out and stop listening to what you have to say. But if you present them with something that defies immediate labeling, you make people curious. You present an enigma they have to solve. You open the door to an interesting conversation.

You can also use different marketing messages depending on the circumstances. For example, I might find occasion to say any of the following when someone asks what I do for a living:

I help people quit their jobs so they can fulfill their life’s purpose.

I help people break bad habits and overcome addictions.

I help people take more risks and live more courageously.

I can imagine many situations where these sorts of replies would make people curious and stimulate interesting discussions.

Are you beginning to see the big picture here?

Using Your Marketing Message to Grow Your Business

A good marketing message doesn’t just stimulate fun conversations. It serves a powerful business purpose too. A good marketing message helps people remember who you are because it gives them a reason to care. When people remember you, they’re more likely to do business with you at some point, and they’re more likely to send you referrals. If people don’t remember you, it’s game over.

When I worked in the computer gaming industry, I learned an important lesson. I discovered that the more time people spent playing a particular game, the more referral sales they generated for that game. The longer people play a game, the more they talk about it. More gameplay time means more viral marketing. This is one reason the massively multiplayer online games can generate so many referral sales. When someone spends years playing World of Warcraft, it’s a safe bet they’ve told everyone they know about the game, and they probably helped Blizzard gain new customers. Heck, I’ve never even played the game, and here I am mentioning it as an example. Now contrast that with a single-player game you can finish in a weekend, and a year later you don’t even remember playing it.

Your marketing message serves a similar purpose. The message itself may not be very memorable, but it can lead to a stimulating conversation that is memorable. If you remember the conversation, you’ll remember the person, and that gives you more chances to engage in business with that person or to send referrals to that person. But if your initial marketing message falls flat, that entire chain of referrals suffers an early abortion.

Do you remember all the times someone offered up a common response like, “I’m a hairdresser”? It doesn’t mean anything, so whatever conversation that ensues about hairdressing will likely be forgotten. Your mind won’t retain the details because the conversation fits a pattern you’ve seen many times before, so it just reinforces the general pattern you’ve already stored, and the specifics are lost. We’re far more likely to remember events that violate our expectations because such events trigger our minds to store new patterns.

Now imagine asking someone at a party what she does for a living, and she says to you, “I make people look stunning before special events.” That statement by itself may not be that memorable, but it has a good chance of stimulating an interesting and memorable conversation. This hairdresser is more likely to stand out. If you remember her a little longer, you have more opportunities to utilize her services and more opportunities to refer new clients to her. Pretty soon she’ll be earning double or triple what equally competent hairdressers earn.

Think about the websites and blogs you frequent. Which ones do you remember best? Do they invite immediate generic labeling (like, “oh, another productivity site”), or do they stand out from the crowd in some way? Being harder to label can be a good thing if it makes you more memorable.

Boosting Your Income

If you’re self-employed and provide some type of service for clients, you can increase your income by attracting more clients. But you can also leverage a good marketing message to increase demand for your services. This means you attract so much business that you have to raise your rates. Then you can earn more money even as you work fewer hours.

Erin has been improving her marketing message over time, so she can attract better clients who will strongly benefit from her services. At first she promoted herself as a psychic medium, but then she started calling herself an intuitive counselor. That’s still a label, but it’s a less common one, so it was a step in the right direction. This helped her avoid bad clients who were looking for lottery numbers and casual entertainment and helped her attract better clients who wanted help making important life decisions. Eventually she began attracting so much business that she had to raise her rates several times. A 30-minute phone reading with her currently costs $497, and she has no shortage of clients because she’s very good at attracting clients who will receive tons of value from her service.

After going through 15 Second Marketing, Erin and I worked on her marketing message as well. The version we came up with is still too long, but it’s a step in the right direction. We’ll have to field-test some variations to see how well they work. If you’re curious, here’s the first draft we came up with:

I help people who are feeling uncertain about their lives determine the best course of action so they can enjoy a fulfilling career, earn more money, and attract loving relationships.

We might try shortening it to this and see how well that works:

I help people who are feeling uncertain about their lives determine the best course of action.

Again, the marketing message itself may not be super-memorable. But the idea is that it can stimulate an interesting conversation about the work you do, such that the other person really cares to hear what you have to say.

Suppose someone asks Erin what she does for a living, and she replies, “I help people who are feeling uncertain about their lives determine the best course of action.” That might lead the other person to say something like, “Okay… how do you do that?” Later in the conversation, the person might throw out, “By the way, my sister is stuck in a bad relationship, but she can’t figure out what to do about it. Are you able to help people like her?” This gives Erin the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, share some success stories, and continue the conversation. It should be fairly clear how this can lead to a potential new client — no selling required.

Such an opener also gives Erin the opportunity to ask qualifying questions of the other person, again without trying to sell herself. For example, after she gets a reply to the opener, she could follow up with, “Are you currently feeling blocked in any areas of your life?” This gives Erin the opportunity to provide some value and advice right on the spot, helping the other person with something that really matters. Erin never has to sell herself because if the person is really interested in her service, eventually they’ll ask something like, “So how much do you charge for a session?” or “If I booked a session with you, do you think you could help me figure out my career path?”

Think of your marketing message as your conversational opening move. If you use a bad opener, you can stunt the whole conversation. A good opener is no guarantee of success, but it can surely boost your long-term performance.

A good marketing message isn’t all-or-nothing. There’s a whole spectrum from terrible to mediocre to incredible. If your current message isn’t working for you, try something else. Keep tweaking it until you’re able to generate good conversations and create a steady flow of leads and referrals.

You can also use your marketing message on your website, your Facebook page, your email signature, and so on. Even when you aren’t physically present, your marketing message serves as an invitation for people to learn more about you.

Providing Genuine Value

I find Charlie Cook’s advice very refreshing because he offers a way of thinking about marketing that is honest, authentic, and non-manipulative. You’re never trying to sell people something they don’t need. You’re never trying to get people to buy from you. Instead, you’re inviting a discussion about the real work you do and how you can help people. You’re opening conversations at the level of life purpose. This is an awesome way to generate leads for your business and build contacts for your career because it works so organically. The approach meets with zero resistance because it fits our natural conversation patterns.

When your marketing message doesn’t convey any real value, that’s when you have to struggle to sell yourself. That’s when you end up throwing money away on ineffective advertising and promotion. That’s a downhill battle because you’re trying to make people care, and you’re going to meet with resistance because people don’t like being sold.

Once you get into tweaking your marketing message, I think you’ll find that it’s actually a lot of fun to field-test it. The next time someone asks what you do for a living, try out different marketing messages to see what kinds of conversations they stimulate. Do you feel like the conversation is stunted, or did you just open the door to a wonderful discussion about a subject you’re passionate about? Passion makes you stand out. Passion makes you more memorable. It makes people want to work with you. It encourages people to refer others to you. And passion flows naturally when your marketing message is aligned with your life purpose… when you come from a place of abundance instead of scarcity.

In this article I’ve only scratched the surface of how to craft an effective marketing message. If you find value in this topic, I encourage you to get a copy of Charlie Cook’s Insider Secrets to 15 Second Marketing. It’s very inexpensive relative to the value it provides, especially since it can pay for itself many times over by helping you boost your income. It comes with a 90-day money back guarantee, so there’s no risk to try it. I think you’ll get a lot of value from it whether you’re self-employed or not.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Suppose you set a goal to write a book, but you aren’t already in the habit of writing on a regular basis (ideally daily). Most likely you’ll never complete the book. That goal will just sit on your to-do list for years.

Suppose you set a goal to quit your job and run your own Internet business, but you aren’t in the habit of developing websites. That goal is also unlikely to be achieved. It will simply remain a fantasy, overridden by the habit of showing up to work each day.

Identify Habits to Support Your Goals

When you set a new goal, think about what habits would enable you to put that goal on autopilot, thereby making it a done deal.

It’s usually best to think in terms of daily habits, especially for big goals. Daily habits are easier to install than less frequent habits. (For details on successfully installing irregular habits, see the article How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits.)

It’s also wise to think in terms of simple habits, not incredibly complicated ones. Simple habits are easier to install and maintain. You can always add complexity later, but focus on getting the basic habit successfully installed first.

If one of your goals is to write a book, a simple daily habit would be to work on your book for at least one hour per day. If you can install and maintain that habit, completing your book is practically a done deal. Even if you write only on weekdays and take two weeks off, that’s still 250 hours per year you’ll be investing in your book. This simple discipline is enough to build a career as a professional writer.

Ask yourself: What daily discipline(s) would make this goal a done deal? The answer to that question will tell you what habit(s) to install. If you can condition and maintain those habits, you’ll very likely achieve your goal. It’s only a matter of time.

Be Specific

Make your habits specific. Identify when, where, and how you’ll implement them. Leave nothing to chance.

If you’re going to exercise daily to support your weight loss goal, specify when you’ll exercise and for how long, where you’ll exercise, and what type of exercise you’ll perform. Doing yoga in your living room from 4pm to 4:45pm daily is a clear habit. Adding “go to the gym” to tomorrow’s to-do list is not a clear habit.

One of the most basic habit properties is time. To install any new habit, you must put in the time.  Carve out a dedicated block of time to spend on your new habit. Even if the habit doesn’t require any extra time to maintain, such as the habit of not biting your nails, you’ll still need to devote time to conditioning the habit.

Start With a 30-Day Trial

Use the 30-day trial approach to kick-start your new habit. This method has a high success rate and can be adapted for virtually any habit you’d like to install. (For details on how to do this, see the article 30 Days to Success.)

Focus on achieving a perfect record with your habit for 30 days straight. Don’t worry about Day 31. If you can make it 30 days, you can usually coast from there because the habit will be on autopilot by then.

Even if you later get off track, it will also be easier to re-establish a habit when you’ll already completed at least 30 full days in a row. At the very least, you’ll know you’re capable of making it 30 days and beyond when you start anew because you’ve already done it.

Eliminate Interference

Nuke any obstacles that may interfere with your new habit. Clear commitments from your schedule that would overlap the time you’ve allotted for your habit.

Notify other people that this time is sacred and that they do NOT have permission to disturb you at these times.

Make sure you have all the equipment and supplies you’ll need to implement your habit. You don’t want to start on Day 1 with lots of enthusiasm, only to discover you’re missing something important and can’t proceed.

Give yourself every advantage before you begin. Review the article Habit Change Is Like Chess to make sure you account for the early game, middle game, and endgame of habit change. Don’t fall into the trap of blitzing for Scholar’s Mate and putting yourself in a disadvantaged position from Day 1.

Identify Supporting Habits

Take time to identify any supporting habits that will support your main habit, thereby supporting your primary goal as well.

For example, if you want to change your daily eating habits, you’ll also need to change your grocery shopping habit to make sure you buy the right foods consistently. This is especially important if your new diet will incorporate lots of fresh produce.

Another example: If you want to build a successful blog, writing is an important daily habit, but for optimal results, you may want to spend time each day promoting your work as well. This is especially important when you’re just starting out and hardly anyone knows about your blog.

Work on installing your main habit and all critical supporting habits at the same time if possible. If this is too much to handle, then install the supporting habits first. You can tackle them one by one with consecutive 30-day trials if you wish. Once the supporting habits are in place, you can then tackle the main habit.

For example, first you could install the habit of restocking your kitchen with healthy food every Tuesday evening. Then you could install the habit of preparing meals every day (to reduce your desire to eat out). And finally you could install the habit of changing your diet to whatever you want it to be. This simple progression can lock in a collection of supportive habits to help you achieve goals for weight loss and better overall health.

Commit Yourself Publicly

If you need some extra incentive to stick with your 30-day trial, get other people involved to help you. Commit to your new habit publicly. Put yourself on record, so it will be harder to wimp out.

Many people announce their latest 30-day trials in our discussion forums. Some also post daily updates to let others know of their progress. This is an excellent idea because it increases accountability. You’re less likely to slack off when you know others are watching out for your progress updates.

If that isn’t enough, then make a promise or bet with someone — with a significant consequence if you fail. Add some pain to the mix to ensure that you’ll do your best to follow through. This kind of positive stress can be very motivating, especially if you consider yourself somewhat lazy.

Goals Into Habits – A Personal Example

One of my top professional goals for this year is to develop and release a line of downloadable information products on a variety of personal growth topics.

This is a big goal that will require a significant time investment. Unfortunately, my current work routine doesn’t support this goal at all.

I have lots of experience selling info products online. I used to sell downloadable PC games for several years, so I already have the know-how to create and publish downloadable info products. I remember the daily rhythm I experienced while developing and releasing new games, and it’s very different than my current work routine which is centered around instant publishing of much shorter content.

Achieving this goal requires that I invest a serious amount of time and energy in product development. But up until this time, I haven’t been in a good position to install the necessary habits I’d need to make this goal a reality. I managed to write a book of course, but that was a one-time release, not a complete product line.

Starting this week, I’m going to devote several hours every weekday to developing new information products. Initially I plan to create a downloadable audio program. I’d also like to write more books, but I intend to release at least one audio program first.

In order to achieve this goal, I must radically change my daily habits. Here are some of the changes I’m making:

1. Continue to get up at 5am, but instead of going to the gym first, go straight to my home office to get started on my work day. Review my goals and plans, and get to work on product development tasks by 5:30am every weekday.
2. Dedicate every weekday morning to product development, working straight through until lunch time. I normally have lunch around 1pm, so with a few breaks, this should give me a solid 6-7 hours per day on product development. If I start feeling burned out, I can always cut back on the hours or take extra days off as needed.
3. Devote one hour per day to writing and editing new blog posts. I can write short posts more frequently or long posts less frequently. Adapting to shorter writing sessions will be a major change in my blogging rhythm.
4. Limit the time I spend on routine communication to no more than 60 minutes per day, including email, forums, phone calls, etc. Do these tasks in the afternoon.
5. Exercise in the early evening after my workday and before dinner. Favor exercises I can do at home instead of going to the gym. This saves driving time.
6. Run errands on weekday evenings around 8pm (especially Tuesdays). Stores are less crowded because people are at home watching TV. This habit saves me as much as 30 minutes on a typical errand run vs. running the same errands on a weekend.

It may take me a while to successfully install all these new habits to support the achievement of my goal, but once they’re up and running, I’ll be able to develop new products with a steady rhythm, much like the blogging rhythm that allowed me to write hundreds of new articles year after year.

By reclaiming more time from my daily routine, I’ll have more time and especially more creative energy to invest in developing information products. I can continue to release abundant free content like articles, podcasts, and newsletters, but I’ll save the more complex messages for structured products.

Blogging is a great medium for expressing certain ideas, but it’s a weak medium for covering topics that are too big or too complex. This is one of the reasons I decided to write the book Personal Development for Smart People. Writing a book enabled me to explain the fundamentals of personal growth in much more depth than I could do in a handful of articles or podcasts. I was finally able to share the big picture instead of always hacking away at the branches. I was delighted with the final result, as were the vast majority of the book’s reviewers, so this encouraged me to develop more products.

Other topics that would be better served by full-length products as opposed to blog posts and podcasts include time management, subjective reality, polarity, the Law of Attraction, the raw food diet, polyamory, and polyphasic sleep. These topics are all sufficiently complex that an article or series of articles can never do them justice.

Erin is also interested in developing and releasing her own info products. In fact, last week we made a bet with each other to see which of us would release a new product first. This is a win-win situation because our combined readers will benefit from a new product release from either of us, and obviously our family will enjoy the additional income as well. I won’t share the exact details of the bet (it’s kinda kinky), but suffice it to say I’m very motivated to win.

What new goals can you achieve by installing a few simple daily habits?

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

After my spa day on Monday, I felt more relaxed, but I still felt pretty aggressive. I woke up Tuesday morning feeling hostile and belligerent. Later in the day, the anger went away, and I was left with this incredible feeling of power and energy, which also carried into today.

Weight Loss

I weighed 171.0 this morning for a net loss of 8.0 pounds in 25 days. I haven’t lost any weight in about 10 days now. That’s pretty lame.

Microsoft Easy Transfer Wizard

I recently bought Erin a new PC, one of those HP all-in-ones. The new PC is pretty cool and works great. The only problem is trying to transfer her data from her old Windows XP PC to her new Windows Vista PC.

We tried using Microsoft’s “Easy Transfer Wizard,” and we’ve concluded this software is somewhat misbranded. It’s clearly not easy, unless you consider easy to be a synonym for broken. It doesn’t actually transfer anything — other than PC users to the Apple store. And the only way it could be a Wizard would be if it conjured Bill Gates at my front door to apologize for wasting my time.

Seriously, I could write a better piece of software in BASIC overnight.

I miss the DOS days sometimes. At least DOS worked.

So now all the friends who tried to convince me to get Erin a Mac are saying, “Shoulda bought a Mac.” I guess it would have been a better idea to pay more for software that runs than to save money on software that doesn’t.

Of course we can transfer Erin’s files manually, which is what Erin is doing now. But that sorta defeats the purpose of an Easy Transfer Wizard. How hard can it be to rewrite “Copy *.*” for Windows Vista?

Now if Apple were really smart, they’d seize upon this opportunity to send me and Erin free Macs in exchange for us blogging about the experience of switching over. I’d do it if I were them.

And if Microsoft were really smart, Erin would already be up and running on her new PC instead of still using her old one.

Phone Call With David Rainoshek

I talked to David Rainoshek, founder of juicefeasting.com, for more than two hours yesterday. He’s like a human health Wikipedia. He asked me a lot of questions to assess how I’m doing on the juice feast and to help determine whether it would be wise to break the feast or keep going. I can’t share every detail of the conversation — there was just too much — but his ultimate recommendation was that I begin breaking out of the juice feast around Day 30.

In Ayurvedic terms (a system I’m not particularly familiar with), David said it sounds like I’m experiencing something called a Vata imbalance, and there isn’t a good way to correct that on a juice feast, so the imbalance is likely to continue or worsen if I keep juice feasting. This isn’t necessarily a dangerous condition, but it indicates that the current cleansing physiology I’m inducing probably isn’t the best choice for me at this time. My body seems to be resisting this kind of imbalance instead of fully cooperating with it.

I’ve been craving fat like crazy lately, which seems to be a strong signal from my body that I need more fat in my diet. But if I add more fat to the juice feast, then I’m unlikely to remain in a cleansing physiology, so I might as well break out of the feast altogether.

I had a similar problem with the 80-10-10 raw food diet (less than 10% of calories from fat), which I did for 30 days in January. I made it the whole 30 days, but in the end I had no interest in continuing to follow that diet. One problem I had was very bad dry skin, including cracked, bleeding knuckles on my hands. I’m also experiencing dry skin on the juice feast, and the skin on my hands is dry and scaly now. I’ve been rubbing coconut oil on my hands often, but it doesn’t seem to help much. A juice feast is actually another variation on 80-10-10 in terms of the nutrient ratios, so my body is giving me strong indications that it needs more than 10% of calories from fat for optimal functioning. These results will likely vary from person to person, so my results may be atypical.

My weight loss followed a similar pattern during my 80-10-10 diet trial as well. I lost 8 pounds quickly and then stalled. I’d probably lose more weight on the juice feast eventually, but it’s certainly not as rapid as what most people experience while juice feasting. Someone who (coincidentally) started juice feasting on the same day, at a starting weight only 4 pounds above mine, has lost 20 pounds already. That kind of result seems to be more common.

When I adopted a raw diet with more fat in it, I got great results, especially when I included lots of greens, mainly in the form of green smoothies and salads. I added some superfoods like maca as well. I had lots of energy, I didn’t have any dry skin problems, and I felt grounded and not spacey. I loved that I could eat as much as I wanted and not gain weight, and I loved the foods I was eating too. There was no deprivation at all.

Even on a raw diet with more fat, I was actually losing weight, albeit very slowly. After I did my first colonic, however, my weight loss accelerated. I lost a pound a week for 5 weeks straight, dropping from 184 to 179 pounds. That’s the point where I started my juice feast, so I might have continued losing weight if I just maintained my previous raw diet. I’m sure the juice feast sped things along, but it seems to have done so in a rather unbalancing way.

Masculine vs. Feminine Energy

Another problem David and I discussed is where the juice feast is taking me energetically and what I’m likely to experience if I keep going. I’d thought the juice feast would induce a period of higher productivity, inspiring lots of action. But actually it’s had the opposite effect.

Instead of getting a boost of action, I’ve been getting a boost of creative ideas and insights. However, I really don’t need that right now. I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. I have an overabundance of great ideas already — for new articles, projects, books, etc. So getting a boost in this area is absolute overkill for me.

I’ve been receiving louder, deeper versions of ideas that I’m already clear about. My response is, “Okay, I got it. No need to keep rehashing the same ideas I’ve already received.” It’s like cleaning a window that’s already clean.

There’s also been a significant increase in my psychic/intuitive abilities. I didn’t notice this at first, probably because I was distracted by so much emotional detox, but Erin recently pointed it out. She says there’s been a noticeable increase in the frequency and accuracy of my intuitive hits. For example, I’ll say something and she’ll complain, “Hey, that was my line,” because I said the exact sentence she was about to say. I’ve also been getting a ridiculous number of synchronicities to confirm some of my ideas; however, I didn’t need extra confirmation because I was already confident that I was on the right path. More overkill.

Now that I think about it, other people have been like open books to me lately. I can read their surface thoughts very easily, even over the phone. The signals are so clear. However, this isn’t really a skill I cared to boost. I’m sure some people would love it, but it’s just not what I was looking to do at this time.

I’m getting major boosts on the feminine energy side, but I’ve been experiencing a matching decline on the masculine energy side. I’m getting less done than usual, and my productivity has dropped a lot. Instead of sleeping about 6-1/2 hours per day, I’m sleeping about 9 hours. My energy is contracting and pulling inward. I feel deeply connected with other people, but I’m not making much progress toward my goals. I’m spending a lot of time in introspection. I’m doing a lot of reading too — I’ve read maybe 10 books during my juice feast already. I’m soaking up new information and ideas like a sponge. But when I sit down to work on a project, I just can’t seem to focus on it. I feel strongly pulled in other directions.

Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what I wanted from a juice feast. I wanted a boost on the masculine energy side. I wanted to boost my creative output — my ability to take action and complete projects. I didn’t want to generate more ideas, and I didn’t think I needed more clarity. I already felt clear enough. I wanted to pour more energy and action into my existing ideas. I wanted to get more done. I thought that was one of the benefits a juice feast would deliver. For some people that does seem to be the case… but apparently not for me. This juice feast is boosting parts of my life that don’t seem to need boosting, while simultaneously shutting down parts of my life I wanted to raise up.

Experiencing a boost on the feminine energy side isn’t bad in general. It’s just that I don’t desire what I’ve been getting. So that leaves me a couple options. I can embrace the results I’m really getting and go with the flow of this experience. I can put my other goals on hold and allow my energy to contract and turn inward, exploring my emotions and intuitive abilities in much greater depth. Or I may decide that isn’t what I want and break the juice feast to return to a lifestyle that’s more compatible with my current goals.

So I wanted the juice feast to help put me into an even greater expansion phase, but instead it launched me into a contraction phase. Now I can accept and go with the contraction, or I can dump it and return to an expansion phase.

My initial reaction was, I’m just not interested in wallowing in feminine energy right now, so if this is likely to continue, I should break the juice feast. David suggested taking 5 more days to be sure, which would take me to Day 30. I think that’s reasonable. During this time I can turn and embrace those feminine energies that are swirling through my life without resisting them so much. I think an additional 60+ days of this would likely be a bad choice for me at this time, but I can handle 5 days easily (only 4 more days after today). Then I can make a more informed choice on Day 30.

Some readers also recommended that I drop the goal of 92 days and turn this into a 30-day trial instead. I’ll decide what I want to do on Day 30, but for now I’d say there’s a 90% chance I’ll break the juice feast starting on Day 31. It will take me 3 days to break it. I need to do it very gradually to avoid getting sick, so I’ll still be doing a lot of juicing for several days afterwards.

This juice feast has been a major growth experience to be sure, so I don’t regret doing it, but I think I went into it with mismatched expectations. If I’d known how it would affect me, I probably wouldn’t have done a juice feast at this time. If there comes a time where I really want to dive deeply into exploring my creative, intuitive side, and I’m willing to put my active projects on hold for a while, I might return to juice feasting at another time. But for now I’m feeling a strong call to return to the masculine energy side. Perhaps some of the gains I made from juice feasting will stay with me after I return to solid foods though. One person told me that he noted major improvements only after he ended a two-week juice feast — he seemed forever changed by the experience in a positive way.

As David and I discussed, juice feasting would be an awesome undertaking for someone who felt creatively blocked, who lacked clarity about their life path, who needed to lose a large amount of weight, or who was suffering from major health issues. That just isn’t me though. So where a juice feast would help re-balance an unbalanced person, for me it seems to be turning balance into imbalance.

I can still do the liver and parasite cleanses by the way, so that part is no problem. In fact, I’ve already started on the liver cleanse by taking Chanca Piedra. This is an herb that helps break up liver and kidney stones. I’ll be taking that for about 30 days, and then I’ll begin the parasite cleanse. If anything interesting happens as a result of those, I’ll be sure to let you know.

It was really great talking through these issues (and many more) with David. He helped me see this with a lot more clarity. Sometimes when I’m in the midst of a personal growth experiment, I get so immersed in it that it’s hard to see it objectively.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

The original release date was October 15th, but the book has already shipped and is available now.

You can get it at Amazon.com and in many major bookstores, including Borders, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and Hastings.

The major book distributors also have it too, including Baker & Taylor, Ingram, Partners, Bookazine, and New Leaf. So if your local bookstore doesn’t carry it yet, it should be easy for them to order it if you request it.

Why an Early Launch?

The early launch was actually a mistake. I learned of it last week when people started telling me that they’d just received their pre-ordered copies from Amazon. That was news to me!

I checked the Amazon sales page for the book and saw that it was no longer in pre-order status — it was already selling. Once that happened, the book’s Amazon sales rank quickly climbed into the top 1,000. And I hadn’t even announced the release yet.

I promptly contacted Hay House to find out what happened. Apparently the book was supposed to be shipped from the printer to their warehouse, and then it would be shipped to their distributors shortly before the launch. But instead, thousands of books were shipped from the printer directly to the distributors and retail chains, who promptly began selling them.

Obviously this throws off the timing of my launch plans, but all we can do is roll with it. I’m not even bothered by this because I’m so thrilled that the book has finally shipped.

Blogger Review Copies – Update

If you’re a blogger who took advantage of my review copy offer, there’s no need to wait until October to post your review. Please feel free to review the book as soon as you get a chance to read it. If you email me a link to your review via my contact form any time between now and October 31st, I’ll be happy to add a link to your review. I’m going to do this in batches. About 420 bloggers have already been approved for review copies, so that’s a lot of reviews.

The review copies began shipping last week, so please be patient if you haven’t received your copy yet. Most reviewers will receive a print copy in the mail. But there were a lot of requests from international bloggers, and it was a challenge to find a fair way to qualify them. Hay House wanted to disqualify almost all of these requests because many of the international blogs were in languages or countries where the book isn’t even available yet, and Hay House wants to focus on the U.S. launch. Many of these requests also came from countries where the mail system is unreliable, such as parts of Eastern Europe. And on top of that, many international bloggers said they preferred an electronic version of the book, so they could get it sooner.

I still wanted everyone to get a print copy, but Hay House has to pay for this, and shipping hundreds of books internationally isn’t cheap.

After some discussion we ultimately decided to send the international bloggers a PDF version of the book, but if their traffic was high enough (we had to set the bar fairly high), Hay House would still mail them a print copy. Maybe this wasn’t a perfect solution, but I think it was a fair way to handle it. The alternative would have been to disqualify most of the international review copy requests. But this way, nearly everyone who requested a review copy will receive something — either a print copy or a PDF. If you received the PDF but don’t like reading on your computer screen, you can always print it and read it on paper. I don’t know too many people that read long e-books on their screens.

If you didn’t participate in the free review copy offer but would still like to review the book on your website or blog, I’ll link to your review if you send me a link to it… as long as it has some decent substance to it and doesn’t just rehash the back cover text.

I’m not possessive about the ideas in the book — I really want them to spread. I’d love to see people writing about other ways to apply the book’s 7 principles to specific challenges and situations. Put your own creative spin on it.

Several bloggers have already posted reviews and have sent me the links. I’ll be sure to link to these reviews soon. I’m just waiting for a few more to come in so I can do this in batches.

Interview Requests

I still have about two dozen interview requests to process, so if you requested an interview, please be patient. I’ll endeavor to reply to all of the requests I’ve received so far by the end of the week. As you can imagine, this is a pretty busy time for me.

***

So I turn my back for one minute… and my book sneaks out the door without me. Must be an Aries.

I see that there are already a couple of Amazon reviews posted. I’m delighted to read some of the first pieces of feedback about the book. Wow!

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

For example, when I was going through my 30-day raw food diet trial earlier this year, I had a lot more energy — physical, mental, and emotional. This wasn’t a surprise to me because I’d experienced similar energy boosts during other raw food trials over the past several years.

At first it felt great to enjoy that extra energy — especially the feeling of euphoria — but after a while it began to feel uncomfortable. I was trying to contain all this extra energy, but I wasn’t used to it. I felt like an overcharged battery. Sometimes I felt so overloaded with energy, I thought I was going to explode. It was like feeling super-aroused but with no sexual outlet available.

After doing several 30-day raw food diet trials, I always returned to cooked food again. That always lowered my energy, and I lost all of the gains from eating raw, but the old feeling was more comfortable and familiar, so I felt a magnetic pull to return there.

What to do with the extra energy?

Eventually I asked myself, “Why are you intentionally lowering your energy? What is it about that higher state of being that makes it so hard for you to contain it?”

I soon realized what the problem was. That extra energy had nowhere to go. You see… my whole life was structured to handle a certain level of energy output that had been relatively stable for years. My exercise routine, daily activities, social life, and so on were all balanced to support a certain energy output. When I changed my diet and experienced a major energy boost, my life just wasn’t designed to handle it. It was like sticking a 12-volt battery into a 1.5-volt device.

Since I was increasing my supply of energy, perhaps I needed to increase the demand as well.

If my theory was correct, then in order to maintain my new diet, I’d have to change the rest of my life to support a higher energy output. I couldn’t just change my diet and leave everything else the same.

As it turned out, this was precisely the key I needed to return to the raw food diet and stay there without wanting to flee back to my old comfort zone.

The most important change was that I set some new goals as well as some bigger goals to create new outlets for the extra energy flow. These were goals that would have seemed like too much of a stretch on my old diet, but with a greater energy output, they seemed achievable.

Instead of trying to contain all this extra energy, I found new ways to let it flow through me. Some of the specific changes I made include the following:

1. Increased physical output. Before this dietary change, my gym workouts would usually burn 300-400 calories. Now I’m doing 500+ calories per workout. To be honest I don’t consider this change critical. Re-channeling the extra mental and emotional energy was more important than burning more calories. But I do think this extra physical output helped. Raw foodist Dr. Doug Graham recommends burning a minimum of 20% of your daily caloric intake as physical exercise. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting close.
2. Increased creative output. This is by far the biggest change. I feel more creatively inspired than ever, so I’ve been doing more creative work than I used to, shifting between blogging, speaking, journaling, business planning, concocting raw food dishes, and other outlets. I was especially pleased with four of the articles I wrote this month; those particular pieces felt very inspired to me. On Thursday I wrote a 4,400-word journal entry because I had so many ideas coming through that I wanted to record. I’m also developing a new audio program which I plan to release later this year. I now feel very uncomfortable if I go more than a couple days without creating new material. It’s like I’m overly aroused with creative energy and feel compelled to express it. Normally I don’t write on weekends, but this morning I just had to write an article to release some of this extra energy. Otherwise I’ll go through the day feeling like I’m about to explode.
3. Increased intentional output. I feel best when I spend at least 20-30 minutes each day imagining new ideas and visualizing my goals. It’s like I’m releasing some of the extra energy in the form of positive intentions. I often go to bed 30 minutes early and just lie there visualizing new goals and possibilities until I fall asleep. If I don’t do this regularly, I feel a strange build-up of pressure to let some of this energy flow through my imagination and release itself as new dreams and goals.
4. Increased spiritual/intuitive output. I feel more spiritually tuned in than ever. I’ve never enjoyed such a clear channel for intuitive guidance. I no longer have to meditate to put myself in the right state for “downloading” inspiration. I can simply close my eyes and access it within seconds. It’s like the switch is always on. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, I just tune in and request a solution, and it starts coming to me almost immediately. Consequently, I’m now relying on my intuition more often than my logical/analytical mind because it’s faster, more accurate, and more holistic. Yesterday Erin told me to “stop giving her readings” because she hadn’t had time to fully process the previous breakthroughs I helped her experience. I can’t help it though. When I pick up intuitive information about her, I have to relay it, or it feels like the energy is backing up.
5. Increased social/emotional output. Since I’ve been feeling so good lately, I needed new ways to channel those good feelings. Mostly I’ve been channeling those feelings toward my family. I’ve been having a lot of very connected conversations with them and pushing for more family outings. Last weekend I took the kids on the rides at Circus Circus, and next month we’ll be taking a family trip to L.A. and San Diego. I’ve also been teaching my 8-year old daughter about how to hold positive intentions and avoid complaining; this seems to be having a positive impact on her already. I’m sure some of these good feelings are coming out through my writing as well. A few people mentioned I seem more excited than usual. I can’t help it because that’s how I naturally feel now. I wake up feeling excited.
6. Increased standards. Lately I’ve been feeling a strong desire to fix a lot of the little problems in my life — problems that are too easy to ignore. Yesterday I replaced a broken paper towel holder in our kitchen — it broke nearly a year ago and was still usable but slightly annoying. I’ve also been much more consistent at teaching the kids to maintain certain standards of order in the house, and they’re taking pride in cleaning up after themselves. I finally feel like I’m getting a handle on the little problems that have been backing up. Individually they’re no big deal, but collectively they can be draining if ignored for too long. Until now I just didn’t feel have the energy to deal with all of them. Now I’m finally making a dent.
7. More sexy time. During my January raw trial, I experienced a temporary drop in libido while I was adjusting to the diet, and then it returned to normal. Now it’s definitely higher than it used to be. But at the same time, the desire to have sex feels more subtle and less distracting, so it’s easier to hold onto it for a while without feeling an overwhelming urge to release it. It also feels much more heart-centered… not so stuck in the lower chakras. Maybe it’s the maca.

The most significant change was definitely #2 (creative output). Sometimes I actually have to hold myself back from sitting at my desk and writing so much; otherwise I’ll never see my family.

Improved diet = increased creative output

When I remember other dietary changes I’ve made, I see similar patterns. Each successful dietary improvement was accompanied by a significant increase in creative output.

I went vegetarian in the summer of 1993, before my final semester of college. A few weeks after making this change, I started working as a contract game programmer, eventually creating a pack of Windows arcade games that hit the shelves several months later. This was a very busy and creative time for me. I even designed one of the games myself. I also earned a lot of money during this time, especially for a student.

I went vegan in January 1997, just before I started designing a new computer game. It was my most ambitious project. Due to financing problems, it was never released commercially, but I was very proud of the design. This was an extremely creative time for me. A couple years later I released an award-winning game with a very original design. I have no doubt that my improved diet helped me a lot here. I also got into martial arts training and distance running during this time.

During my raw trial in January of this year, I was working on my book. I made a lot of important edits to the book during those 30 days. I also booked a speaking engagement at the I Can Do It! conference. This was a very expansive time for me.

It’s hard to say which came first — the dietary change or the demand for greater creative output. Upon reflection I think it was the latter. When I was ready to take my creative output to a new level, I also felt ready to improve my diet. It seems like the intention to be more creative and to contribute more value triggered the dietary changes, perhaps to put my body in a state where it could handle more energy flow.

Have you ever experienced anything like this? Have you noticed any connection between your dietary changes (the kind that made you feel much more energetic) and increased creative output?

If you do creative work like me, there’s a good chance your income is strongly linked to your creative output. The more you can create and the more inspired your creations are, the more value you create for others and the more income you can generate from your work. So there can also be a financial benefit to improving your diet and channeling more energy. There’s also a productivity benefit because more energy means you can get more done in less time — without feeling burned out afterwards.

Are you resisting a more energetic state of being?

Perhaps the most important lesson I learned is the role of resistance. When I initially resisted my transition to a 100% raw diet, the real reason was that I was resisting the consequences of the increased energy flow. I’d been enjoying a nice comfort zone, but I’d have to leave it behind if I wanted to successfully navigate this change. That meant accepting more responsibility and putting more on my plate than ever before. It took me a long time before I was ready to do that.

Of the various major dietary shifts I went through (omnivore -> vegetarian, vegetarian -> vegan, vegan -> raw), this latest shift was by far the biggest and the most difficult. The first change was definitely the easiest and the mildest. It’s too early to say for sure because I only made the shift this year, but I strongly suspect that going raw will also be the most beneficial change in the long run.

If you want to permanently improve your diet, you have to reach the point where you can say yes to all the consequences. Otherwise you may fall into a fear of success trap. If you resist the consequences, you’ll stop yourself from making the changes that would give rise to them.

If you improve your diet and then feel much more energetic (physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually), how will you channel all that extra energy? Where will you direct it? How will you use it to fuel greater creative output? I think those questions need to be addressed before you’re ready to make the shift. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall back into your old comfort zone (both diet-wise and energy-wise).

Imagine what would happen to your life if you permanently felt a lot happier, stronger, more motivated, and more energetic. What would you stop tolerating if you suddenly had tons more energy flowing through you? Would you direct all that energy into your current career, relationships, and exercise routine, or would you feel compelled to make some major changes? What if your job was incapable of channeling all that extra energy? Would that compel you to quit and do something more creative, so you could contribute more? Do you resist any of these potential consequences on some level? What would happen if you could accept and even invite all of these consequences?

Quantum leaps

Some of these consequences can be very challenging to accept… and even more difficult to intentionally invite. It takes courage to willingly push beyond your familiar comfort zone. You have to be willing to bust up old patterns, so you can create new patterns that will effectively harness the extra energy.

In my case the changes I experienced weren’t terribly disruptive because my career outlets are very flexible, so they can handle more energy without being torn apart. From the outside looking in, it may appear that little has changed, even though this was a huge shift for me internally. But if I had a job and/or relationship with less flexibility, I might have had to endure much more significant external shifts.

It really is like taking a quantum leap. In these situations you don’t gracefully improve along a continuum. You reach a point where you must abandon your old orbit in order to shift to a new orbit. There may be a lot of energetic build-up before this shift occurs, but eventually you hit a tipping point. You have to choose one side of the chasm or the other because there is no middle to speak of.

You can certainly have a quantum leap that doesn’t involve dietary changes, but you may find as I do that your dietary leaps induce major shifts in the other areas of your life too. So in order to make the dietary improvement, you have to accept the whole package of consequences. If you resist any part of the package, you resist the dietary change as well.

Is there some part of your life where you’ve been pushing for a quantum leap but always falling back to your comfort zone? If you made this important leap, what other related leaps would have to come along for the ride? What part of this package deal have you been refusing to accept? What are the physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual consequences? What will it take for you accept the complete bundle of those consequences?

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Why So Many Bloggers Fail

I’m often asked why so many people who jumped on the blogging bandwagon failed to get good results. While the A-list bloggers enjoy soaring traffic and income, countless other blogs fall by the wayside. Why?

There are several ways to answer this, but perhaps the most obvious answer is that most new bloggers give up within the first six months. The web is littered with abandoned blogs. But six months is nothing. It takes six months just to get your bearings in the blogosphere.

During my first six months as a blogger, I earned a whopping $167. That’s about 17 cents per hour… not exactly what you’d call an unqualified success. But about a year and a half later, my blog’s income was passing $10K/month and kept going up from there. What if I’d given up during the first few months?

Why didn’t I give up? Partly it was because I wasn’t doing it for the money to begin with, so I didn’t define success in financial terms. Probably the main reason though is that I felt this line of work was such an excellent fit for my passion and skills that I couldn’t fathom doing anything else. It’s a virtual certainty that I’d be writing about personal development today in some fashion even if I was still making only 17 cents an hour. What really drove me was the desire to creatively express myself in a way that might help people.

However, in order for my creative self-expression to provide value for others, I had to do a ton of work on the skill side. Most people don’t see the years I invested in personal development before even starting a blog. My interest in personal development really began around 1991, but I didn’t start blogging until 2004.

Building Skill

Before I started blogging, I’d read about 700 non-fiction books on topics including productivity, relationships, spirituality, health, finances, and more. I had a good understanding of the broad field of personal development. I also worked enough on my own personal growth to generate some unique ideas.

When I started blogging, I’d already written about 20 articles between 1999 and 2003, some of which became popular online. I’d also been paid for about 6 articles by CNET ($1000 per 1000-word article). So I’d earned some money on the side from my writing before I started writing for a living.

Moreover, when I started my blog, I’d been running an online computer games business for 10 years. During the first 5 years of that business, I turned $20,000 cash into $150,000 debt. I had to learn a lot of difficult lessons about how to run a profitable business, most of which had nothing to do with money. My most important lessons actually had to do with developing and trusting my intuition and using it to make major business decisions. I had learned how to succeed as an entrepreneur long years before I started blogging.

So yes, my blog became an overnight success, but that night was about 15 years long.

I don’t know too many successful bloggers who jumped into the blogosphere with no meaningful experience and did well off the bat. Most had something in their backgrounds that prepared them for blogging success. It may have been a previous job that helped them build good work habits and discipline while stockpiling many great ideas. These people really weren’t starting from scratch. They had a decent skill set and a proven ability to create value. They started blogging because they had something of value to share.

Paying Your Dues

The reason so many bloggers fail to build a significant audience is that they haven’t paid their dues yet on the skill side. They get drawn in by the lure of passive income, but they don’t have the skills to deliver on the service side. Passive income is certainly nice to have, but it shouldn’t be your primary motivation. What will you do when you have tons of passive income? Wait for death? Passive income is a means to an end, but what’s the end you’re after?

There are a lot of reasons certain blogs get a lot of traffic, but I’d say the #1 reason is that they deserve it. They provide lots of value, and word of mouth builds traffic. If a blogger generates no word of mouth traffic growth, the reason is simple: Visitors don’t value the blogger’s content… at least not enough to tell anyone else about it. Another way of saying this is that if you aren’t seeing a steady growth in referrals for your professional work, it’s because your work isn’t very good.

Sure there are some ways to game the system, but I consistently see that the high-traffic blogs deliver a lot of value to people, whether that be education, entertainment, inspiration, creative ideas, or some other form of value. The top blogs ultimately deliver what people want.

Most of the failed blogs deserve to fail. The bloggers have nothing special to say. Instead of being inspired to write, they try to meet a certain quota of posts. They think studying search engine optimization can make up for lousy content. That’s like a bad poet concluding that the key to great poetry is better fonts.

Early Skill-Building Pays Off

You’ll probably have a hard time building momentum in any new endeavor if you fail to pay the price and develop your skills. I know it’s hard to be patient, but your early skill-building work can pay off massively down the road, not just for yourself but for all the people you’ll eventually help.

Every field has a core set of basic skills. If you commit to mastery of those skills over a period of years, you’ll probably do very well in your field. If you try to shortcut the process, get used to disappointment.

For example, some of the core skills that are important in my current line of work are:

1. Personal development knowledge – A broad base of knowledge of existing ideas, systems, and methods that can foster growth in the areas of health, relationships, career, money, habits, and spirituality.
2. Writing – Being able to express thoughts clearly through written language. Knowledge of basic grammar as well as high-level structural elements like unity and coherence.
3. Speaking – Presentation skills as well as comfort speaking in front of a live audience. There are many details here including knowledge of sound equipment and microphones, humor skills, and vocal variety.
4. Web/technical skills – Functional understanding of blogging and web technologies such as email, RSS feeds, discussion forums, and social bookmarking.
5. Business skills – Ability to manage general business responsibilities such as accounting, taxes, legal contracts, record keeping, and payroll.
6. Interpersonal skills – Networking with others in the field, avoid isolation/cocooning. Many great opportunities will come through the connections you build.

With the exception of #3, I developed all of these core skills to a reasonable degree of proficiency before I even started blogging. I developed #3 to a reasonable level before I started speaking professionally. If I had jumped into blogging without these core skills, it would have been much harder to succeed. I simply wouldn’t have been ready.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened when I started my computer games business. I had good technical skills, but my business skills and interpersonal skills were weak. I had no clue how to run a profitable business, and I didn’t understand networking. At first I was too isolated, and then I kept doing business with people who were either dishonest or incompetent. It didn’t matter that I was a smart programmer. My lack of skill in the other critical areas dragged down the whole business. It was only when I developed basic competency in my weak areas that the business finally became profitable. That took about 5 years working full-time (and often beyond full-time).

Accepting the Price of Skill

If you pick a field you’re passionate about, the skill-building work won’t seem so bad. You can actually enjoy it. I enjoyed learning about business even while my games business was failing during the first few years. I had so much to learn that even the most poorly written books offered me a wealth of ideas.

The skill-building process never ends. I continue to study personal development because I want to keep integrating fresh new ideas. I listen to audio programs on my iPod, and my reading queue is always filled with dozens of books. Even though I’ve written a book of my own as well as hundreds of articles, I never think of myself as being done with the learning process. There are always new ideas and perspectives to consider.

Before I wrote my first book, Personal Development for Smart People, I read at least four books on how to write a book, all of them written by experienced authors. I’ve already written enough articles to fill 20 books, but writing a coherent book was an entirely different beast. Making a study of book writing helped me avoid some pitfalls that might otherwise have caused me to stumble.

If I didn’t keep building my knowledge and skill, it would be fair to say that my blog should be displaced by someone else who’s willing to make that kind of commitment.

Planting Your Skill Seeds

When you start building a skill, it’s like planting a seed. You may have to water it for a while before you see any results. But eventually you get a nice harvest that makes it all worthwhile.

What skills might you begin building today that could really come in handy 5-10 years from now?

Ten years might seem like a long time, but it doesn’t matter. That time is going to pass no matter what you do. It’s inevitable that you’ll find yourself there someday. When that day arrives, you’ll either have a decade of skill-building behind you, or you won’t. It’s up to you to decide which path you’ll take. If you don’t consciously commit to the path of skill-building, you settle for stagnation by default. Please don’t do that to yourself.

Before I started my blog, I could see that if I got on this path, I’d eventually end up doing some speaking. That’s a reasonable expectation for people who work in this field. I was an okay speaker but certainly not great. I recognized it would probably take many years to get really good at speaking because I’d never made a serious study of it. So I starting working on my speaking skills in 2004. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far, but I know I can always get better. So I keep working on my skills in this area and trying new things.

When I look back on my previous 15 years of skill-building, I’m very grateful. It was a big investment to be sure, but all that work is really paying off. I can also see that if I keep building my skills as I’m doing now, especially in the area of professional speaking, the payoff will be huge. I’m a much better speaker today than I was in 2004, and if I just keep doing what I’m doing, I’ll be an even better speaker several years from now. The seeds have already been planted; all I have to do is keep watering them. I’ll never be perfect, and there are people who have more natural talent than I do, but I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to keep getting better. Being perfect is impossible, but I can guarantee that I’ll get better just by continuing to study and practice.

When you commit to building your skills in any area, you don’t have to be perfect. You just have to grow. If you wait for perfection, you’ll never go out and apply your skills.

Amateur vs. Pro

Am I suggesting that you need to develop a certain baseline level of skill before embarking on a professional path? I’d say yes. If you don’t have a good baseline skill level, you’ll do more harm than good. You probably don’t want an unskilled mechanic messing with your car. Nor would you want an unskilled surgeon slicing up your abdomen. Similarly, you’re unlikely to enjoy reading the work of an unskilled blogger or being bored to tears by an unskilled speaker.

How do you know if you have the right level of baseline skill to go pro? Perhaps the most obvious sign is that people will begin to suggest it. People will say, “Wow, you are such a great cook! You should have your own restaurant.”

This is what happened with me. While running my games business, I was writing articles on the side to help other software developers. Eventually people started telling me, “Wow, those are really great articles. You’re a talented writer.” I thought that was strange because I’d never thought of myself as a writer before. I just thought it would be nice to share ideas with other game developers.

In addition to positive feedback, I started getting requests for new articles: “Steve, can you write an article about X?” Then webmasters and online publishers began asking permission to republish my articles in their newsletters or on their websites. Soon people started asking to translate my articles into other languages, and before I knew it, I had a Russian fan site. Some articles were eventually translated into more than a dozen different languages. Further down the road, CNET offered to pay me to write some original articles for them, which I did for several months.

By the time I started blogging, it was already pretty clear that I had a good enough baseline skill level to go pro as a writer. I started writing articles in 1999. I didn’t start blogging until 5 years later. So I’ve actually been writing articles for 9 years now. Even though I didn’t write many articles during those first 5 years, I had the opportunity to digest a lot of feedback from them.

A lot of people try to bypass this process. They want success without effort. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. You have to pay your dues. Otherwise you’ll quit too soon or you’ll sabotage yourself because you’ll know you aren’t ready to go pro. You’ll look at others in your field and feel intimidated instead of welcomed. Or you just won’t have the skills to express yourself in a way that creates value for others.

The blogosphere is filled with amateur writers pretending to be professionals. That’s why the blogosphere is littered with dead blogs. The amateurs give up within 6 months or less because they aren’t committed to the skill-building years.

If you want to be a true professional in a certain line of work, don’t neglect the effort of skill-building. It’s hard work, but it does pay off. Building skill over a period of years is how you go from amateur to pro. The pros commit for the long haul.

The universe doesn’t really say no, but sometimes it says not yet.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

If you perform a certain task every day for weeks on end, it’s usually pretty easy to maintain. However, once you take a day or two off, it can be harder to start up again on your next “on” day. For example, if you get up early every weekday and then sleep in late on Saturday and Sunday, waking up Monday morning often feels harder, and you’re more likely to oversleep. Before you know it, you’ve blown your positive habit completely, and somehow every day has become an off day.

1. Make it daily anyway.

The first solution is to turn almost-daily habits into daily habits. Sometimes it’s no big deal to continue the habit even when it isn’t necessary, and the upside is that you’ll have a stronger habit with less risk of losing ground.

For example, I like to get up early 7 days a week. I find this much easier to maintain than getting up early 5-6 days per week. If I get up at 5am every single morning, it’s really no big deal. But if I stay out late one night and sleep in until 7am, it’s always harder to get up at 5am the following morning. Every once in a while I’ll stay out past midnight and sleep in late, but my default is to get up with the alarm at the same time every morning.

Even though I don’t need to get up early every day, the habit is beneficial for me every day, so there’s no reason to limit it to weekdays. Although it might seem harder to do it 7 days instead of 5-6 days, it’s actually easier to be consistent.

With close to 100% daily consistency, a habit will typically maintain itself on autopilot, so you don’t even have to think about it anymore. But with 80-90% consistency, the contrast between your on and off days is always in the back of your mind. Do I have to get up early tomorrow, or can I sleep in late? Do I need to exercise tomorrow, or can I skip it? If you have a lot of almost-daily habits, this can be a big cognitive burden and quite a distraction. Maintaining good habits becomes much more difficult than necessary.

2. Use placeholder habits.

Another option is to create an alternative, placeholder habit for your off days.

Suppose you want to exercise 5 days a week, and you really want to keep those off days. Instead of doing your regular exercise, you could schedule an an alternative activity for the same time.

Instead of doing your usual workout, you could use your off days to go for a walk, read, meditate, write in your journal, etc.

I recommend that you use placeholder habits that are similar in some way to the original habit. For example, on your off days for exercise, you could still do something physical like walking, stretching, or yoga. This turns your physical development into an everyday practice, even though you’re doing different activities each day.

3. Chain Habits.

When you chain a series of habits together, they become easier to maintain. As soon as you begin the first habit in the chain, the rest of the sequence will tend to take care of itself.

My usual morning routine involves getting up, hitting the gym, showering, getting dressed, eating breakfast, etc. It’s a pretty stable pattern. But sometimes when I feel I’m at risk of overtraining, I’ll skip my workout without substituting anything. When this happens I can just jump to the next link in my morning habit chain, which means I’ll get up and then shower.

I find that when I occasionally skip habits that are part of a longer daily chain, it’s fairly easy to put them back in again as long as I continue to maintain the first and last links in the chain. As long as I get up early and go to the gym or get up early and then shower, my not-quite-daily exercise habit remains pretty solid. But if I mess with the first link in the chain and don’t get up at my usual time, the whole sequence is more likely to be blown.

So the idea is to put your not-quite-daily habits in the middle of a chain of daily habits. If you maintain the overall chain, you’ll probably find it easier to maintain the middle links as well, even though you sometimes skip them.

4. Make specific commitments.

If there are certain habits you won’t perform every day, decide exactly when you will perform them.

“I’m going to exercise 3-4 days per week” is too vague and wishy-washy. “I’ll do a 30-minute workout at the gym every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday morning at 6:30am, alternating between weight training and aerobic conditioning” is much better. The more specific your commitment, the better.

Block out time on your schedule, and add these commitments to your calendar. Be sure not to schedule anything else for those times.

It’s very easy to fail when you give yourself too many outs and don’t really commit. On any given day, there should be no question as to whether you will or won’t perform your habitual activity. Ditch the mights, maybes, and shoulds. Either you will or you won’t. Decide in advance what it will be.

5. Turn habits into appointments.

If you have a hard time maintaining irregular habits, find a way to turn them into appointments that involve someone else. It’s easier to ditch a habit if you’re only accountable to yourself, but most people are less willing to skip appointments that would leave someone else hanging.

Get a workout buddy. Schedule early AM phone calls with another early riser. Plan home organizing time with your roommate(s) at the same time every week. Schedule regular babysitting for date nights with your spouse.

Your accountability will be greater when you involve others in your not-quite-daily habits.

Theses are just some of the tactics you can use to improve your ability to maintain irregular habits. For a list of specific habits that will give you some ideas, see the article 10 Ways to Optimize Your Normal Days.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Here are several techniques you can use to make better time estimates:

Calculate Your Fudge Ratio

The best place to start is to measure your current estimation accuracy.

Make a to-do list of upcoming tasks to complete, and jot down an off-the-cuff estimate for how long you expect each task to take. As you complete each task, record the time you actually spend on each one. Then add up your total time spent, and divide it by your total time estimate for the collection of tasks. That’s your fudge ratio.

For example, if you estimate that a certain list of tasks will take 12 hours to complete, but they really take 15 hours, then your fudge ratio is 15/12 = 1.25. This means you it took you 25% longer than expected to complete the tasks.

If you measure your fudge ratio for a variety of tasks, you’ll probably find that for individual tasks, your fudge ratio varies tremendously, perhaps ranging as widely as 0.1 to 10.0. However, for groups of tasks that collectively require a few days to complete, you may notice that your fudge ratio settles into a fairly narrow range. When you average enough tasks, your fudge ratio converges on a consistent figure.

My average fudge ratio is about 1.5. This means that whenever I make an off-the-cuff estimate for how long a task will take, on average I’m too optimistic; the task ends up taking about 50% longer than my initial guess. For any particular individual task, my estimates may be much more inaccurate. However, if I estimate that a collection of tasks will require about 2 days to complete, it’s a safe bet they’ll really require about 3 days.

Once you know your fudge ratio, you can use it to generate more accurate estimates for groups of tasks. Just add up your off-the-cuff estimates, and multiple the total by your known fudge ratio. This will tend to be a fairly accurate estimate.

I tend to be consistently optimistic when estimating the time required for certain tasks. Knowing my fudge ratio has NOT made my initial estimates more accurate. My off-the-cuff estimates are just as inaccurate as they’ve always been. However, when I multiply my estimates by the fudge ratio, the estimates come pretty close to the time required. This helps me budget my time better.

Based on my fudge ratio, I know that if I want to complete about 8 hours of actual work in a day, I should only list about 5 hours and 20 minutes worth of tasks based on my off-the-cuff time estimates (5:20 = 8 hours / 1.5). While it might seem silly to make this kind of compensation every day, in practice it works quite well — far better than the alternative of listing 8 hours of tasks and then either pushing myself to work a 12-hour day or feeling bad that I only completely 2/3 of my tasks. Self-sabotage can make things even worse when I subconsciously know I’m trying to do the impossible.

It’s better to make a reasonable task list that I can actually complete by the end of the day instead of beating myself up for being bad at estimating. Even if my daily task list seems too short at first glance, it feels good to cross off the final task at the end of the day. Due to daily variations, this isn’t perfectly accurate, but overall it’s better than anything else I’ve tried, and it encourages a sustainable daily rhythm without overworking or under-working.

I recommend using at least 10-20 hours of tasks for your initial fudge ratio calculation. If you based your calculation on only a few hours of tasks, your fudge ratio may not be accurate enough.

Of course it’s a good idea to recalculate your fudge ratio every once in a while. Once a quarter should be fine. It’s also wise to update it whenever the nature of your work changes, such as when you begin a new project or switch companies or careers.

If you want to get a little more detailed, you can calculate different fudge ratios for different kinds of work. Personally I don’t do this, but if you think it’s likely that different tasks will yield significantly different fudge ratios, it may be a good idea. For example, if you’re a student who finds that math homework has a fudge ratio of 0.9, but term papers have a fudge ratio of 1.7, you’ll probably want to maintain separate fudge ratios to create better estimates.

If you manage a team of people, you can calculate a fudge ratio for each member of your team (with or without their knowledge). Ask for time estimates from each team member for a collection of tasks, measure the actual time required, and calculate the fudge ratio for each team member. Whenever you get new time estimates from those team members for upcoming tasks, you can multiply their estimates by their individual fudge ratios. This will help you create a more accurate schedule for team projects. I think you’ll find that people tend to err in their estimates in a fairly consistent manner.

Achieve Reasonable Granularity

In order to make accurate estimates, it’s important that you break your tasks down to the right level of granularity. If your chunks are too big, you’ll overlook too many details. If your chunks are too small, you’ll get buried in low-level details, and you could spend more time estimating a task than it would take to just complete it; this is too much overhead.

For example, “Overhaul my website” sounds like a complex, multi-task project. This isn’t granular enough to make a reliable estimate. You’ll need to list the individual tasks needed to complete this project.

On the other hand, “Write mailing address on envelope” is way too granular. You could have completed this task in as much time as it took to list it and estimate it. This much detail only wastes your time instead of making you more efficient.

You should experiment to find the right chunk size where you can make the most accurate estimates. I’ll offer a couple pointers based on what works well for me:

The One-Sitting Rule. My estimates tend to be best for tasks I can complete in a single sitting. In practice this means about 2-4 hours per chunk. When I go less granular than that (bigger chunks), I miss too many details and grossly underestimate the time required. When I go more granular (smaller chunks), I list out too many details, I overestimate how long things will take, and I waste too much time creating and managing my to-do list instead of getting things done.

Compensate for Experience. If I’ve completed similar tasks many time before, my estimates will tend to be fairly accurate, so I might drop my fudge factor down to 1.2 or even 1.0. For example, I’ve written 700+ articles, so I’m pretty good at estimating how long an average article will take to write (3 hours is typical). But if I have to do something I’ve never done before, a fudge ratio of 2.0 or higher may be more accurate. The less experience I have with a task, the higher my fudge ratio needs to be.

Define Clear Task Boundaries

Make sure your tasks are clearly defined. Vague or nebulous tasks are hard to estimate.

If one of my tasks is “Update accounting,” I can’t be certain of what that includes. Does that mean balancing my checking account? Doing payroll? Filling out tax forms? Recording receipts? If I want to make a reliable estimate, I need a clear picture of what I’ll be doing.

You may find it helpful to list a few keywords for the components of an otherwise unclear task. You don’t necessarily need to estimate the time for each segment. You just need to be able to visualize what you’ll be doing. The keywords can help trigger the right imagery, so you can make a better estimate.

You should be able to quickly verbalize the first and last steps of each task. For example, when I see a task labeled “Write new blog entry,” I know that the first step is to pick a topic. The last step is to click the “Publish” button. If you can’t name the first and last steps of a task on your list, then your task doesn’t have clear boundaries. In that case you’ll need to take a moment to define those steps, or you’ll need to define your task a little more clearly, possibly by breaking it into smaller chunks. Good estimates require clear start/finish boundaries.

Be especially careful to consider what will be required to bring a task to 100% completion. If your task is to “Pay your bills,” does that end when you write the checks, when you deposit the payments in the mail (or complete an online payment process), when you file the paid bills in your filing cabinet, or when you balance your checkbook? Don’t forget to consider how long it takes to clean up and put away your materials. Even if you’re just making dinner, there will be dishes to attend to afterwards.

Reuse Estimates for Recurring Tasks

Once you’ve completed a recurring task, make a record of the time required for completion, so you can reuse that estimate in the future. When that task reappears on your to-do list, you can simply look up your old estimate. These estimates will be fairly accurate because they’re based on previous results, not previous estimates.

I recommend that you create an estimation list for your common recurring tasks. Here are two methods for doing that:

Method 1 (simple version). For a very basic estimation list, you only need to record a single figure for each task. Just note how long the task took to complete the last time you did it.

Your simple estimation list might look something like this:

Grocery shopping – 55 minutes

Make and eat dinner – 42 minutes

Vacuum house – 83 minutes

Wash, fold, and put away laundry – 75 minutes

And so on…

Once you build a good list of time estimates for recurring tasks, you can create a very reasonable plan for your day by adding tasks to your schedule.

Method 2 (detailed version). For a more complex version, you can record four figures for each task: (1) the number of times you’ve completed the task since you started keeping records, (2) your best (minimum) time to complete the task, (3) your worst (maximum) time to complete the task, and (4) your average time to complete the task. You can use these figures for making reliable estimates in the future; the min-max range tells you how reliable your estimates are likely to be. Whenever you complete each task again, take a moment to update your figures. In practice this won’t take much time at all, but you’ll end up with a fairly accurate list of estimates.

To update your average task time using this method, multiply (1) by (4), add the time required to complete the most recent repetition, and then divide the result by (1)+1. For example, if you previously completed a task 10 times, averaging 30 minutes per repetition, and the 11th repetition takes 35 minutes, then your new average is (10×30+35)/(10+1)=30.45 minutes. This method allows you to keep updating your average without having to record all of your previous task completion times.

If you record your best (minimum time) to complete a task, you can also use that to challenge yourself. Beating your previous record can motivate you to maintain a faster tempo. At the very least, try to beat your average time. Putting the clock on yourself can push you to work a little faster, especially for repetitive tasks that might otherwise seem a bit dull.

For most people I recommend Method 1. Method 2 is probably overkill unless you’re really committed to optimizing your time usage.

***

Learning to make better time estimates is a useful skill to develop, one that will serve you well for life. The methods above are actually quite easy to implement.

Becoming a better estimator may improve your life at the tactical level of daily time management, but be careful not to lose sight of the strategic level. Have you taken the time to define your life purpose? Are you setting the right goals? Are you working in the right career? Mastering low-level tactics won’t provide much value when your overall life strategy is nonsensical or nonexistent.

Even so, accurate estimation can benefit you across a variety of fields, so it’s a good skill to develop early in life. It’s still okay to develop this skill before you’ve achieved clarity at the higher levels of life purpose and long-term goals. Just be sure that at some point, you remember to attend to those higher levels, so you don’t merely become a faster rat on a treadmill.

What are your personal tips for generating good estimates? I invite you to share them in the forums. And remember, this is for posterity, so please… be honest.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.