If this describes you, then who decided to fixify your income? Who made that decision?

You made that decision, didn’t you? You decided to earn a fixed amount of money per month. You can trace your decisions back to some moment where you said yes to a fixed income.

Are you aware that saying yes was entirely optional? In fact, if you give it some thought (which I’ll encourage you to do in this article), you should be able to see that accepting a fixed income is a rather stupid choice, all things considered. A fixed income is a sucker bet.

How is that choice working out for you so far? Are you blissfully delighted with it? Do you like knowing that you’ll earn the same amount of money month after month? Does it feel comforting to know how much you’re going to make? Or is there some part of you that’s bored and frustrated beyond recognition?

Do you like the stability of it? Is it truly stable, or is your feeling of security rooted in a hopeful illusion? If some individual can decide to turn off your income with the words “You’re fired,” it’s hardly stable. If that’s your situation, it’s safe to say your income is unstable and conditional rather than stable and secure. We can say that all income is conditional, but how stable are those conditions? Does someone else wield the power to turn off your income?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that your income seems reasonably stable, secure, and predictable. Perhaps you work in a high-demand field, and you’re really good at what you do, so even if you lost your current job, you could quickly find a new one doing similar work for similar pay. That may be a stretch for some, but for the sake of this article, we don’t even need to pluck that low-hanging fruit. There are plenty of other cuts awaiting a splash of lemon juice.

Downsides of a Fixed Income

Aside from its predictability and possible stability, virtually everything else about a fixed income is negative.

First off, a fixed income lacks flexibility. It cannot adapt well to changing circumstances. This means that fixed incomes can get pummeled in a variety of ways.

If expenses rise unexpectedly and surpass your monthly income, then you have no choice but to draw money from cash reserves or investments or go into debt. If your expenses later return to normal, this debt may be temporary, but you’ll still end up paying extra interest or losing interest on your depleted savings/investments, which takes money out of your pocket.

If you spend more, you can’t simply earn more to compensate. This turns unexpected expenses into threats. They become something you relate to with fear or worry about. What if the car breaks down? What if someone gets sick? What if prices go up? Such events are just part of life. It makes no sense to fear the inevitable. Stuff is going to break, including expensive stuff that costs a lot to repair or replace. If getting an unexpected bill stresses you out, your mindset is a mismatch for reality.

If expenses rise above net income for too long, you can sink into debt for a long time and waste a great deal of money paying interest to someone else. Many people remain stuck there till they die. If their fixed incomes are too close to their expenses, taxes, and debt payments, then getting out of debt becomes hopeless. Hope can only be restored by focusing on the income side.

For this reason, people on fixed incomes often spend an inordinate amount of time fussing over their expenses. Otherwise they may risk depleting their savings or going into debt. They want to fulfill their desires, but their income limits their ability to do that.

“I can’t afford it” is practically a mantra for fixed income people. They sacrifice their true desires in order to stick to their budgets, totally oblivious to the fact that no one is forcing them to waste their lives on expense-tracking tedium. If they desire something with a price tag, but they can’t afford it, they rule it out as impossible for them – as if their fixed income is the final arbiter of their desires. Eventually resentment builds. They start resenting the unfairness of the economy, of people who set the prices, of business in general, of money, and so on. The bad guy is somewhere out there. Nope… the bad guy is the stupid choice you made to fixify your income. Wise up and stop doing that to yourself.

People look really pathetic when they act financially helpless. This isn’t how human beings should relate to themselves.

“Hi, there’s something I really want. Actually, it feels like the perfect match for me, but I just can’t afford it because I’m on a fixed income. Help me! Can you give me a price break or something? I really, really want it!”

“How about if you give me a break and stop pretending to be helpless?”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m on a tight budget. I really can’t afford to pay full price.”

“Now you’re just making yourself look foolish. Who fixified your income in the first place? You did! Why are you putting the onus on me to work within the limits you created for yourself? You’re asking me to fit an elephant inside a breadbox. Why don’t you raise your limits? Raise them high enough to be well beyond your desires, so you can easily afford whatever you want.”

“I can do that?”

“Yes, you’ve always been free to do that.”

“Well, I dunno about that. I don’t think my boss will give me more money.”

“Screw your boss then. Why do you want a boss anyway?”

“But that would mean making major changes in my life.”

“Yes, it would.”

“I don’t think I’m ready for that. It’s too risky.”

“There’s no additional risk because you’ve already lost the connection to your desires. You’re already stuck in a situation where you aren’t experiencing what you truly want. Life doesn’t get any worse than that. To do nothing ensures a continuation of the worst possible outcome – being perpetually unfulfilled.”

“But it could get worse. I could be even more unhappy.”

“If you do nothing, it will indeed get worse. That’s a given. Your desires will slip further and further away as you disconnect from your heart even more. Life doesn’t get any worse than that. The only hope lies on the path of change.”

“So it’s to be torture then?”

“Yes, until it kills you.”

“I can cope with torture.”

“Suit yourself.”

“So how about that price break?”

“Fezzik, tear his arms off.”

Foolishly Guarding Fool’s Gold

It’s funny how people strive to protect that which is worthless. The state of being unhappy and unfulfilled is worth absolutely nothing. If that’s where you find yourself, you’re already at rock bottom.

You may think that you’ll have to risk some of your stuff (possessions, money, etc) to make big changes in your life. That may be true, but if you aren’t happy right now, then all of that stuff is of zero value to you anyway. If you try to maintain your stuff at the expense of your happiness and fulfillment, then you are indeed a complete idiot. You’re trying to sell your very soul, aren’t you? You’re entering into an agreement that says, “I agree to be perpetually unhappy and unfulfilled in exchange for cash and goods worth $X.” Add up the value of all the stuff you believe you’d have to risk to make big changes. Does that value of X make this agreement a wise choice?

Risk the stuff. It’s worthless anyway. But don’t make the insane choice of sacrificing your happiness for stuff.

Switching to a Variable Income

Earning a variable income, where you have the flexibility to earn a different sum of money each month, has a lot more to do with mindset than anything else. It doesn’t matter if you have a job, run your own business, or enjoy multiple streams of income. Those are just different vehicles.

The key is to recognize who determines your income. You do. You may have financial and economic realities to deal with, but ultimately you set the prices for what your time and efforts are worth financially, you decide what skills to develop and what kind of training to undertake, and you determine what kind of value to create and deliver to people. The most powerful choices are under your control.

If you deliver pizza for a living, you can expect to be paid for that particular skill based on its market value. Pizza delivery guys are easily trained and replaced, so you can expect to earn very little from such a job. Don’t blame the job for what it pays. No one is forcing you to choose a low-paying, unskilled job. If you try to squeeze more money from a job than the job is worth in the larger marketplace, eventually your boss or customers will figure out that you’re being overpaid, and you’ll be replaced by someone cheaper.

On the other hand, maybe you want to inspire and motivate people for a living. This takes a lot more skill than delivering pizzas, but it’s in much higher demand relative to the supply. In general, people are willing to pay a lot more to be inspired and motivated than they’re willing to pay for a hot pizza (unless you live in Naples). If you develop a high ability to inspire and motivate people, and you build the means to deliver your value to a sizeable number of people, you can eventually earn more in an hour than the pizza guy earns in month.

You not only have the ability to develop your skills within a particular field, but you can also switch fields repeatedly. If you want to earn more, then keep building skills and changing up how you combine and express those skills to maximize the value you’re able to create and deliver, thereby maximizing the income you’re able to generate. The opportunities to do this are endless as long as you remain flexible and alert.

Your income is not fixed unless you decide to fixify it. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting checks from the government as your only income source. Those checks may not increase in size, but they aren’t the only checks you’re capable of earning. If you don’t like the size of those checks, go out and earn different checks.

A Fixed Income Is a Sucker Bet

Take note that while you’re receiving a fixed income, someone higher up the chain of command is enjoying a variable income at your expense. When you receive a fixed income, you’re actually creating a variable amount of value, but the income generated by your excess value is being siphoned off to line someone else’s pockets. They’re profiting from your ignorance. How generous of you! It may seem like they’re taking on more risk, but keep in mind that if they go down, you go down too. You share in the risk, but you don’t share in the upside. You do realize you’re giving away the farm here, don’t you?

If you’re going to work, then why not receive and enjoy the fruits of your labor instead of giving most of your earnings away before you even see them? You’re already creating value, aren’t you? If you want to be generous, consider giving some of your excess value away to charity. I donate some money each month because it feels good to do so. But I donate to non-profits and charities that spend their money on things I want to support, not to stock-holding officers or investors who are already making millions a year.

Stop pretending to be helpless when it comes to how much money you make. Your paycheck has no power over you – except to the degree you give your power away. You may be working in a system where the higher ups have every financial incentive to keep you powerless so they can keep siphoning the value you’re creating, but ultimately you’re the one who chooses to walk through that door each day. You don’t have to keep doing that. You can get up and leave right this minute if you want. Many people are much happier for having done that.

You are the final arbiter of your desires. If you want something with a price tag, you have the power to earn the money to pay for it. You decide how much you earn. You decide how much you spend.

When you realize that you choose your income, you can focus your energies on creating and delivering as much value as it takes to earn whatever you want. Be intelligent and deliberate about it. Make abundance a priority in your life. This is a lot more fun than fussing over expenses and nitpicking your taxes. Once you develop a modicum of skill, you’ll find that it’s a lot more fun to earn an extra $10K than to save $10K. You can earn $10K in an hour if you develop the mindset and skills to do so. No one is stopping you from doing that.

Stop Fussing Over Expenses and Taxes

When it comes to reducing your expenses and taxes, you have to do a lot of tedious work. It’s not fun, at least not for any sane person I’ve met. Yet people with a scarcity mindset spend a lot more time nitpicking their expenses and taxes than they invest in boosting their income. Not a good trade off… not by a long shot.

When you try to minimize your expenses and taxes, you’ll eventually reach the point of having to make tough calls that could reduce your quality of life. On the expenses side, you may have to do extra expense tracking and budgeting, which takes time. Or you may begin to sacrifice quality to save a few bucks on your purchases.

On the tax side, you’ll have to fill out more paperwork and do more accounting to take advantage of more deductions and save more money. Is that really what you want to spend your precious life doing?

Consider that when it comes to expenses and taxes, you have a hard limit of $0 and can go no lower. Once you’re spending the bare minimum, that’s it – you’re done. So your maximum ideal gain is to spend nothing at all. And even if you could take things that far, your quality of life will surely suffer. You’ll be wasting so much time going out of your way just to save a few extra dollars here and there. Sacrifice and scarcity will be your constant companions. That’s no way to live.

In the long run, it’s much more productive to focus your time and energy – not to mention your precious life – on the side of generating more income. You have no hard limit on that side. For all practical purposes, the sky is the limit. With commitment and persistence, you can boost your income by many multiples of what you might save on the expense and tax side.

Working on the income side is a lot more fun to boot. You get to spend your time creating value and receiving money with gratitude instead of worrying about whether or not you can afford to splurge on organic produce.

For my taxes, I pay an accountant to do all the paperwork for me. That costs extra money, but I don’t worry about it. I also procrastinate endlessly when it comes to doing any sort of accounting work. I do the bare minimum I can. I keep everything in good order, but I don’t balance the accounts very often. At tax time I let my accountant work his magic to figure out the best deductions for me, but if I have to do extra work that I don’t want to do just to save a little more money, I simply decline. That way I get to spend more time on the value creation and delivery side, not to to mention the enjoyment of life side. The pay is much better on that side, both financially and emotionally.

Last year my accountant told me I could save more money by deducting the business use of my car. All I’d have to do would be to keep track of mileage when I drive my car for business reasons. There may have been some other ways to claim this deduction, but they still required me to do more tracking, analysis, and/or paperwork. That seemed like a stupid waste of life, so I told my accountant to skip that deduction – not worth it to me. I’m not going to waste more time on stuff I don’t enjoy just so I can save an extra thousand dollars on my taxes. The IRS will surely have no trouble taking the extra money, and I’m happy to spend my time doing more of what I enjoy, which will easily enable me to earn enough money to cover that missed deduction many times over. I’d actually lose money if I tried to take that deduction. It’s yet another sucker bet for those who choose to live in scarcity.

When it comes to my expenses, I don’t maintain any sort of budget, either on the business side or personal side. Budgeting is boring to me, so I don’t do it. I simply spend whatever I feel like spending. When my expenses rise, expectedly or unexpectedly, I don’t worry about it. I don’t have to worry. I know that if I begin to overspend, I can always restore balance by over-earning just as easily.

Earning money is fun. Spending money is fun. Both activities are interchangeable. Fussing over expenses and taxes isn’t remotely fun, so that isn’t part of the equation – that kind of stuff gets triaged.

My latest credit card bill for my business is $1010, which is on the low side. Most of it is stuff that gets auto-billed each month. I was too busy earning money that month and didn’t have as much time to spend money. The bill before that was $6900. Ah yes, the Bermuda conference. I had a lot of fun spending money that month. The bill before that was somewhere in between. My personal credit card bills fluctuate similarly. Every month I pay off every balance completely, so there’s no revolving balance and no interest charges.

I “waste” money on unnecessary expenses all the time. I overspend on little things. I don’t fuss over trying to save money. I assume that whatever I can spend, I can earn. That wasn’t always the case though – it took years to train up to the level where I could earn enough to cover my desires.

Years ago I had a friend who absolutely hated waiting in line. He saw it as a personal insult. He used to say that all stores and restaurants should have a separate cashier for people who are willing to pay 50% more, just so they’ll never have to wait in line. I thought he was nuts at the time, but he was simply trying to maximize the value he got from life. Waiting in life sucked too much value away.

I really don’t know how much money I earn each month because I only look into it a couple times a year. It’s just video game gold anyway – doesn’t really matter what the exact figures are. I have a general feel/vibe for how the cash is flowing week by week, and in terms of spending I do my best to go with the flow. Is my bank account growing or shrinking? I like to see the numbers keep growing. I check my account balances a couple times a week to take their pulse. I earn money from multiple sources pretty much every day, so my checking account is perpetually refilling itself, but I want to make sure there are no big surprises like fraudulent charges. Some months it’s hard for me to guess what I actually earned within +/- $5K. I simply don’t care to keep track. It’s somewhere in the tens of thousands each month, more than enough to live off.

I do the same with my book. I have no idea how many copies it’s sold. Can’t even fathom a guess within +/- 5K copies. I haven’t asked my publisher for a sales update this whole year. It’s great that we’re up to a dozen languages for translated versions, but as for the money and sales, I don’t really care. I’ll sort it out when the royalty statements start coming. It will be more fun to be surprised.

Even though this may sound financially irresponsible, I think it’s just the opposite. My bills always get paid. I’m paying down my mortgage much faster than necessary. My car is 100% paid for. I’m sharing this with you because it actually works, even though it may sound counter-intuitive.

Managing your finances in real life – the fun way – is very much like earning gold in a computer role-playing game. Earning money is play. Spending money is also play. If you aren’t having fun, you’re missing the whole point.

I think it’s truly irresponsible to waste your precious life on things you don’t enjoy, like fussing over your expenses or taxes. Does it feel good to you to sacrifice quality of life to keep a tight grip on your finances, when you could be making plenty of money if you simply spent more time doing what you love and providing value for others? Would you rather do something creative and have plenty of money to splash around, or spend your time dealing with cheap items that keep breaking down? I think you deserve the best that life has to offer you, but you have to step up and claim it. No one is stopping you from doing that.

Cash Reserves

Suze Orman recommends maintaining a short-term cash reserve (not counting long-term investments) equivalent to about 6 months of expenses. I think that’s a wise idea. A decent cash reserve gives you a lot more flexibility, whether your income is fixed or variable.

I maintain a liquid cash reserve at all times to have a cushion for any unforeseen expenses. I like to see that reserve be at least $50K, preferably closer to $100K. That way if something unexpected happens like a wacko filing a frivolous lawsuit because he spilled boiling water on himself while attempting my brown rice recipe… or crashed his car while attempting to drive after a week on polyphasic sleep, I can easily afford a decent hitman.

When your income source is fairly vulnerable, like if you could get laid off or fired and spend a lot of time out of work, you may want to maintain a bigger cash reserve. But when you assert more control over your income and maintain more options for responding to financial setbacks, you don’t need as big a reserve.

If you have multiple streams of mostly passive income, and if it would take a major upheaval to threaten those sources even if you stopped working for a while, you may be fine with a 2-month cash reserve or less. If I suddenly need more cash, I have lots of options that could easily be implemented in less than 60 days. I could do another joint-venture promotion. I could create and sell an info product. I could do another book deal and get an advance. Even so, when I focus on feeling abundant, I naturally attract a bigger reserve than I need.

Cash reserves are useful because there’s a lag between creating and delivering value and receiving income from it. Some income sources have low lag time. For example, when someone registers for my workshop and pays by credit card or PayPal, the money is in my bank account within a few days. Some sources pay monthly, such as affiliate deals. Others pay quarterly, semi-annually, or less frequently, like book royalties. Some pay “whenever.” A cash reserve helps to smooth out fluctuations. It also keeps you from incurring stupid bank fees from bouncing checks. Having a bank balance that’s too low can lead to a lot of time wasted as well as unnecessary stress.

How do you build a cash reserve? You can get there by skimping on expenses, but that gets really tedious and boring after a while, so I don’t recommend it. Focus on creating more value, training up your value-creating skills, and building a bigger client base for whatever service you provide. It all comes down to getting better at creating and delivering value.

I certainly didn’t make sacrifices to build a cash reserve. I just kept doing what I enjoyed. I stayed alert for new ways to express and deliver value to people. Sometimes it was as simple as asking, “What else can I write about that could help people in some way?” I didn’t have to focus on earning money. When you get good at creating and delivering value, money finds its way to you.

Luck or Choice?

Why do I find myself in this “lucky” situation where I get to do what I want, earn what I want, and spend what I want? If you think luck had anything to do with this, you’re crazy, deluded, and otherwise insane. This happened by choice. I created this career and financial situation deliberately. It wasn’t easy to figure out how all the pieces would fit together – it took years – but it was definitely worth it.

How long it takes you to hit your desired financial stride is irrelevant since the time is going to pass anyway. You can spend that time creating the life you desire, or you can stay stuck with something you don’t want. You might as well work toward what you desire, unless you want sacrifice and scarcity to accompany you all the way to the grave.

Recognize that a fixed income is a sucker bet. It’s like drinking soda. It doesn’t matter that lots of people do it – that doesn’t make it any less dumb. There’s no good reason to sacrifice yourself to line someone else’s pockets. Don’t be a sucker.

You’re free to opt out of the fixed income sucker bet whenever you want. When you do this, rest assured that the other suckers in your life will bark at you for pouring lemon juice on their cuts, and the higher ups won’t appreciate that you saw through their scheme. But you’ll be free to decide how much you earn. You’ll be able to write your own paycheck, not with airy-fairy wishful thinking but with a commitment to creating and delivering the best value you can, regardless of how you choose to express yourself.

Of course having a variable income isn’t all fun and roses. It takes time to get the hang of it and to get a good feel for how to balance the flow of earning and spending. It took me about 5 years before I achieved basic competence with it. I made tons of mistakes during that time, but I learned from them. After that it was pretty easy to maintain stability.

If you pursue this path, maybe you can figure it out in 2 years. Maybe it will take 10. Again, the time is going to pass anyway. If you drop the fixed income mindset, you’ll end up in a pretty sweet place once you eventually figure it out.

As you probably noticed, I made up some words in this article. You’re free to coinify your own words too. This is your reality after all. You make the rules. Just as you can subscribe to other people’s verbal patterns, you can also subscribe to other people’s income patterns. But you don’t have to. You never did have to. Just because a pattern is popular doesn’t mean it’s the best pattern for you. Give that some thoughtification.

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.

Paraliminals are personal development audio programs designed to condition your mind for enhanced results, such as greater productivity, positive behavioral changes, better health, and so on.

What’s unique about Paraliminals is that they deliver simultaneous but distinct messages to your left and right ears. One message is tailored to your left brain, the other to your right brain. No subliminal messages are used, so you can hear exactly what’s being said. The messages are of course very positive and uplifting. It feels good to listen to them.

Listening to a Paraliminal is a very relaxing experience, much like a guided meditation session. Paraliminals are recorded with special Holosync technology that uses binaural beats to put your mind into a relaxed and receptive state. This is one reason I recommend Paraliminals so highly — they never fail to put me into a deep state of relaxation.

I’ve been listening to Paraliminals regularly for almost 3 years now. My last listening session was last night before going to bed.

I wrote a detailed Paraliminals review a while back, so please check it out if you want to learn more about them. I own the entire Paraliminals collection, and I didn’t write my review until I’d listened to most of the Paraliminals multiple times. I still feel just as good about recommending Paraliminals today as I did at the time I wrote my original review… except that now I’m even more impressed by the long-term usefulness of this collection. The quality is just outstanding.

The Peak Performance Paraliminal CD includes two different sessions. The first session is 25 minutes, and the second is 23 minutes. The first session focuses on boosting your motivation, and the second session encourages you to take action from a place of passion and commitment. I was informed that the free download includes only the second session.

Take note that this isn’t a promotional recording — it’s the same material they sell on the Peak Performance CD for $29.95.

Given my roots as a shareware game developer, I’m delighted to see Learning Strategies embracing the try-before-you buy model. Obviously I love giving away content for free.

Download the free Paraliminal and give it a listen. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

If you like the free Paraliminal and decide to buy the whole Paraliminals collection as a result, be aware that I receive a commission on those sales. As a general rule, when I find good products to recommend, I almost always negotiate a profit sharing deal with the publisher or join their existing affiliate program. This enables me to generate a sustainable income while continuing to offer a vast amount of free content to people around the world. It also makes it possible for me keep this site free of all third-party advertising. I evaluate a LOT of products every year, and I only recommend the very best ones I find.

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.

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.

Erin just joined Facebook this afternoon. If you have a Facebook account, please send her a friend request. She has 121 Facebook friends so far (after we posted about it to our Twitter accounts), and she’s looking to add more. Her Facebook page is at:

Erin Pavlina – Facebook

My Facebook Experience

My Facebook page is here:

Steve Pavlina – Facebook

I’ve been using Facebook for a few months now. I currently have 1,907 Facebook friends. I’ve been a fairly active user ever since I joined. I get new friend requests, comments, and emails there every day.

Overall I’m glad I joined Facebook. It takes extra time to keep up with it, and it can easily become a time sink if you aren’t judicious in how you use it. However, I’ve found it a good way to meet people with compatible interests.

I set things up so that whenever I update my Twitter status, it updates my Facebook status automatically. Also, if I make a new blog post, the link is automatically posted to my Twitter and Facebook accounts too. Facebook has an app that anyone can add to their account to do this. To set this up with Twitter, I used Twitterfeed. You only have to set these up once, and after that it’s all completely automated. Nice!

There are four primary ways I use Facebook now:

1. Broadcast medium. I use Facebook as a broadcast medium via the auto-updates that appear when I post anything to my blog or my Twitter account. This is fully automated. This brings more readers to my blog posts. It gives people an extra outlet to keep up with my work.
2. Gathering feedback. Facebook is another place where I receive general feedback (via comments posted on my Wall and Facebook email) as well as specific feedback about my Twitter updates and blog updates. Most of this feedback is pretty general (”great post”), but some of it has been helpful. The Facebook feedback is usually short and snappy, so it gives me a quick vibe on people’s reactions to a post. The feedback I get via email and the forums is usually much longer.
3. Making new connections. I’ve met some pretty cool people on Facebook. This includes new friends (people I now keep in touch with regularly) as well as new business contacts. I’ve received a few interview requests and speaking invites via Facebook too. Facebook has been more beneficial as a business tool than Linkedin. My Linkedin account generates mostly spam and inappropriate requests and has been largely useless. Between the two, Facebook wins hands down for business networking.
4. Maintaining existing connections. Some people prefer keeping in touch with me via Facebook instead of using regular email or phones. Some of my existing connections have strengthened with people who happen to be on Facebook. I think this is because my Facebook friends see my updates more frequently (vs. if they just subscribe to my blog feed or newsletter), so they think about me more often as a result.

The downside is that I can’t respond to all the feedback I get on Facebook, including the emails people send and the comments they post on my Wall. It’s just too much to keep up with it all. A few times people got upset when I didn’t reply to their questions, but I have to triage. However, I think most people understand that when you have nearly 2K Facebook friends, you can’t be equally responsive to everyone. If people think I can do that, their expectations are totally unrealistic.

Another thing I don’t have time for is getting involved with all the Facebook apps. Most of them are way too cutesy for me. I really don’t need people sending me virtual candies and such. Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the sentiment behind it — but I just don’t have time for that sort of thing. I almost always decline requests that require me to add new apps to my account. If you want to send me extra love, just hold the intention in your thoughts, and I’ll receive it. No need to send me virtual snacks via Facebook.

I also decline all Facebook cause invites. People send me new ones every day. Again, it’s not that I don’t care about the fate of whales or polar bears. It’s just that I don’t have time to get involved in five new causes every day. I have to be more focused than that.

Spam hasn’t been a big problem for me on Facebook. When people start spamming me with too much junk (some Internet marketers have done this), I just unfriend them. Problem solved. If you spam me, I can guarantee you won’t be my friend for long. If you send me a message that says, “I know this looks like spam, but…” you’ll be unfriended before I read the rest of your message. I have zero tolerance for anything that looks like spam.

I normally accept all initial friend requests. The limit is currently 5,000 friends, so my account still has room for about 3K more friends. I thought about creating a separate fan page, but for now that seems unnecessary, and I don’t see what it would accomplish. Maybe if I hit the friend limit, I can consider it.

There is a lot of stuff in Facebook that is awfully cutesy and which seems totally pointless to me, so I simply ignore that stuff. When I stick with my core reason for using Facebook, which is to cultivate new compatible connections, it does fulfill that purpose quite well. Many people find me on Facebook because they see I’m friends with one of their friends. This has a rippling effect of expanding my Facebook network in interesting directions. For example, I frequently get new friend requests from other raw foodists because I’m friends with lots of other raw foodists there.

Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter a bit longer than Facebook. I currently have 2,409 followers there, and I’ve posted 479 updates. On average I gain roughly one new Twitter follower per hour.

One thing that helped boost my follower join rate was adding my Twitter page to my signature in our discussion forums. If you regularly participate in any online forums, I highly recommend you do the same. Your signature links will appear on every post you’ve ever made (assuming the forum software is decent). People who find your old forum posts (such as via search engines) may start following you on Twitter if they like what you posted. This way your old posts are working for you. Be sure to also link your forum signature to your Facebook page if you want more Facebook friends.

Overall I like Twitter. I wish I adopted it earlier, since I’d have a lot more followers by now. Many bloggers who started using Twitter earlier have way more followers than I do.

Using Twitter doesn’t require much time at all if you’re disciplined, especially since my blog posts are automatically announced there. I have it set to announce Erin’s blog posts to my Twitter account as well. If I get a quick thought I want to share, it takes 30-60 seconds to post it on Twitter.

I use Twitter mainly as a broadcast medium. I don’t reply to all the questions and comments people send me there — that wouldn’t be a good use of my time. As with Facebook, a few people get upset when I don’t reply to them. I do reply to some people there, but replying to everyone who contacts me there is totally unrealistic.

People often send me cool links via Twitter, and I’ll occasionally re-tweet them or share them in our forums. Earlier today I shared a link to a heart-warming Youtube video (16:23) that someone sent me via Twitter this morning. If I get too busy, I don’t even look at the links people send me. I can’t keep up with all the links people email me either. If you send me a link, the odds are less than 50-50 that I’ll even look at it.

Even on Twitter I get a lot of people asking me to help them with certain causes. I appreciate the seriousness of some of these requests, but it’s just too much for me to get involved with this sort of thing. I do what I can now and then, but I can’t get behind every cause that crosses my plate.

While I don’t do a lot of out-linking from my blog posts — I feel it would add way too much clutter to the archives if I did — I often share cool links via Twitter. Those links may not be seen by as many people, but I think it’s a good compromise. I prefer to use my blog for sharing original content. If I want to pass on a link or share something timely, Twitter works well for that.

One of my favorite things to do on Twitter is to share interesting, inspiring, and/or challenging quotes. Sometimes I’ll tweet a famous quote I come across. Other times I’ll post a sentence or two from my book or my blog that I think people will find stimulating. I get some cool feedback on these quotes, so I think people like them. Again, all of these tweets are automatically posted to my Facebook account too.

Online Socializing

The downside of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that it increased the flow of new connections coming into my life. At first this was great, but soon I started feeling over-socialized. I was forming more new connections than I could sustainably manage. Adding these new contacts is easy. Maintaining ongoing relationships with all of them is impossible.

In lieu of spending even more time answering emails and such, my most practical option was to raise my standards for the type of online socializing I would do. Otherwise I could spend all day on this stuff and never get any real work done.

Consequently, I’ve become much pickier about which connections and conversations I’ll get involved with personally vs. keeping my distance. This applies to my regular email as well as to forum discussions, Facebook feedback and emails, and Twitter responses.

This wasn’t easy to do. There were many people I felt deserved a response, so I constantly have to remind myself not to follow up on anything that doesn’t pass my pre-qual tests. I don’t always succeed, but I’m gradually getting better.

I admit I feel a bit guilty about all the stuff I have to let slide. But I can’t justify spending all day answering one-on-one feedback when I have more impactful things to do.

Even though I’ve added Twitter and Facebook to my life, I’m actually doing less online socializing than I used to. The reason is that the extra incoming communication made me more aware that it isn’t a good use of my time to over-socialize online. I quickly realized that in order to stay productive, I had to be more selective than ever.

Consequently, I’ve been letting some online-only friendships fall by the wayside if the compatibility connection just isn’t there. I’m letting a lot of emails go unanswered these days. In fact, many of them are now going unread. I used to read every email I received, but no longer. If people send me lengthy emails about their life stories and how my work has helped them, I used to love reading that stuff, but I can’t justify spending time on that anymore. It steals too much attention from other things. It’s unfortunate that some people will spend hours writing these long messages that will go unread. I’m grateful for the intent behind them, but I must be more careful in how I use my time. If I take the time to read those emails, I have to do less of something else.

Incidentally, if you’re considering sending me a long email in the near future, please don’t. I probably won’t have time to read it. I do appreciate the intent, however.

A big problem with online socializing is that it can become a crutch that crowds out face-to-face connections. I’d rather meet new people face-to-face as opposed to sitting in front of my computer typing emails. So I’m intentionally withdrawing from a lot of online socializing in order to free up more time for face-to-face interaction. I’m dropping the quantity, so I can raise the quality.

Ironically, the net benefit of adding Facebook and Twitter to my life is that they caused me to back off from online socializing and to become much more selective with socializing in general. The upside is that these services help me cast a wide net, so I have new potential connections coming into my life every day. Then I sift through the contents of that net with a pair of tweezers. I look for strong compatibilities, and when I find them, I follow up to see if there’s the potential for a deeper connection to be made. Sometimes this results in new friendships or business contacts, and other times it just fizzles.

Dealing with Rejection — When You’re the Rejecter

What I dislike most is that this approach requires me to “reject” more people than ever, usually by ignoring them or blowing them off. I still feel a bit guilty about this. But obviously this isn’t going away if I’m going to keep doing what I do. It will very likely continue to get worse.

Still, there’s an ongoing incongruity between my feelings and my reality that I haven’t yet resolved, and I dislike that very much. For years now I’ve been receiving more feedback than I can possibly respond to. And now I’ve ramped that up to an even greater level. Now I can’t even read it all. Logically I know that it’s unrealistic for me or anyone else to expect I can personally follow up with everyone who contacts me. So why do I still feel like everyone deserves a personal response? Why do I feel like I should do my best to maintain every online relationship I have, even though that’s totally impractical these days?

It feels rude to ignore people who take the time to keep in touch with me, especially those who genuinely want to connect or who offer encouragement and support. I think it’s very nice that such people take the time to email me. So how can I respond by ignoring them?

Something is messed up with my beliefs here. I’m looking at this situation from a disempowering perspective. I can see the truth logically, but I’m not feeling it emotionally. My heart just isn’t onboard with my brain’s solution. Some part of me is resisting the idea that possibly for the rest of my life, I’m always going to have to blow off people who reach out to connect with me. This includes saying no most of the time to people who ask for help (and need it).

When I switched to a 100% raw vegan diet this year, something strange happened to me energetically. There are lots of ways to describe it, but one way to explain it is that I used to have an imbalance where my power chakra was a lot more energetic than my heart and third-eye chakras. This year that imbalance has totally flip-flopped. In plain English, this means that my emotions and intuition keep bringing problems to my attention that at present, I lack the ability to solve in a way I feel good about. So I have a lot of motivation and drive to do certain things that I’m simply not able to do to my satisfaction. My solutions often make me feel worse than the problems they’re intended to solve.

This new imbalance has been causing me problems for several months now. On multiple occasions, I’ve acted on some of these heart-centered impulses, but the results weren’t so good. I’ve gone out of my way to help people in a few situations, but the results left me feeling empty and disappointed. This relates to some offline problems I’ve been tackling lately, i.e. stuff I’d never blog about due to the importance of protecting people’s privacy.

This Facebook/Twitter expansion seems like it might be another manifestation of this imbalance. Originally I felt motivated to join these services as a way to reach out and connect with more people. It certainly had that effect. But the side effect is that I now must reject more people than ever, which is the opposite of what I wanted. So yeah, you could say it’s a solution of a sort, but it’s not a solution that makes me feel totally good.

Ultimately in order to resolve these issues, I need to correct the energetic imbalances I’m experiencing. That may take some time though. It’s like whenever I take some kind of action now, I can feel the rippling consequences of it so deeply that I end up focusing too much on the negative side and not enough on the positive. It’s like my emotions and intuitive abilities have become over-energized and don’t know when to shut up.

On the many occasions when I have to blow people off, I wish they wouldn’t think their disappointment so loudly… cuz I can hear it, you know. It’s like constantly having one of those Obi Wan moments after Alderaan got Death Starred.

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.

This is a majorly long article. At about 8,600 words, I’m pretty sure this is the longest article I’ve ever written. It’s more like a free book chapter. The length is because my goal is to share one of the most comprehensive articles ever written on this topic. If you actually read the whole thing, you should gain many helpful insights from it. There are many subtle ideas here. If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to print it out for later. It goes good with peppermint tea.

Calibration for Long-term Success

When you begin any new activity or endeavor, initially you won’t be calibrated for success, so you’ll experience mostly failure. However, if you keep moving forward with a clear goal in mind, and if you progressively adjust your thinking and actions along the way, you’ll eventually calibrate yourself to get the results you want. This calibration only occurs from directly applying a skill under real-world conditions, not by reading about it.

When you’re in the pre-calibration period, achieving even a small degree of success in a new field requires a massive, all-out effort. Post-calibration, success is practically on auto-pilot; you can consistently achieve the results you want with minimal effort.

Calibration Examples

It’s easiest to understand calibration by way of example, so here are some detailed examples to consider:

Social Dynamics, Making Friends, and Dating

In the field of social dynamics, calibration is the process of learning how to meet new people, initiate conversations, keep conversations going, make new friends, get dates (second meetings), and basically achieve positive social interactions.

How you calibrate your social skills will depend on your personal goals for this area. A salesperson may focus on learning how to build rapport, generate interest, close sales, and construct a database of quality contacts. A professional speaker may learn how to get attention, arouse emotion, generate laughter, and inspire people to action. A pick-up artist may study how to initiate conversations, demonstrate value, build attraction, and achieve successful closes (a close could be getting a phone number, a date, or a sexual encounter).

In high school I was comfortable within certain social circles, but I was still more introverted than I wanted to be. So when I started at college, I decided to remake myself into a more extroverted person. I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just dove in and attempted to be as social as possible. I accepted any and all opportunities for social interaction. If anyone invited me to go out, I always said yes. I made a huge commitment to elevate this part of my life, and I stuck with it for my entire freshman year.

This strategy actually worked. I hadn’t read any books on social skills at the time, but I quickly calibrated my social skills via trial and error.

Within a few weeks, I’d made dozens of new friends, and I was going to parties every week. If I ever wanted to hang out and do something fun, I could always find someone willing. Not including sleep time, I’m sure I spent more time in other people’s dorm rooms than my own. I was always going out — for parties, poker games, volleyball, ping pong, or just for pizza. I created an absolutely amazing social life and packed more fun into each month than I used to enjoy in a year. I practically became like a different person.

What I found interesting was that in the beginning, it seemed like I was always the one to initiate new connections, but once I felt comfortable doing that, additional connections began flowing into my life almost effortlessly. During my first week at college, I noticed a party across the hall and asked if I could join in the fun (and got a quick yes). After that I was always getting invitations to parties and virtually never had to ask. During the first few months, I initiated a lot of social experiences (Wanna join me for dinner at the dining commons? Wanna grab a slice? Wanna get a poker game together?). But eventually I had so many invites coming to me passively that I didn’t have to initiate as much.

Looking back, I probably went way overboard. The good news was that I really took control of this area of my life. By throwing myself into it with a passion, I quickly became comfortable meeting new people, and I learned to make friends easily. The bad news was that I totally blew off my studies and was flunking out of school. In retrospect it wasn’t such a bad trade off though. I got expelled after my third semester, but the social calibration I gained during that time has served me well ever since. I went to a different school later and still earned my college degrees, but I think the social calibration has proven more valuable in the long run. I don’t feel intimidated in new social situations, and it’s normally easy for me to make new friends and connect with people. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a wife without even trying.

When Erin and I moved to Las Vegas in 2004, we didn’t know anyone in the city. We went from having a lot of friends in L.A. to having zero local friends in Vegas. It was just the two of us and our kids in a big city of strangers. But part of the reason I was happy to move to a new city was that I knew I could make new friends easily. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I had plenty of great local friends. The bigger challenge for me has been feeling over-socialized at times. There have been some weeks where I’d have preferred more alone time.

This social calibration has benefited me tremendously in business. I can go to a mixer or conference where I don’t know anyone, and I have an easy time making new friends and contacts. I remember when I first started attending the Game Developer’s Conference many years ago, most of the attendees seemed shy and socially awkward. They’d mostly keep to themselves or cling to their co-workers, especially at meal times. Meanwhile, I was going around making new friends, which just felt natural to me. Some of those chance encounters led to new opportunities and deals that helped grow my business. It was also nice to have more friends with similar interests.

One year at that conference, I hung out so late that the shuttles had stopped running. It was pouring rain outside, but a new friend offered me a ride back to my hotel. In fact, something similar happened at a different conference this year. It’s nice to know that my social calibration can keep me out of the rain when necessary.

To some people this may not sound like a big deal. Many people develop such skills in high school or younger. But for a shy kid like me who went to an all boys Catholic high school, it was indeed a big deal.

Although I use my social skills mainly to make friends and business contacts, you can use a similar process to develop dating and relationship skills. For example, if you want to go on more dates, you can calibrate your skills to get good at opening conversations with strangers, develop fun and interesting conversations, build attraction, and at least close with a phone number. There are lots of people teaching this stuff online now, with varying degrees of credibility (and sanity), but the most important thing is to just dive in and start experimenting. You’ll experience some rejection at first, but if you just keep learning and adapting, your skills will calibrate to the point where you’re able to get consistently good results.

If you happen to be suffering from loneliness, most likely it’s because you never took the time to adequately calibrate your social skills. Consequently, you may avoid making new friends because you don’t understand the social nuances of how to do it. You probably feel socially awkward and suffer from an amplified fear of rejection. The solution is to focus on a different goal first. You need to calibrate your social skills before you can apply them. Go out and socialize for the sake of learning how to socialize. Don’t worry about whether or not you make any new friends. Once your social skills are calibrated, which may take a few months, then you can focus on building the kinds of friendships you desire, and it will be much easier for you. Aim to get good first. Then aim to get results.

Martial Arts

If you study martial arts and begin learning to spar, you’re going to be pretty bad at it initially. You’ll have no sense of timing, and you won’t grasp the rhythm of a sparring match. You’ll probably bang knees with your opponent a lot. All the newbies do that.

For the most part, you can expect to look and feel like a total dork. The first time I sparred, which was more than 10 years ago, I was laughing during the match, mostly at how awkward I felt. I’m sure I looked like a total dork.

This is to be expected. You can try to play it cool, but the truth is that the first few times you attempt any new sport, you’re virtually guaranteed to look and feel like a dork. This is because your mind and body aren’t calibrated to that sport.

Within a few months of regular training, your sparring should be fairly well-calibrated for an intermediate level of skill. At the very least, you won’t embarrass yourself. You’ll have sparred many different opponents, and you’ll have a good sense of what to expect. You’ll be able to use different moves successfully, land punches and kicks, and pull off the occasional surprise. I remember how cool it was when I stripped an opponent’s helmet off with an axe kick during a sparring match.

While sparring at the beginner level feels awkward and intimidating, once you gain a little competence, it becomes a fun challenge. At this point the subtleties of the skill begin to reveal themselves. Once your basic sparring moves and tactics are calibrated, you can begin to calibrate your strategic decisions, and this is where the richness of sparring really opens up. The game becomes less physical and more mental. Some would even say it becomes spiritual at a certain point.

Calibrating to a particular sport is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. Even if you don’t train for a while, the mental calibration remains, and you can easily pick it up again later.

I trained for about three years in Tae Kwon Do in the late 90s with a mix of group classes and private lessons. Over time I got pretty good at sparring and really enjoyed it. I moved away from the studio and stopped training, but several years later, I started training in a different martial art, Kempo, starting as a white belt. Kempo is geared toward self-defense, while TKD is more sporty. Fortunately, all the moves that are legal in TKD are also legal in Kempo, and Kempo allows you to do some things that aren’t legal in TKD, such as punching to the face. (Protective gear is worn during sparring, but there’s still some risk. I suffered a bruised rib and a split lip on different occasions.)

Even though I’d lost most of my flexibility, the first time I sparred in Kempo, I did amazingly well, certainly far beyond the white belt level. From my first Kempo sparring class, I was able to hold my own against one of the black belts in the studio. I was sparring TKD-style, not Kempo-style, but that actually gave me an advantage because the other students weren’t calibrated to that style. TKD is mostly kicking, but Kempo uses more hand techniques. My preference for kicks surprised the other students because they would hover just outside of punching range, but they were still within my TKD-calibrated kicking range, so I hammered them with kicking combos until they figured out they needed to back up. This threw them off mentally, and it took months for many of them to adapt to my style. Of course, it also took me a while to get used to having punches thrown at my head.

After a year of training in Kempo, I was fairly well-calibrated to that style, but I had to unlearn some of my TKD habits that were ineffective in Kempo. I had to work on my speed, defensive maneuvers, and incorporating punches, strikes, and backfists into my sparring.

The point is that once you gain calibration at a particular skill set, you may very well lock in that skill for life. I feel as if basic competence in sparring is so ingrained in me that even if I didn’t spar again for 20 years, I’d be able to quickly pick it up again. I can actually feel that calibration in my body.

Blogging

Since blogging is still a fairly new medium, it usually takes new bloggers a while to properly calibrate. The failure rate is pretty high for newbies because most of them give up before they calibrate for success. I’d say you need to write at least 200-300 posts before you get a decent calibration going, and that assumes you’re making a solid commitment to getting better. For some people it will require more than 500 posts to achieve reasonable calibration, especially if they aren’t very good writers. There’s just a lot to learn.

In particular, there’s a huge gap between writing posts that people read and forget vs. writing posts that people will remember well enough that they’re still referring their friends, family members, and co-workers to read a year later. One of the key calibrations for long-term blogging success is to learn how to write the latter type of post; that’s how you get your archives working for you, and your traffic can still grow even when you aren’t posting anything.

For example, of the top 10 articles on my website that generate the most referrals, only one was written this year. Articles I wrote years ago continue to attract new readers today. However, it took me a long time to learn to write the kinds of articles that would produce such results. I’ve publicly shared how I do this, and that’s been helpful for some people, but it still takes time for new bloggers to “get it” to the point where they can apply it.

Not long ago I was at a party, chatting with a woman who got started blogging after attending a blogging workshop I did a couple years ago. She was telling me some of the mistakes she made with her blog during that time, all of which were mistakes I explicitly said to avoid during the workshop. For example, she wrote lots of timely content instead of timeless content, so she felt like she was on an endless treadmill, and her archives were largely worthless. She remembered that I said to avoid those mistakes too, but that wasn’t enough to stop her from making them. Despite having the opportunity to learn from my experience and avoid the pitfalls I described, she still had to go out and make those mistakes in order to refine her own calibration. I’ve seen countless bloggers make the same mistakes. They seek my advice, I tell them what to do and what not to do and why, and they do exactly what I tell them not to do and then wonder why it isn’t working. Oy vey! This is okay though, as long as they keep plugging ahead and learn from those mistakes. We human beings aren’t known to be the best listeners in the galaxy. We learn much better by doing something than by reading about it.

Different bloggers will naturally calibrate themselves toward different goals. For example, I wanted to calibrate my blogging skills to the goal of having a deep, long-term impact on my readers. I want to change people’s lives for the better. This is partly why I do things differently than most bloggers. I blow off many practices that other pro bloggers defend as sacred. My articles tend to be very long and detailed. I typically avoid posting shallow short info-crack pieces. I post less frequently, sometimes going a week or more with no fresh content. I largely ignore current events. I don’t often link to other blogs. This is all because I’m calibrating my skills toward a certain type of result. Those popular strategies just aren’t very helpful at achieving the results I desire, so I don’t use them. If you want this to become yet another info-crack blog, get used to disappointment. I want to change your life, not provide you with a five-minute distraction.

So be careful when taking advice from others. If you’re calibrating toward a different goal than they are, their advice may hurt you more than help you. It’s best to learn from people who’ve already achieved a similar calibration to what you want to achieve. For example, if you just want to make as much money as possible and don’t care how you get it, then you probably wouldn’t want to model my blogging methods because I’ve calibrated myself toward a different goal. But you might want to follow those bloggers who proudly proclaim they’re in it for the money — there are plenty to select from. On the other hand, if you believe you’re here for a reason and that blogging could potentially become a sustainable expression of your life purpose, then you’d probably benefit greatly by studying my style, since I’ve been getting positive results in this area for years. The point is that if you decide to model someone, be sure you’re modeling someone with compatible goals (and thus a compatible calibration).

One thing I’ve learned from 4+ years of blogging is that it really isn’t that hard in principle to become a successful blogger; however, it’s very hard in practice. Newbies’ minds are typically filled with many false notions. In some ways they need to unload more useless ideas than they need to absorb useful ideas. I’ve raped quite a few pro blogging sacred cows, yet my blog is still going strong.

There are a lot of blogging success factors that are somewhat counter-intuitive. You won’t realize this if you just read sites about blogging because they’ll rarely write about these factors. For the most part, it’s not that anyone is intentionally withholding information. The ideas are simply too subtle for most bloggers to be consciously aware of them. Many calibration issues are like this — they’re just too subtle to appear on any “top 10″ or “how to” lists. Sometimes people who succeed can’t document all the specific reasons they’ve succeeded. They can’t consciously unearth every detail of their unconscious calibration. There are some things I do as a successful blogger that I’ve never seen anyone write or speak about publicly, myself included. Some of the concepts are so subtle or intricate that even if I explained them in detail, nobody but other successful pro bloggers would even understand what I’m talking about, and some people would accuse me of lying.

Yesterday another blogger emailed me a link to a post he wrote, explaining why he personally dislikes my writing style. This is a blogger who says he gets significantly less traffic than I do. His main criticism is that I state my opinions too directly, as if they’re facts. This is a perfectly valid criticism of course; I confess to doing this liberally. The attitude of that blogger was that this is a personal defect I should correct. However, what he probably doesn’t realize is that this is a trait I developed over time as part of my calibration process for blogging success. I’m sure his advice is well-meaning, but I know that if I take his advice, my results will actually decline. I can say he’s wrong and that I’m right because I’ve learned which approach works best for me via trial and error. As a generalization, I know that making strong statements works better than making weak statements.

This is one of many subtle calibration refinements I learned from years of blogging. I discovered that prefacing every opinion with phrases like “I think…” or “I feel…” or “In my opinion…” leads to the creation of wimpy content. So this was actually a personal defect I learned to correct, and I intentionally make strong statements. My readers aren’t stupid. They know that since this is my website, such statements represent my thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. When I offer up my thoughts directly, as opposed to watering them down with qualifiers, people are challenged to agree or disagree with me. This helps people question their beliefs, strengthening some while weakening others. This is what I like to see.

Another benefit to making strong statements is that other bloggers, including the one critical of my posting style, will take the time to write posts just to disagree with me, thereby sending traffic to my website and actively helping me achieve my goals. Yet because their content is usually wimpier, they don’t benefit equally from this same mechanism. There are a lot of subtle interactions going on here, and I’m only offering a cursory overview here, but the net effect is that by posting strong statements, I enjoy more blogging success, but I also attract more criticism. However, the criticism actually benefits me. This is pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

Part of the reason I’ve been so successful as a blogger is that people remember what I’ve written, especially if they disagree with it. If you look at the comments written about my work throughout the blogosphere, you’ll find that most people have very polarized opinions about my work. Some people love my work. Some absolutely despise it. Very few are neutral. However, love it or hate it, these same people keep discussing my work, constantly spreading the word to those who don’t know about me. Such controversy makes people curious and brings new readers to my website every day. Isn’t this just insidious? The more people dislike me, the more they actively go out and market my work to others, and the more they help me achieve my goal of helping people grow. This is so effective that I can even tell such people how they’re helping me, and they’ll keep right on doing it.

I could certainly write more agreeable posts that few people would find objectionable. I could apologize for every opinion of mine that isn’t mainstream. But that’s totally the wrong calibration for my goals, not to mention for my personality. It’s way too cowardly. I don’t want to calibrate as a wimpy blogger that nobody can find fault with. It’s more effective to calibrate as a blogger who challenges people and makes a difference, even if it sends some people running the other way (to go out and promote my work instead of reading it themselves).

Uncalibrated newbie bloggers often blog scared. They try to please everyone and avoid taking risks. Consequently, they write posts that are easily forgotten and which will generate few referrals. Then some new upstart blogger comes along with a better calibration, breaks all the newbie rules, and surges ahead in traffic. And the other newbies think it’s luck. It’s not luck though. A good example is the blog Stuff White People Like. I first happened upon it shortly after it launched, and I knew it would become successful. I could see it had a great calibration for building traffic quickly — it was only a matter of time before it took off. The posts were politically incorrect to the max, but they were witty and memorable. Sure enough, that blog became a hit and even led to a book deal. If this sort of success surprises you as a blogger, it means your calibration is off. If your calibration is solid, you should be able to browse through the early posts on that blog and NOT be surprised by its success. Overall, if you’re often surprised by the success of others in your field, it means your calibration isn’t very good yet. As your own calibration matures, you’ll get better at being able to predict successes.

One of the keys to success in any field, especially blogging, is to accept that there are good reasons the successful people are succeeding, and it has nothing to do with luck. If you see someone who’s getting better results than you, even if it’s someone with less experience who started after you, chances are they have a more accurate calibration than you. You can rail against that, feel jealous, and call them names, but it’s better to take a step back, eat your humble pie, and learn from such people if you can. I’ve learned some pretty cool things from bloggers who started long after I did. Although my current calibration is obviously working, I know I can always improve, and I never want to think of myself as such as expert that I can’t keep learning and growing.

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

This isn’t unique to blogging either. Think of any successful media personality, and I’m sure you can find some rants about them with a quick online search. In fact, the biggest stars will have tons of rants. Consider Tom Cruise for instance.

Some people might assume this sort of controversy is a side-effect of success, like perhaps that celebrity got a big head after enjoying some success (causing people to turn against him/her), or maybe the rants appeared as a side effect of the celebrity’s popularity (like it’s just a numbers game). I’d say that’s the wrong way to look at this. It’s more likely that generating controversy was part of the celebrity’s early calibration process. If anything, the ability to handle controversy probably helped them become a celebrity in the first place.

Some of the first articles I ever wrote, even before I launched StevePavlina.com, generated controversy that helped turn them into fast hits. An example was the article Do It Now, which I wrote in 2000. Lots of people love that article, but some people find it disturbing and feel compelled to rant about it (even eight years after it was first posted online), perhaps because it makes them realize just how unproductive they are compared to what they could be achieving if they really made an all-out effort. Unfortunately, it took me years to figure out why that article became a hit and to learn how to reproduce the kind of impact it had. It also took me a long time to realize that the negative backlash generated by that article was actually helping me grow my readership… and that I should accept and embrace such critical feedback rather than worry about it. What I initially interpreted as negative feedback (i.e. I did something wrong) was actually positive feedback (I did something right). Interpreting emails from people saying “you are wrong” as evidence that you did something right is again pretty counterintuitive, isn’t it?

This is a key point of calibration. When you’re building a new skill, you have to look at the big picture in terms of the results you’re getting. You might do something that seems to generate immediate negative feedback from people, but when you step back and look at the big picture, you may see that the overall feedback is overwhelmingly positive. This happens a lot in blogging, where a reader may chew you out for something you wrote, and then six months later, they’re singing your praises for helping them achieve a breakthrough they never thought possible. And even if they aren’t singing your praises, they’re out there telling people why they hate you, thereby making people curious and sending you more traffic.

A similar effect also happens in social dynamics, where the “bad guys” can actually attract more success because they have so many detractors unwittingly doing their marketing for them.

Newbie Fear

Perhaps the toughest part of calibration is dealing with newbie fear. This is the fear of failure or rejection we experience when learning a new skill. Initially we suck, we know full well that we suck, and we really don’t want to deal with the embarrassment and humiliation of other people witnessing just how badly we suck. This is most distressing with skills that must be calibrated in public, such as dating skills and public speaking.

There are some ways to mitigate newbie fear. One of the best ways is to connect with other newbies and go through the initial training together. When you look up to experts who are already well-calibrated, it’s easy to become intimidated and psyche yourself out. You’ll tend to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard of performance. But if you befriend and hang out with other newbies, the learning process can be a lot more fun. It’s comforting to have buddies that suck just as badly as you do. You can blow off steam together, share your latest insights, and poke fun at each other as you learn. “Misery loves company” isn’t such a bad idea in this case.

The key is to associate with newbies who are committed to learning and growing. If you hang out with flakes, it probably won’t help you much. Try to identify other newbies that you predict are likely to stick with it and succeed, and hang out with them if you can. This will help increase your commitment without making you feel too intimidated.

When I first started learning about blogging, I enjoyed connecting with other newbie bloggers. In the old days (old as in four years ago), we swapped links with each other, shared advice, and found ways to help each other gain traffic. Many of those people gave up and quit of course, but a few are doing very well today. It’s cool to watch your newbie friends improve their calibration right along with you, even though everyone improves at different rates.

Ultimately, you’ll only get so much mileage out of trying to reduce newbie fear. The fastest way to overcome it is to simply charge straight at it. Just accept that you’ll suck, that some embarrassment will happen, and that the only way out is through. This is especially important for building good social skills.

You’ll only get so far by sitting at home reading, listening to audio programs, and watching videos. Such educational aids can help, but they can never substitute for real-world experience. Use them as supplemental materials to refine your in-field experimentation. If you want to become a successful blogger, start blogging immediately. If you want to build an online business, get some kind of website online right away. If you want to improve your social skills, go outside and meet people tonight. Yes, you’re going to suck at first. But if you push through the newbie fear and do it anyway, the fear will subside, and you’ll begin to calibrate your skills very quickly.

Even if you read all the books in your field, you will still suck on your first in-field experience. You won’t even be able to apply what’s in those books. So get out in the field and start calibrating.

Get that first crappy “Hello, World” blog post under your belt. Let out that inane “Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” pick-up line. Bang shins with your sparring partner as you scream, “Ouch!”

Newbie Pride

If you’re a newbie at something, and you’re feeling hesitant to go after some live in-field experience, realize that this is very normal. Many newbies resist being newbies, but this resistance only makes them more nervous. So realize that a big part of the problem is your own resistance to being a newbie. You’ll get into the field sooner if you can accept this phase of your learning curve.

My advice for turning this around is to fully embrace your newbieness. Don the badge of Newbie Pride. Instead of fearing that you’ll look like a total dork, take this the other way. Embrace and even exaggerate your dorkiness. Don’t try to resist it. Blow it up even larger.

In martial arts classes, there’s no hiding your newbie status. You wear a white belt, so everyone knows you’re a beginner. This actually makes it easier because you know people don’t expect much of you. The lower belts may be nervous about sparring, but since they know that nobody expects much of them, most are able to get out on the mat and spar without undue hesitation.

However, in other fields, people don’t wear white belts. This has positive and negative side-effects.

In online business, for example, many newbies try to hide their newbieness. I made this mistake when I started my first business. I pretended to be an experienced business person when I just started. I talked about my staff even when I was the only person in the business. That was totally unnecessary, not to mention really dumb. When I started blogging, however, I didn’t try to hide my newbieness. I embraced that dorky beginner phase and had fun with it. And because of that, more experienced bloggers reached out to help me. Back then, “more experienced” meant they started blogging a month before I did.

I still maintain this attitude today. If I’m new at something, I’ll openly share my newbie dorkiness and hesitation. It doesn’t embarrass me to share my weaknesses. On the contrary, it actually invites a lot of help and advice from non-newbies who want to help me calibrate.

The Master Newbie Pick-up Artist

Suppose you’re a guy who wants to learn how to pick up women at night clubs, but you’re terrified of going out, and you can’t imagine walking up to a woman and delivering an opener. Realize that so much of your resistance is because you’re trying to appear cooler and more experienced than you really are. Do you realize this is totally unnecessary? It’s better to embrace your newbieness and use it to your advantage.

If I were trying to develop this particular skill, here’s what I’d do. I’d go up to women and tell them the plain and simple truth. I’ve never actually done this, so take my advice with a grain of salt because this isn’t a calibration I’ve bothered to develop, but I’ll bet you it would work well at initiating fun conversations.

I’d walk up to a group of women with a big smile on my face. I’d get their attention and say to them, “Hey guys, I’m currently learning how to meet women at night clubs, but I’m a total newbie at this. Would you mind if I practice on you just for fun for a couple minutes? And would you give me some honest feedback afterwards?”

I suspect you’ll probably get a laugh if you do this, and if you don’t, then the women aren’t likely worth talking to anyway, so you can quickly disqualify them as boring or humorless. You’ve taken the pressure off by initiating a “practice session,” so it doesn’t even matter what you say next. Your next line could even be, “Okay what do you think of this? [Switch to deep voice] Hey, baby. What’s your sign?” That would probably get another laugh, but even a groan isn’t bad. You can keep saying other funny lines. You could also kick off a meta conversation about meeting women at night clubs, such as by asking a question like, “Okay, after I do the opener, what should I talk about next? Would this be a good time to tell you a quick story to demonstrate that I’m a cool guy? Should I tell you about the time I …?” The context is that you’re just practicing, but in truth you’ve already opened the group.

This is an untested suggestion of course, so you’ll have to try it yourself to see if it works for you. The general idea is not to hide your newbieness. It’s perfectly okay to be a newbie and even to admit it to people. When you’re a newbie, your initial goal is to calibrate your skills, not to achieve a particular result. So take the pressure off as to whether or not you succeed or fail. You can go for results after you’ve calibrated your skills.

If you pretend to be an expert when you’re not, you’ll just stress yourself out. Wear the badge of Newbie Pride.

Incidentally, if you actually try this, please let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear how people react to it. I think this could work for men and women alike.

In fact, if a woman came up and used this opener on me, I’d probably laugh and say, “Sure, let’s practice.” I’d be pretty impressed by a woman who used such a line because it demonstrates a high level of awareness with a certain playfulness. I’d probably fall in love on the spot.

Great… now I’ve gotten myself all riled up to the point where I totally want to go to a night club and try this for real just to see what happens.

The Skill of Calibration

Being able to calibrate yourself to a new skill set is a skill in itself. The more skills you learn, the faster you’ll be able to achieve competence in each new skill you attempt.

One thing that happens as you calibrate to many different skills is that you become more comfortable being a newbie in general. Once you’ve gone through the newbie phase enough times, it ceases to bother you so much. You can start from rock bottom in a new field and be mostly okay with how badly you suck. You get used to it, and you know you’ll eventually get better. This makes it easier to put in the time as a newbie, so you can quickly progress to intermediate. For me the newbie phase is often the most fun and exciting because I learn the fastest during this time.

Another benefit of having lots of calibration experience is that you’ll be less intimidated by the experts. You’ll accept that they fine-tuned their calibration over many years. This will help you develop the patience necessary to keep hacking away in order to build long-term competence.

When I became a raw foodist earlier this year, I spent a lot of time communicating with successful long-term raw foodists. Initially, the information I gained was just overwhelming. I was offered thousands of pages of text to read (books, e-books, articles), plus audio, video, and live lectures to attend. There were some weeks where learning this skill practically became my full-time job. I had to unlearn many bad habits that were holding me back, not to mention breaking a lifelong addiction to cooked food. This was a total lifestyle overhaul, not just a minor diet change.

After months of study and practice, I eventually calibrated myself to being a successful raw foodist, well enough that I felt I could maintain it on autopilot. I’d probably label myself an advanced intermediate at this point. I have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, cooked foods are no longer appealing to me, I feel fantastic, and I love the foods I eat. As part of this re-calibration to raw foods, my taste buds have shifted a lot. I actually crave fresh greens now. I feel mildly deprived if I don’t eat at least a pound of greens each day. Now that I’ve achieved a decent calibration, maintaining this lifestyle is pretty much a no-brainer for me. But during the first few months, I had to invest a lot of thought and effort into it.

Immersion and Experimentation

When learning new skills, my preference is to get through the newbie phase as quickly as possible, so I can start enjoying some good results. In order to accomplish this, I’ll often put other areas of my life on hold, so I can devote the bulk of my time to building competence in the new skill. I don’t always do this, but if the skill is important to me, I prefer the strategy of total immersion instead of working on it a little bit each week.

The danger of being stuck in beginner mode for too long is that your early motivation may fade, and more self-discipline will be required to keep going. Many new bloggers give up within the first few months, well before they’re getting any results. It takes them too long to calibrate their skills to what is required for success in blogging, so they never make it past the beginner phase. After a few months, they still haven’t calibrated, so they continue to make the sorts of mistakes that a well-calibrated blogger could spot within seconds. For example, they write boring posts that nobody cares to read, or they write time-bound posts that will be worthless a year later. It takes too much discipline for them to keep going with no results to show for it, so they give up. Then they repeat the same process again in a different field. Hopefully by now you can clearly see that this is a loser strategy.

On the other hand, I’ve seen bloggers who’ve built a lot of traffic very quickly, earning $1000+ per month within a few months after they started. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into learning everything they could about blogging, and they were willing to be open-minded and flexible. They learned what worked for them and did more of it. They learned what didn’t work and stopped doing it. They understood that if they wrote a blog post, and it generated no increase in traffic whatsoever, then perhaps they should write something totally different instead of sticking with more of the same.

Proper calibration requires a lot of experimentation. If you don’t get a good result, you can interpret that as a negative result, and change something — change anything. But don’t keep doing what didn’t work, expecting that it’s just a matter of time before things pick up. It’s not really a matter of time. It’s a matter of skill.

When you immerse yourself in learning a new skill, don’t focus on trying to get results with the skill — at least not right away. Instead, focus on getting good at the skill.

For example, if you’re learning to blog, focus on writing posts in a variety of styles. You want to calibrate yourself to get good at writing blog posts that generate referrals. Don’t worry about trying to make money with your blog. Don’t even worry about trying to build a certain level of traffic. You can focus on those goals later. But initially, aim to figure out how to semi-consistently write awesome posts that generate referrals. If you can’t figure out how to do that, your blog will surely fail. But if you can calibrate yourself to this skill, then you can shift from building your skill to applying your skill. That’s where you can start really building your traffic and generating income from your work.

A New Equilibrium – Post-Calibration

The funny thing about calibration is that once you reach a certain point, you’ll tend to let go of all the tricks, tactics, and techniques you learned along the way. Now you’re able to maintain a certain level of success just by being yourself.

This happens because the skills you learned have been internalized. You no longer have to think about the details because your subconscious mind takes care of them for you. Applying your skill becomes much easier when you reach this point.

Blogging is largely effortless for me these days. I can crank out a detailed new article with fairly little effort. I got the idea for this particular article while I was at the gym this morning. I outlined it in my head while I took a shower. Later I sat down to write, and the words just flowed. It took me a while to write an article of this length of course, but the process was easy and effortless. The reason it was easy is that I’ve already calibrated myself to the skill of writing articles. There are lots of details that go into writing an article of this length, but I don’t have to consciously think about the process of how to write. It’s all internalized. I can just sit down at my desk, the ideas start flowing, and my fingers automatically start typing. I can chunk the task of writing an article as a single to-do item, even an article of this length, and it isn’t a big deal to me.

When I write a new blog post, I don’t consciously think about all the details that other pro bloggers would tell you are important. I just blog. It feels like a very simple thing to do, not nearly as complicated as it might seem. However, the reason I can keep it simple and still do well in this field is because I went through that complicated newbie phase years ago. I internalized the techniques that proved effective for me, so today I don’t even think about them anymore.

Putting a skill on automatic pilot is the long-term benefit of good calibration. Once you gain this calibration, you can’t really lose it. You may need to re-calibrate your skills from time to time to adapt to changing conditions, but that usually isn’t as hard as acquiring the initial calibration.

If you took away my blog and all my articles, and I had to start over from scratch as an anonymous blogger today, do you think I could repeat my success? I’m sure I could do so very quickly because I’ve already calibrated my blogging skills. I typically experience quick success when I can rely on a previous calibration, such as learning to spar in a new martial art or building a social network of friends in a new city. One of the reasons I achieved quick success as a blogger was that I benefited from my previous calibration of running a profitable online business for years, so I was able to adapt much of that skill to the medium of blogging. I was also able to adapt my blogging calibration to writing a book.

When you calibrate, you lock in a new skill. Then you can use that skill to generate consistently good results. This is a wonderful place to be. Post-calibration, you’ll typically feel very confident within the realm of that skill. You have every reason to feel confident because you’re genuinely competent. I’d feel comfortable starting a new online business. I’d feel comfortable moving to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. I’d feel confident studying a new style of martial arts. I’d feel confident giving a new speech. However, the first time I did these things, I hadn’t yet calibrated myself for success. The only kind of confidence I was able to muster back then was the “fake it till you make it kind,” which is more false bravado than genuine confidence.

Calibrate Is a Verb

Don’t let the newbie phase get you down. Everyone has to go through it. Get a newbie training partner if you must, but turn toward that newbie fear, and run straight at it. The fear will soon go away. It’s not a big deal to fail or to get rejected. That’s part of being a newbie. Accept it. You will get better.

In order to calibrate your skills, you have to take action. You can’t just sit at home reading or studying training materials. You must go into the field and do field work under real-world conditions.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody’s got plans… until they get hit.”

I know so many people who’ve spent months reading about and talking about starting an online business. They still don’t have an online business. But they just keep talking about it and planning it, as if that’s some form of phantom progress. Their calibration is still at zero. They think they’re getting closer to their goal. From my perspective, they haven’t even started yet. They’re just procrastinating.

Such people would do much better if they stopped reading and planning and started doing. Nobody earned a black belt from reading about martial arts.

Which approach do you think will generate the best results? Reading about a diet for 30 days? Or doing a 30-day trial of that diet?

Which will improve your social skills the most? Watching social skills videos for 30 days? Or going out every night for 30 days and starting up conversations with strangers?

Which will generate the best blogging results? Reading blogs on blogging for 30 days? Or starting your own blog and posting your own blog entries for 30 days?

Which will generate the best physical results? Read about weight training for 30 days? Or hit the gym and do 30 days of weight training?

Reading and studying will give you knowledge and information that sits in your mind. That seems like a good thing, but you’ll still have zero results to show for your efforts. You’re actually no closer to your goals. You’re still at the starting line. But if you go out and do the best you can to apply what you know right now, even if your understanding is full of holes, you’ll quickly learn what works under real-world conditions, and you’ll adapt. You’ll make a huge leap forward in your calibration. You’ll also generate some real-world results that may benefit you.

Get your nose out of the books and onto the field. Take your licks as they come, and learn from them. Build your skills under real-world conditions, so you can actually apply them to get results. Don’t just read about life. Live it.

Reading and learning are awesome, but make sure you’re using these as supplements for in-field experience, not substitutes. If you’re reading about any skill you want to develop, but you aren’t regularly performing in the field yet, you’re just procrastinating. Deep down you already knew that, didn’t you? I’m here to remind you of this, so you can hate me for it and help spread the word about how awful I am.

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.

Twitter

My Twitter trial is going well. There are 600+ people following me on Twitter so far (my blog obviously bestows an advantage there). I’ve shared some links as well as various minor updates.

I’m grateful for the helpful advice from fellow Twitterers (Tweeters? Twits?). For example, one person told me about Twitterfeed, so I’m using that service as well. Now whenever I make a new blog post, it will automatically be Twittered (Tweeted? Twitterized?) to my Twitter account with a link to the post. Erin’s blog posts will show up there too (in my Twitter account since she doesn’t have one).

Apparently a good way to expandify your vocabulary is to use more online services.

TimeSvr

One service I mentioned in a Twitter update was TimeSvr.com. This is basically on online concierge service where you can assign basic tasks (like 20 minutes each) to a virtual assistant. During their current beta test period, you can try this service for free (no stated limit on how much work you can assign to them). I have no connection with them, so I gain nothing if you sign up. I’m just testing the service myself. I can’t give it a thumbs up or down yet, but it looks interesting so far.

PhotoReading discount expires July 31st

The 59% PhotoReading discount for StevePavlina.com readers expires July 31st, so if you want to take advantage of it, this is your last opportunity to do so. These offers have sometimes been extended for a few more weeks, but that isn’t happening this time. It’s only for July.

Los Angeles and Carlsbad trip

Erin and I will be in Los Angeles this weekend and then Carlsbad for most of next week. As Erin announced in her blog, she’ll be doing a limited number of in-person readings on this trip. If you live in the L.A. or Carlsbad areas (Southern California) and want to book an in-person reading with her during this time, please let her know right away. I think she only has a few spots left.

On this trip I’ll be visiting the headquarters of my book publisher, Hay House, since they’re located in Carlsbad. That wasn’t the main reason for this trip, but since our hotel is just down the street from them, it’s a nice opportunity to meet the people I’ve been working with. I’m especially looking forward to meeting my editor, Jessica Kelley, who did a fantastic job massaging Personal Development for Smart People into something we’re both proud of.

Erin’s intuitive readings

Ever since Erin and I recorded Podcast #21: Being Psychic, there’s been a significant increase in bookings for her readings. That podcast was never meant as a promotional piece — we simply talked about Erin’s experiences and offered tips for developing your own intuitive abilities. But now Erin is booking new phone appointments a month in advance, so her clients are having to wait longer than usual to get a reading.

We raised Erin’s prices on May 1st because she was starting to lose clients who didn’t want to wait so long for a reading. Now we’re back to that same situation. If this pattern continues, we’ll either have to raise her prices again or continue to maintain a longer wait time. I’m not sure what the best solution is. We’ve already raised her prices several times in the past two years. When she first started doing readings professionally in 2006, a 30-minute phone reading with her was $55. Today it’s $295 ($395 for 60 minutes).

Erin’s skills have increased a great deal since she started doing readings (she’s done more than 1100 so far). With the continued growth of her client base, she’s getting more repeat clients and more referrals too.

The higher we raise Erin’s prices, the more we price people out; a lot of people who’d love to get a reading with her simply can’t afford one. However, higher prices also reduces her wait time, so her clients don’t have to wait as long for an appointment. For many people (especially her repeat clients), the wait time is more important than the price.

I know that many people would see this as a good problem to have. Obviously it’s nice that Erin’s talents are in such high demand that she’s earning five figures a month from doing readings; this makes it easy for her to keep her website ad-free while continuing to post new articles in her blog. She took the risk of following her passion, and it’s clearly working out well. We just didn’t expect that she’d end up catering mainly to clients who are more time-sensitive than price-sensitive.

Erin regrets that many people can no longer afford a reading with her. That situation is unlikely to change though. If she were to offer free or discounted readings so more people could afford them, that would simply increase her wait time even more, which would be unfair to her existing clients. Given the pattern we’ve seen during the past two years, it’s likely her rates will climb even higher.

It’s amazing how far Erin has come in her personal growth. When we first met in 1994, she was working as a secretary for $9/hour. I’m glad she was able to recognize that typing 90 words per minute wasn’t her greatest strength and that there were better ways she could help people.

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.