And that belief is true. Except, it’s not true for most of the time. There comes a time when we go on a trip, a discovery of ourselves. We write for a completely different reason. Let’s have a look, shall we?

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Within that mix of greens is always a cabbage, and sometimes two. Her family is so sick of cabbage that she's more than happy to get rid of it. The next thing you know, that cabbage is on my doorstep.

The problem with cabbage is that you can only eat so much, unless you turn it into cutlets. You add chopped onions, carrots, chilies, assorted Indian spices, of course some salt, and then you get magic. I know it's magic because when I gave my neighbour those cabbage cutlets, she asked for the recipe.

As it turned out, the kids wolfed down a dozen cutlets in minutes. Her husband, who wanted to burn the cabbage, thought the cutlets were great. The family then set about making cutlets for their own consumption.

The words and ideas we combine can make us want to abandon the whole writing process. However, there's always a way to make your writing look wonderful. Essentially, you're taking the ordinary and adding a touch of elegance.

The core goal of writing is to corral our thoughts, to put it in put it in that little fence and close the door. It's to ensure that we discard the millions of ideas that don't matter. We need to get rid of the unnecessary details and the mind-numbingly long sentences.

We want to get a point across, and the sentence needs to lead to the next and the next and the next. But then, writing takes a turn. We don't just want to peddle information. We know AI can do it way better than we can. We start to realize that we are not writing.

Instead, we are selling an idea. We want people to change the way they think or do things. Now, that moment calls for more than a plain old cabbage AI. And that's because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to the other.

Bugger.

Yes, that's the progression of writing. It's a sales pitch no less. But done with so much finesse that the reader cracks a smile. They see the misdirection. They know they walked into something really cool. And like my neighbour, they want the recipe too.

You've been listening to Why We Write and this was part three, which was about elegance, and how elegance can make a reader want to come back over and over again. It's not about editing, it's not about tidying up your stuff and fixing your typos, but getting to a point of elegance, which takes time.

And this is not about practice, it's just doing something every day. Not writing an article every day, but writing every day. And that's when you get to elegance. But this also takes us to the fourth part, and that is why writing is a discovery of you.

A city is always surprising to its own citizens. You realize how little you know your city when someone visits. That visitor makes trips to different areas of the city, eats at different restaurants that you've never heard of, and they start to describe your city to you in a way that causes you to wonder if you're kind of stuck.

We rarely venture outside our daily routine, which is why it's so surprising when an outsider asks you questions that you can't easily answer. When someone asks you questions, you feel you should have the answer to them.

It's not like you're completely clueless, but there isn't a sense of clarity to your answers. It feels like you have to reorganize your thoughts, maybe do some more digging and exploring. But it's not enough to think, because thoughts are like fireflies.

So we have to write. Back in 2005, I decided to teach the skill of article writing. I already knew how to write articles, or so I thought. However, the moment you create a course, you realize that you have lots of gaps in your instruction.

You realize this because the questions come in a trickle, but often in a torrent. Many of these questions may seem mundane enough until you start to write out the answer. That's when you realize you need to do some research.

You're doing research on what you should already know. That's particularly true because writing exposes the holes in your knowledge. This means that you are answering the client's questions while fixing the fumbles in your understanding of the matter.

You should know this stuff. You should be able to express it, but you don't. And when clients ask these questions, you somehow have to put together an answer that makes sense. And this is what writing does. It's also the moment when something unexpected happens.

It's common to start writing an answer, and then land upon an entirely different issue that needs solving. For instance, I may start writing an article about how to create reverse testimonials. And then I discover something that I wasn't expecting.

While taking screenshots of the reverse testimonials on our site, I realized there were different aspects of the testimonials. Some were exceedingly long, and others were not more than a few rows long. Some stayed on topic and explained why the product suited them, while other testimonials spoke about their perceptions.

It had nothing to do with the product. As I dug, I started to find a whole new set of angles to reverse testimonials. And this is a discovery of me. This is a discovery of you. You have to ask yourself, who am I writing for? Myself or my client? The answer seems logical enough. You're writing for somebody else. But it's not that clear cut.

Sometimes we write for ourselves, like I will draw for myself. I have kept a daily visual diary of my life since 2012. I've done watercolors. I've taken photographs. And I've done these things purely for my benefit. And sometimes I've had a client's question, and I realize I don't have a neat enough explanation.

The most exciting moment is when you set out to answer a question, only to find yourself slightly lost. You don't know where you're going, but you know there is an endpoint to it. And then as you go down that road that you should know, but haven't gone down, you find a treasure trove of questions that no one has been asking.

This level of insight is your own. It's a discovery that you make in your own time. You're driven by your own intense curiosity. And if you're the kind of writer who wants to populate your website, then all of this is nonsense. You don't want to take this route.

You want to just jump on AI, slap in some prompts and get some answers, tweak it a bit, and there it's on your website. This level of digging means you have to consider a new set of questions, questions that haven't been asked before. Your work has increased many times over.

If all you want to do is write another article, why bother? People have many motivations to write. I write because I want to find an answer to a question that exists. I don't know that answer. I don't know that road in my own city. But that's what I want to do.

Most of us write at the beginning because we have a website to fill, and we have newsletters to send out, and we have things like that to do. We share mundane and everyday, and we've been told to do that. And yet, eventually you discover that writing is about you. Writing is when you discover what you know, but you don't know how to express it really well.

Or something that just jumps at you from absolutely nowhere, and you go, where did that come from? So writing is a discovery of you. And that brings us to the end of this podcast, but also to the end of this very small series, just two parts, not a series really.

Well, we have to compare it with thinking. And thinking is this swarm of bees that shows up but then takes off. And these ideas keep running through your brain. And like me, you probably take 15 years, or five years, or five days, but these ideas keep popping in and zooming out, and so you have to pin them down, and that's why we write.

And if you really want to improve your writing, then you're going to take some of the information, not all of it, and then relook at it, like we do with all our courses and some of our books. They're not just sitting there, as they were written 5 years ago, 10 years ago. They get rewritten, and it creates evolution and revolution.

But even if you were just to sit down and write every day, not write an article, you know how many times I'm saying this, not write an article, but write every day, then you will start to see evolution.

And at some point, it just takes off. I don't know that moment, but there is a moment, and it takes off, and you never look back. Then, you will start to do some other kind of writing, and you will struggle, like you have always done before, like we have always done before.

But that evolution and revolution happens. People who don't write well, who believe that other people are better writers than them, the reason for that is they stop, they pause, they write every now and then. That's not going to work for you. You want to create evolution, it's continuous.

And at some point in time, you realize that you're not just writing because you want to put words on paper. You're not doing what AI does. AI does an excellent job, but you're going for elegance. You're leading the reader one step ahead, and it's like a little mystery, a little dance.

You discover who you are, because as you go on that journey, you discover your own city, your own country, your own space, in a way that you've never thought of before. Someone else asks you a question, or you set out to look for something, and suddenly you start discovering yourself.

The post Why We Write — Part 2 appeared first on Psychotactics.

We feel like giving up, but there’s a reason why we write. Actually, many reasons.

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A bee swarm forms when a colony splits, and the queen leaves with thousands of worker bees to find a new home. The swarm temporarily stops somewhere, like on your car, to rest, while other scout bees search for a permanent resting site.

Your car just happens to be a convenient stopping point. Meanwhile, the scout bees continue their search. Once they've found a suitable location, the entire swarm disappears.

That's pretty much what happens to our article writing ideas as well. If you're the kind of person who is constantly curious, you're likely to have a lot of thoughts. The thoughts move along quickly only to be replaced by more thoughts.

And then those two are gone. And so we have to store those thoughts. We have to store those thoughts because we have to write them down. Writing, it seems, is more valuable than we thought. In this podcast, we'll look at four aspects of why we write.

In 2024, after 15 years, I finally published a book called Suddenly Talented. Why 15 years, you may ask? The short answer is I was thinking. Not just thinking, but also discussing. I had hundreds of discussions on talent. I told people why I didn't believe in talent, or rather why I didn't believe in inborn talent.

Occasionally, I'd even write a few articles on it. I even started a sub stack. But the book, that proved elusive. It wasn't because I wasn't able to write. While I was threatening to write the book, I wrote several other books. I even wrote a few courses.

The obstacle in my way wasn't the lack of content or ability. If anything, there was too much of this buzzing going around my head. The reason why we write is because writing is permanent.

You don't have to worry about the structure and you can even sidestep some of the logic. But when you write, it feels like every word counts.

You and I go back and forth and back and forth, writing, editing, deleting, editing, getting ourselves a coffee, some snacks, going back to writing, struggling through the whole process. And we do this because we know there is a sense of finality to what we're doing. Writing forces you to be detailed yet succinct.

There's none of that random chatter or obtuse behavior that we experience when we're speaking. We write because we want to think better.

It's the reason why writing is so uncomfortable. It's not because you can't write, but because it feels impossible to corral all of those swarms of thoughts and then put them down in a way that makes sense. And we're not talking about good writing or elegant writing, we're just talking about writing.

When I wrote Suddenly Talented, my days were so much longer. If you ask me to write a thousand word article, I'll usually get one out in about an hour. If I have to write 3,000 words, it might take me three to four hours.

It's just that there are more elements to juggle. And when it came to writing the book, there were a similar amount of words, but still it took me ages. It seemed to drain my energy and make me flee to the cafe instead.

Yes, there is. As you write, you get a better sense of what you're really saying. I will start writing a book or making a presentation, and it'll be day one, day two, day three. And when I get to day three, I realize that day three should be on day two, or some of the elements need to move to day one. And it's this constant reshuffling.

What's really happening is that you're getting a sense for what you want to say. And when it's in my head, I can't think like that. I can think of many elements, but not all of that clarity and sequence.

And that's what writing does for you. It forces you to put everything down on paper, because eventually you're not editing so much as moving things where they should be. Whether you're writing a booklet, a book, or just an article, you'll find that you're inundated with a pile of ideas.

They don't fit in that book. So they have to be pushed into new articles, new chapters, or even a new book. Nonetheless, there is a sigh of happiness. You've managed to put things down on paper, and you don't have to keep thinking, thinking, thinking endlessly, because it's finally done. It might not feel finished, but yet it is done.

Writing is a ruthless tyrant. It exposes your weakness and structure. It shows the frailty of your argument. But it forces you to express yourself better. If those were the only benefits of writing, it would still be a biggie. But there are only some of the reasons why we write.

The second reason is even cooler. It's about evolution and a touch of revolution. Let's move to the second part, where we look at how writing creates evolution, then revolution.

I don't know if you know it, but the brain audit has versions. There was version one, version two, version 3.2, and there is no version four. Why?

When I finished the third version, I'd covered what I wanted. The first version was more of a handout with fewer than 20 pages. The second was a lot better, but it needed work.

The third took months and was finally done. By then, I had been writing for almost a decade, so it was a finished product. Then a few years passed.

I expected to be proud of my writing, but I was cringing a bit. My niece covered a single paragraph, then another, and by this point, I was not feeling very happy, so I diverted her attention to another activity.

Even so, I was shaken by the fact that my well-written book needed a fair bit of tidying up. I don't know why I was surprised, because evolution is almost to be expected. If you write a lot, you are expected to get better, right?

Yes, you will, but evolution can be slow. For writing to get to a stage of revolution, you need almost constant feedback. At first, the input is soul-destroying.

Every part of your writing seems to come under fire, and it feels like you can't do anything correctly. When you get the feedback, you are almost surprised. You didn't want criticism, you wanted praise.

The first time I went to a watercolor class, I felt an intense need to be appreciated by the teacher. However, I realized that a single class, just one event, wouldn't have improved my work so much. So I went back a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, and I thought, surely I'm getting the praise that I deserve.

I really get upset with these situations, but I was doing my best. It was improvement. And yet, I was not getting any praise. After 10 weeks, the course ended, we had a small auction of our work. Friends and well-wishers were invited to the auction. My watercolor was priced at $20.

And you know how the auction goes, like who wants to buy this one? $5, $10, $20. But something improbable happened. The auctioneer decided that nobody was buying my stuff, so he was reducing the price. So it went down from $20 to $10, $10 to $15, $15 to $5. And there were still no takers.

If she bought it, surely it was going to be an exercise in pity. Eventually, the auctioneer gave up. And me, I had my feedback in real time. My work was worth nothing. At that point, you and I are supposed to give up.

We're supposed to believe that we're not talented, and we'll never be good at that skill. I took it as feedback. I decided to get better. I went back to the teacher, the guy who kept telling me that I needed to improve. I asked the teacher, how can I improve? And he said, paint something daily.

He suggested that I keep a visual diary. In a way, he was suggesting evolution, step by step, day by day. Writing is a day by day exercise too. Like any other skill, it needs critical appraisal.

A good way to get this feedback is to ask someone to read your headline, your first paragraph, the connections between the story, and even to see if your objections are good enough, but not to read the entire article. This is the problem that people make.

No, you have to write every day. Just a little bit maybe, maybe an article, but mostly you have to write every day. And it's the same thing when you're getting the feedback. You can't go to somebody and say read my article. No, they have a life, they have problems, they have other things that they need to do.

They're not sitting there waiting to read your article. But if you say, can you read my headline? Sure, they can read your headline. Can you look at this objection and see if it makes sense? And yeah, they can do that. And sadly or happily, AI can do that as well.

But even if you're dealing with the sterile nature of AI, you want to ask for tiny bits of help, not the whole article, but just the objection, just the headline, because when someone, whether real or mechanical, suggests that the entire piece has gone haywire, it might feel soul destroying.

But when you ask for a specific piece of feedback, you can tweak just that one point, that one part. And this helps you even when you don't have someone to give you feedback. So just say you're working by yourself.

If you need to improve your headlines, you can start looking for headlines that seem to get your attention. And if you look long enough, you will start to recognize a pattern.

It's a longer process. It's more frustrating, but it is possible to give yourself feedback. There is a point in evolution where something seems to change. Something speeds up crazily. It's called a point of revolution. In some cases, we can predict when this will happen.

In languages like French, for example, once you pass through about 100,000 repetitions, that's 100,000 rep mark, you will have enough vocabulary and grammar to get a decent conversation going. With writing, just having a good subtopic and a headline will give you a push into revolution land. I've seen this time and time again.

Somebody will write a topic, and then they will tweak that topic just a little bit. And suddenly, that article comes alive. They're excited to write that article. It's not a generic article that you find on the internet. Now, article writing or book writing has so many elements. And as you add one more bit to it and get better at it and faster at it, you're well on the road to revolution.

However, there's also the plateau. No matter how good you get, you will plateau. Everyone does, unless they ask for feedback. Then someone points out a tiny little bit, something you've missed. That's when your writing perks up again. I wrote The Brain Audit in 2009 and Suddenly Talented in 2024.

It looks like an easy answer, but it's not. If I hadn't asked for feedback, my writing would have still improved, but it would have done so in tiny increments. In order to get exponentially better, I had to get input from many sources. You will want your writing to be evolutionary, but also revolutionary. Well, you know what you have to do.

You have to get feedback. Tiny portions of feedback, very tiny portions, and it will help you on your way. And with that, we come to the end of this podcast. There are two more parts.

The first part was thinking versus writing. A lot of us think and think and think and think and think and think and think. And thinking doesn't get you anywhere. Thinking confuses you. Thinking leads you into any direction possible. But when it's written down, you have to go ahead with something. You have to tidy it up.

You have to reformulate it. You have to shuffle it. Shuffling is a big deal. Just moving things from day one to day two or day three to day two, that's a lot of work. But it's also a sense of organization. Your thoughts are much better, clearer.

And evolution is really painful. It's slow. It's frustrating. It seems like you're not going anywhere. And you aren't. For a very long time, it seems like you're just standing still.

But if you ask for feedback, and you ask for specific pieces of feedback, rather than read my article, you will find that you're improving and you're reaching a point of revolution.  So that's what we covered on today's podcast.

Well, the one thing that you should do is to stop thinking. There are lots of thinkers out there. They're all in this loop. They're never getting out of that loop. Stop thinking. Start writing. It's going to be bad. Get used to it. Ten years later, you'll still think it's bad. You'll still get used to it. Twenty years later, well, you know the story.

The post Why We Write (And The Difference Between Thinking Vs Writing) appeared first on Psychotactics.

And in those 25 years I’ve learned some things that you may not always find on a writing site, or even in any writing article. Read this article and you’ll suddenly have a completely different view of how to go about writing your article.

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It was our first trip to the U.S., and my sister-in-law suggested we grab some takeaway from the local Chinese place. Nothing fancy—just a casual dinner. But when I entered the restaurant, something unexpected caught my attention.

There, behind the counter, was this neatly arranged array of boxes. Each one filled with chopped vegetables, mushrooms, sauces, spices—everything prepped and ready to go. It wasn’t chaos; it was calm. Everything had its place.

Now, I know this kind of setup is common. Chinese restaurants all over the world use it. But at the time, I’d never seen anything like it. And that’s when it hit me:

But here’s the twist. To me, it didn’t look like preparation. It looked like unfinished work. Unfinished work? That's an odd way to look at all of those well-chopped ingredients, but it was this weird concept of “unfinished work” that got my attention.

Today’s podcast is about that idea—about how so much of what we call creativity actually happens before we create anything. We’re going to look at writing, but in a slightly different way.

I’ll walk you through some of the techniques I’ve used over the last 25 years to write consistently, without running out of ideas and (for the most part) without hitting writer’s block.

I didn't say procrastination. I just said: leave it a bit unfinished. Let's say I start writing this article. I will write for a while, until I've got about ⅔ or even 4/5 of it done, and then I will take a break. I might go for a walk, grab a coffee, or even stop working for the day.

However, that system of getting the task done ends the momentum. Once I'm done, I'm done. However, this creates a problem for the next time I sit down to write.

It means I have to start from zero. If, on the other hand, I do most of the work and leave it unfinished, I have the wind behind my back. I can keep going and don't have to start with a blank page.

There's even a term for it. It's called the Zeigarnik Effect. This suggests that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.

This mental “incompleteness” keeps the task looping in your subconscious, often pushing you to return to it or solve it later, sometimes with surprising clarity.

In reality, I could have finished the article, but chose not to do so. And because my brain continues to chug away in the background, it also seems to come up with the next step. In my case, that could be the following article or the next chapter if I'm writing a book.

My goal is to get going; otherwise, my brain will drive me mad. I'll be eating and thinking about the article I have still to write. I'll be walking, talking, doing other projects, and the thought of having to get the article done will continue to bug me.

It also drains my energy with a task that's not even begun. By choosing to write most of the article and leave just a tiny bit, we're still using the brain in the background, but now it's helping me move ahead.

I'd say don't finish what you're writing. Take a walk and talk about whatever you're writing about to someone else. The benefits of putting the last bit off definitely outweigh the benefits of finishing it all in one go.

You know how the purple car concept works, don't you? You've seen red, white, green, orange, and even a polka dot car, but not purple. By some happy coincidence, you see a purple car—or at least something hideously mauve.

You may have already put in some cool case studies, maybe a few examples in the article. You walk out into the street, snap on your headphones, and the first line that comes out of the podcaster's mouth is a story that you wouldn't have dreamed up in a thousand years.

People often come up to me and say, “I can't draw, I can't dance.” They may even say rather silly things like, “I don't have the ‘genes' to do this or that.” There are hundreds and possibly thousands of examples of people who have achieved skills, but those examples don't help make the point.

I listen to all sorts of. podcasts and this one was about something that I have zero interest in. It was about Celebrity Masterchef, but I listened to it anyway. Remember what I set out to do?

I wanted a good example of someone pretty hopeless at a skill. Well, I got that and a lot more. Let me share this excerpt from the book.

An answer appears on Celebrity Masterchef as we zoom in on the conversation between the judges and contestant Amar Latif. Serving sea bass on a vermicelli rice noodle salad flavoured with teriyaki sauce, he appears like any other aspiring chef.

“In your noodles, the ginger, garlic, onions, and coriander are fabulous with the fish. But your noodles are also fabulous because there’s sweet teriyaki sauce running through it,” says judge Greg Wallace.

“I think this is great. The fish is cooked beautifully. The skin is crispy. The big pieces of green chilli across the top are a little too big. However, the rest of it, I think, is fantastic,” chimes in John Torode, the second judge in the competition. It sounds like everyday TV until you realise that Amir Latif is blind.

The guy on Celebrity Masterchef isn't just hopeless at cooking. He's also blind. I couldn't believe my ears. Before you think I'm putting down blind people, I'm not. My father ran a secretarial college, and the people who got 100% of their typing right every time were those with limited or no sight.

Hence, my admiration for someone overcoming an issue is extremely high. Let's not veer away from the point, though. The point was that I merely wanted an example of someone who considered themselves hopeless.

Yet, I got that this individual was not only terrible at cooking but also blind and had to learn how to cook with his mother over video chats. Then, he goes on to win Celebrity MasterChef.

You will find, as I have, that walking away and. listening to something else isn't a guaranteed jackpot. However, more often than not, you will find the odds are in your favour. Also, it's good to chat with someone about what you're writing.

He doesn't tell others that he's written the story. He just tells them the story and waits for a reaction. Here he is on Masterclass.com in his own words:

Write the thing you're gonna write as best you can. Read it aloud to yourself, edit it, and get to the point where you feel it's kind of polished. It's a story of some sort.

And then try it out at a dinner party. Don't tell people that you've written it. Or on a walk with people. Just start to tell a story. As if it's just, oh, a story you know.

Make sure that you're writing it and see if you can keep their attention. And I try out material like this all the time. I'll try it with a group of friends, they have no idea I'm working on subject X.

I say, “I just heard this story” and I start talking. And I can tell by their response if it's working or not, whether they're bored or interested.

The problem with writing is that you don't see reactions from your audience. Only in very rare instances do you see someone reading your book and responding to your book.

But playing it for an audience without them knowing that's what you're doing, all of a sudden you see stuff in the material. You see, and beyond where interest flags.

You see, oh, I could have told it better if I'd not given that away up front kind of thing. It's, a live audience and it is extremely helpful. Especially when they don't know that's how you're using them.

I don't have to be, there's no rule I have to pretend to use. The strength of oral storytelling, of reading your own work or telling someone the story without, just to see how they respond. You purge your work of pretension, of idiocy that you don't spot until you say it and someone who hears it reacts to it,

It's an antidote to the, sort of like the risks of writing, the creative risks of writing. You're isolated, you're not able to speak. The creative risks of writing is you're isolated and you're in your little bubble and you don't know what you don't know. Talking to others opens up the printed work.”

The first point is simply to listen or read something else in between. You know that research that you're always looking for? Ideally, you need to find the research before you write.

However, there's nothing to stop you from adding a story or example after you're almost done. If anything, you're more sure of what you're writing and the example is likely to be both unusual as well incredibly precise.

I talk to Renuka about the articles I'm writing, but often it's just a discussion. She already knows I am going to turn everything into an article, but it's still a discussion. If you have someone, anyone, who you can present an idea to, it almost immediately improves your writing.

Yes, your writing. You're not at your desk. You're walking about or just at the cafe, but that's where the story; the article is starting to become a much better version of itself.

We looked at the first tip, which is never to finish your writing. The second was this trip you need to take and encounter other audio, video or text. Or wait, even a human being.

Finally, we look at the third tip: outlines matter. But bulleted outlines matter more.

When we started doing the storytelling course at Psychotactics, I noticed clients getting quite frustrated.

Storytelling isn't exactly easy, even if you were to boil it down to four main concepts. A client has to learn, and then implement the concepts. On top of it all, they have to make the story interesting and keep it down to a paragraph or two.

If you think all of these steps sound like a lot of trouble, it's mostly because of the lack of outlining. More so, because the outlines are not in bullet points.

However, you'll find to your amazement that bullet points give your thoughts a sense of order. You can type out a bullet point in a matter of minutes, skipping merrily to the next. While you're typing these points, you're not focused on editing your work.

You are almost always engaging with the backspace key on your keyboard, which is in almost direct contrast to when you type out bulleted outlines.

What's cool is that once you have bullets, you can easily move them around as needed. If you call yourself a perfectionist (well, almost everyone does), then you have the joy of being perfect in a fraction of the time.

Well, I don't look at a recipe when I cook Indian food, either. That's because I've done more or less the same thing for decades on end. Just putting your faith that you'll be like some famous author is misplaced trust.

It's possible to write without too much of an outline, but professionals always outline. A movie isn't likely to be made without a storyboard, and that chef at the restaurant is working to a plan. Outlining matters, but bulleted outlines rock.

Even one of them will make a world of difference, but all three are pure magic. Let's go over them again, shall we?

The first tip is never to finish your writing.

The second tip is to listen to or read something in between breaks in your writing. Or talk to someone.

Finally, bulleted outlines work—and you know the reason why.

P.S. That Michael Lewis story got added as I went about writing this article. I posted this article and then Cliff Spenger added more detail to the Zeigarnik effect. And I did write this article with at least three separate breaks. Plus, I have outlines in bullet points. Except there were four bullet points and I decided to expand just three.

The post 25 Years Of Writing: Simple Advice That Will Improve Your Articles appeared first on Psychotactics.

However, there’s zero fun in using a tired analogy. How can you take this rather overused analogy and turn it into something with oomph? Let’s find out.

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It's because someone added 53 pieces from an entirely different jigsaw puzzle, and now all the pieces are in the same box. What seemed like a challenge with a thousand pieces is now a bit of a nightmare because you have to separate the pieces that don't belong to this particular puzzle.

We took the puzzle analogy and then added some low-level complexity to it. Instead of a thousand-piece puzzle, we had some unwanted pieces. And suddenly, you have this level of built-in curiosity, but it also takes that concept of a puzzle/challenge and ramps it up considerably.

With this tiny tweak, we have taken what seems to be a tedious and overused analogy and given it a new lease on life. All analogies don't necessarily need to be fresh and can stay boring at the start.

A staircase might represent steady progress upwards. However, your analogy could easily be transformed into something less mundane.

Here we go:

This particular kind of staircase was steep at an angle of about 45 to 60 degrees. Then, to make matters worse, the stairs were of uneven sizes, some big and some small, and instead of going straight up, they moved around in circles.

We've taken a relatively dull and overused analogy of the staircase, and we have given it some oomph. But you also have to be careful that you don't overdo it.

With the staircase example, we started at one that was about 45 to 60 degrees. Then we added uneven sizes, some big and some small. And then we said that the stairs were going around in circles instead of straight up.

You've given the reader or the listener three separate things to think of. They're running it in the head, you know. They have to imagine every little bit of it. If you're going to add something, add a few details, but don't overdo it.

Here's an example from the book Suddenly Talented. This chapter describes how talent reduces errors.

Let's say you're entering your home in pitch darkness. You could find your way around without the lights, couldn't you?

Even in an emergency, you could move around at a brisk pace until someone moves all the furniture. Suddenly, it's a nuisance as you find yourself flung back into a chasm of errors, but only until you figure out the new layout.

In every situation, whether you're learning Photoshop or learning how to make a curry, we are a basket case of errors. Take away the errors, and what remains?

As we analyze that piece, we notice that there is not much that we have to figure out. It's not like the steps example, which has so many variations.

You have already walked around in the dark in your house and bumped into stuff. And it doesn't take much of a leap for you to realize that if someone moved all the furniture, you'd be in trouble.

In this episode, we ran through three separate examples. The first was the 1053-piece puzzle. The second was the stairs. And the third was finding your way around in the dark without hitting all the furniture.

Two out of three work because they are simple but have that little tweak that makes them fresh and gives them a little oomph. And just like that, you've taken your analogy to the next level.

The post The Power Of Analogies (Part 3) – How To Transform Analogies From Tired To Fresh appeared first on Psychotactics.

We sit down at a desk and wrack our brains trying to find an analogy that's just right. Instead, we end up with analogies that have been used repeatedly by other people. Or analogy doesn't seem fresh—and certainly not memorable.

Yet, there are dozens if not hundreds of analogies waiting for us round the corner. And by that I mean literally round the corner. It's a secret waiting for us in plain sight. Let's find out how to go about creating those analogies by the dozen!

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You know what I'm talking about. Like everyone else, you're stuck in traffic, but there's this one crazy guy. He moves from the left lane to the middle lane. Then, not much further down the road, he moves to the fast lane.

Suddenly, he's back, moving into the middle lane again. Back and forth, he tries to beat the traffic by moving from one lane to the other but not getting very far ahead.

Probably not a lot. Even if you've not experienced an identical situation, you would not have had any problem with the above example. However, you might have noticed how that paragraph's description ended. You felt that the crazy driver was “not getting ahead.”

In other words, his random actions were largely pointless. Here's my question: If you were to sit down and think of a ” pointless ” situation, would you think of a crazy guy in traffic? My guess is you wouldn't.

In the first stage of creating analogies, we came up with one idea or concept. Then, we would need to do nothing but watch the world around us. If you were like me, headed towards the city, you would've seen the crazy driver. Like magic, the “one idea or concept” would have connected with the driver.

The most interesting part about the situation is that it is entirely mundane. Almost a hundred per cent of that analogy is something we can relate to as a pretty everyday event.

The problem is that we look for the analogy when writing or creating something. And when we do so, we also create very repetitive situations. We have an analogy that's almost exactly like everybody else's.

What would you think of when asked to think of distraction?

Most people might immediately move to something like a shiny object, a magpie, or a cat with a laser pointer. We tend to resort to the very same examples over and over again. At one point, one of these examples might have been very interesting to the reader, but they have been used so many times that they are ready for the recycle bin.

All we need are everyday situations that have the capacity to take the reader by surprise. The way I create analogies is to think of what I want to say and then do no writing at all. My next step is to observe the world around me.

I recently stopped having coffee for a while. The problem is that I find most teas extremely tedious. When the waitress suggested I have “hibiscus tea”, I did so because I had few choices. However, as I drank the tea, I found it to bedelightful. It was sharp and tangy from the first sip to the very last drop.

I had a bright idea. If the “tea” was like most teas I have been drinking, I could easily get a second or even a third round. To my absolute amazement, when I added hot water, the “hibiscus tea” was tasteless. It had gone from 100% strength to zero.

Yet, it very cleverly describes the concept of going from full strength to a level of limpness. If I were writing an article that involved “100% to zero”, the hibiscus tea episode is not only a great match but utterly fresh as an analogy.

I have three avocados sitting on my kitchen benchtop. All of them are green. This situation drives me crazy. All the avocados will turn black and ready to eat, or they will all stay persistently green. There is no way to speed up the process; for the most part, I just have to be patient.

Notice once again how you would not connect avocados with patience. If you sat down to write something, you would consider almost everything under the sun, but not avocados.

And that is because we are trying to “write an analogy”. Instead, we should go through life with an idea and then watch something unfold. After that, it is just a matter of connecting that crazy driver/hibiscus tea/ripening of overly green avocados to your article.

Is turmeric powder good for you?

Curcumin is the main active compound in turmeric, responsible for its vibrant yellow colour and many of its health benefits. It is a powerful antioxidant with anti-inflammatory properties, believed to contribute to various medicinal effects.

But you can drink turmeric powder all day long and get zero benefits. That's because curcumin has low bioavailability, as the body doesn't absorb it easily. To increase absorption, it's often combined with piperine (found in black pepper) or taken with fat, as it's fat-soluble.

Let's say I have been thinking about writing an article about strategic alliances. Well, isn't pepper a “strategic alliance” for curcumin? Curcumin has other “strategic alliances” such as ghee, olive/coconut oil, avocado or even full-fat dairy.

It's unlikely that you would be thinking about turmeric in combination with strategic alliances. Yet, if you have your idea and have worked backwards, it's just a matter of paying attention to what's happening around you.

You can surprise people around you by bringing up these completely disconnected analogies with the subject matter. Meanwhile, everybody else is bringing up the same old tired “shiny object” analogies.

Do we need to take it to another level? No, we don't, but we have the opportunity to do so if we want to.

Let's find out how as we move to stage three – The Power Of Analogies (Part 3) – How To Transform Analogies From Tired To Fresh

The post The Power Of Analogies (Part 2)- How To Use Everyday Life To Create Stunning Analogies appeared first on Psychotactics.

However, most of the analogies that we seem to come up with are “boring and tired”. The reason why we struggle so much is because we're going about it the wrong way. And analogies – in general – should be written backwards.

How do you write an analogy going backwards? That's what we'll find out in this article.

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That’s the question the audience had to consider when I made a presentation for The Brain Audit. I said: “I’m going to sit on the chair and get up. Then I’m going to sit on the chair again and get up. Finally, I will sit on the chair and get up again.”

The repetition of this mundane action creates a level of curiosity, but let’s set that aside for a moment because we’re here to understand how to create an analogy. When you want to create an analogy, your first step should always be to understand the concept you’re explaining.

When I tried to explain *The Brain Audit*, I wanted to get people to think about a system that works consistently.

Which is why the presentation continued like this: “I’m going to sit on the chair and get up. I’m going to sit on the chair again and get up. And finally, I will sit on the chair and stand up. So, who among you thought the chair would break?”

“The chair doesn’t break because it’s built on science and structure. That is why we never check a chair before sitting on it. Regardless of how much we weigh, we trust it will hold us. Structure is what helps you improve your business and marketing, but most of us lack that structure, which is why we struggle so much.”

The idea is evident from the start: it’s about using structure. A simple chair can become a dramatic analogy. The act of sitting down and standing up is nothing special, yet it grabs the audience’s attention and adds power to the message.

When creating an analogy, it’s easy to think you need to come up with some clever concept. Instead, you need to work backwards. Ask yourself, “What is really happening?” and “How can I reduce what I’m saying to a single word or a few words?”

The bikini is a tiny garment, yet what it holds back is the key. This principle works on the idea that by giving away 90% of the concept and keeping 10%, the attraction factor remains just as strong—if not stronger. The part that isn’t revealed is the most attractive of all.

Again, the focus is on the concept itself, not the analogy. What are you trying to convey? How can you reduce it into a single idea? Once you have the idea, you can build outwards and find simple, effective analogies.

The painter completes the first coat of paint, then applies a second coat, and finally, the final one. Notice how this analogy might seem tedious, but it’s not because the goal isn’t to find the analogy. Instead, we need to work backwards.

Let’s assume that the idea you wanted to convey was one of “drafts”. That when you create a first draft, it’s shoddy, despite doing your best.

Then, you work on a second draft, and things look better. And blah, blah, blah, third draft, and you’ve got a polished finish. The painter analogy isn’t terribly exciting, but if you work backwards, it becomes incredibly memorable.

What do you want to say? That’s the first and most important part of a memorable analogy. Let’s move to the second point, where we look at why we need to avoid the” exciting” analogy and stick with the boring and mundane.

But there is a twist, you have to make a boring and the mundane disconnected from whatever it is you're talking about. What does this mean?

Let's find out – The Power Of Analogies (Part 2)- How To Use Everyday Life To Create Stunning Analogies

The post The Power Of Analogies (Part 1) – Working Backwards appeared first on Psychotactics.

In fact, you may need at least a dozen. The problem with metaphors is that they're usually very predictable.

How do you take a “boring method” and make a metaphor quite exciting?

Let's find out.

Usually, it's an everyday event—with a slight twist. This twist is usually a surprise. The surprise can be a u-turn, a new fact, or something you're not expecting. At other times, it's something you're expecting, but feels new in the context.

E.g. Imagine a 1000 piece puzzle. To take on the 1000 piece puzzle, you need to know what it looks like in a completed form. Then, slowly, and systematically, you are able to put the pieces together. Even with the completed version, it's a difficult process working out what goes where.

Now imagine a 1000 piece puzzle with just fifty extra pieces. Those pieces don't fit anywhere, but they're just enough to cause an enormous amount of chaos.

Life is like that thousand piece puzzle. You have a thousand things to do. However, every now and then another fift random pieces are added to your day, week or month. What seems complicated in the first place, has now turned quite chaotic.

This is what adults call “stress”: a situation that is challenging that goes completely haywire. However, what if we looked at stress a different way?

1- There's a boring story: solving a jigsaw puzzle.

Imagine you were on a weight-reduction diet that worked way beyond your wildest imagination.

You were told that with the diet, you'd lose about ½ a kilo per week. Instead, in the first week, you lose two kilos. As the weeks pass, it looks like this:

Week 1: 2 kilos down.

Would it make sense to lose another 8 kilos for the next month, followed by yet another 8? If you were to keep at that rate of weight loss, it would be considered problematic. To have “success” is a good thing, but at some point, that success turns toxic.

This is how a lot of entrepreneurs go about their life. They need a starting point of success. They also need a continuation of that success. However, what they're trained to adopt is a form of “toxic success”.

1- There's a boring story: losing weight.

When you get off on the other side, you're expecting the bags to show up. The first red bag rolls off and you take it off the conveyor belt. Then the second, the third and the fourth. There's a green bag, a polka dot bags, some cardboard boxes, and there it is: the fifth and sixth bag.

You leave when you have all seven red bags. If even one bag is missing, you are confused as to what action to take next. This kind of confusion is similar to what happens when clients are buying a product or service.

They have seven issues that need to be considered, and if you cover six and leave just one, the clients stop short. They're confused.

This is why you need to know exactly. what the bags are, so that instead of leaving your clients confused, they move to the next stage. Those seven red bags are what's described in the book called “The Brain Audit“. It's time to find out more about every one of those bags and avoid the confusion.

1- There's a boring story: bags coming off after a flight has landed.

What's unusual is the way the story is told, including the addition of the “polka dot bags, the cardboard boxes” etc. The story feels like a story. Then when the bag ends up missing, we don't dwell on the story. Instead, we jump to The Brain Audit and how a client is also confused when one bag is missing.

Imagine you walk into a room and there's a chair. You sit on it, you stand up. You sit down again, then you stand up. You sit on it a third time. Then you stand up.

The reason why chairs don't seem to break is because they're built with some sort of science in mind. Despite all of us being different weights, we don't test a chair before sit on it, because we know it will work as it should.

There's nothing wrong with testing the chair repeatedly, but the result is consistent. It stands up because there's a logic behind how it has been built.

That kind of logic also helps when you're creating a metaphor. You don't need to come up with metaphors and endlessly test them to see if they work. Instead, what you need is a system—a science—and you can create an almost endless number of metaphors whenever you choose to do so.

What did we see in the bonus example?

1- There's a story—an unremarkable story—of sitting on a chair.

P.S. Do you have a question on article writing? Email me, and I will reply.

The post Three “Slightly Boring” Ways To Create Metaphors For Your Articles appeared first on Psychotactics.

Yet we end up writing a really boring first line. What's worse is that you could use the power of story to create an intensely powerful first line in minutes.

Don't believe me? Well, do you have 10 minutes? Here are two methods to write the first line of your article.

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Deepak was extremely shy, and it was clear that girl had caught his attention. However, being rather timid, he couldn't think of how he'd approach the girl. I told him I'd have no problem walking up to her and striking up a conversation.

Deepak thought my idea was utterly hilarious. He knew I'd spent the entire first year in college talking to no girls at all—and that I was as shy as he was.

“There's no way you can speak to her,” he said to me. What Deepak didn't know was that I already knew the girl. She lived on the floor below my grandmother and I'd known her since we were toddlers. To walk up to Karen and say hello was going to be the easiest thing in the world.

I took up the challenge. I walked up to her and said “Hi Karen”. She turned around and gave me a big smile and we chatted away. Deepak standing quite a distance away, couldn't figure out what I'd said that would cause a pretty girl to be so chatty in seconds.

He desperately wanted to know what line I'd used to create such an impact. He was convinced my power lay in what I'd said in the first line. Of course, I'd pulled a fast one on my friend, but he was right in his assumption that first lines matter.

Whether you're making a presentation, a Zoom call, or writing an article, you can instantly get your reader to smile with a single line. As you'd expect, you're about to find out how to create a first line—and in a manner that's incredibly doable.

The role of the first line is to pull you in with a certain level of curiosity. And while the “first line” in an article can be daunting, you can do a little toe-dip whenever you feel comfortable.

1- Ask a question.

I was watching the British actress Emily Blunt talking about her stutter.

In all the movies, she delivers her lines flawlessly, and in this interview on YouTube, she was talking as “normally” as all of us. She went on to say that she not only stuttered, but it got worse over time.

While growing up in a posh suburb of London, Blunt developed a debilitating stutter and could barely hold a conversation, let alone elbow her way into the limelight.”

Blunt said in the article, “I was a smart kid and had a lot to say, but I just couldn’t say it. It would just haunt me. I never thought I’d be able to sit and talk to someone like I’m talking to you right now.”

“School was interesting because there were certain things I couldn’t do and wanted to, like read out my poem in class. I would never want to do that. I would hate it if the teacher called on me to answer something. I don’t know what it’s like for you, but I think when stutterers are put on the spot, that’s hard. I didn’t love calling my friends.

I could never say my own name if someone said, “What’s your name?” Because you can’t substitute a word out, which is what we tend to do to find a better flow. You substitute another word that’s easier, and you can’t substitute your name. So I realised quickly as a kid, any pressurised situations were quite hard for me.

“When I was 12, my class teacher was this really cool guy called Mr. McHale. He was this enormous man with a massive moustache. He asked me if I wanted to do the class play, and I said no.

And he said, “But I think you can do it. I’ve heard you doing silly voices and mimicking people. So, if you did it in a silly voice, would you consider doing it? Why don’t you do it in an accent?” And that was a very liberating thing for me as a kid. Suddenly, I had a fluency.

The removal of yourself from yourself, in some ways, was freeing. I agreed to it, and I did speak completely fluently. I did a really bad northern English accent, which I won’t even try and do for you now. That was the beginning of realising that I had a handle on it, and maybe it could be temporary, and maybe I could grow past this.

Later, she learned that actors such as Bruce Willis were stutterers. And even the very famous James Earl Jones!

There are two ways that we considered, and the first method is asking a question. Here we go with three separate questions based on the article.

If you picked three people who stutter, would it be Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt and James Earl Jones?

Do you think you could become a famous actress if you couldn’t even say your name without stuttering?

How does a teacher who knows nothing about stuttering help you overcome the problem?

Actress Emily Blunt didn’t phone her friends at all while growing up.

Imagine sitting in front of someone you like a lot, but you can’t say a thing.

James Earl Jones has a voice most people would kill for. As a child, he stuttered.

Who knows? But try the question, pick something that creates curiosity—and you should be well on your way. Or, to put it another way, you’ll no longer be stuttering with your first line.

Fluency awaits!

The post How To Create An Intensely Curious First Line For Your Article appeared first on Psychotactics.

Instead, what we often get is a round of introductions, blah, blah etc. All of which causes the audience to get restless.

How do you get the attention of the audience instantly? Better still, how do you do it with a story that has already gotten a great response?

Let's find out.

Someone introduces the topic, and then they talk about the other person, and then there's this blah blah blah and blah blah blah and more blah blah blah. If you're on a live call, you're thinking, get to the point.

The same kind of feeling seems to envelop us when we are sitting in the audience, and a speaker stands on stage and they start to talk about something, and it's clear that whatever they have to say is not enough to stop us from looking at our phones or being distracted.

And this happens because they are trying to start their speech, they're starting their Zoom call, and they don't have enough momentum. That starting point is awkward. The way to start something and get to the point is by not getting to the point at all.

Because when you tell a story, almost immediately, people stop whatever they're doing; they stop browsing the internet, they stop looking at their phones, and they look at you.

So how do we tell a story? How do we pick a story? Today we will look at how to get that attention by borrowing somebody else's story. You don't always have to have a story; you can borrow it.

And the three things that we're going to cover in this podcast are one, how to borrow a story; second, how to connect that to whatever it is you're talking about; and finally, how much borrowing you should do on a regular basis.

Here is how Hans Rosling, the late Swedish economist, started his speech. And he did it by telling a story. Let's listen to the story and see how we can use it.

I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the first time. That was a great day for my mother. My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine.

And the first day it would be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. And grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood and hand-washed laundry for seven children.

And now she was going to watch electricity do that work. My mother carefully opened the door and loaded the laundry into the machine like this.

And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, “No, no, no, no. Let me, let me push the button.” And Grandma pushed the button. And she said, “Oh, fantastic! I want to see this. Give me a chair, give me a chair. I want to see it.”

And she sat down in front of the machine and watched the entire washing program. She was mesmerised. To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle.

Now, that was a very well-crafted story by Hans Rosling. It has suspense, laughter, and everything you need. It's just sitting, waiting for you to use it in your speech. The question that arises is, can you use someone else's story?

Just as you've heard in this podcast how it is being used, you can use it too. So you are relating someone else's story, and that's perfectly okay. But why would you use their story in the first place? The reason why you'd pick a story like this is because it's already been tried, and it's tested.

You can hear the laughs; you know that it has all the elements within the story, and if you were to start a speech with “, Okay, let me introduce this topic of pricing”, or you would introduce it by saying something which was just blah, blah, blah, well, the audience is not likely to listen.

But if you said something like, “Let me tell you the story of Hans Rosling's grandma and the washing machine, ” you've got everyone's attention almost instantly. Just the word story, let me tell you a story, is enough for people to look up and pay attention to whatever you're saying.

As you are relating a story that was told by your brother-in-law or the plot line of a movie, you would tell those stories, but you don't know that those stories are going to get the same level of suspense, the same level of laughs, and here you know that it's already been proven.

All you have to do is make sure that you tell the story as closely as the original version. So if I were telling the story, I would tell you a story about Hans Rosling's grandma.

Hans grew up in Sweden, and his grandma washed clothes by heating firewood and washing the clothes for seven children. It was back-breaking work.

Therefore, the day that the washing machine came in the house, she was super excited. And then you go on to tell the story just like it was told, and you've got your audience's attention.

And if you're wondering where this is all leading, well, what we need when we start anything is to have something that has a lot of impacts. And stories always bring the audience to life. I know I'm being a bit repetitive here, but let me tell you a second story, or rather, let me relate a second story.

Well, this is her story. Gillian Lynne did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera”, and she's a hugely successful choreographer. When Gillian was at school, she was hopeless.

The school wrote to her parents and said that we think that Gillian has a learning disorder, and that's because she couldn't concentrate. She was always fidgeting. So, of course, they went to see a specialist.

The mother explained to the specialist how Gillian was having so much trouble at school, disturbing people, and her homework was always late. This went on for about 20 minutes.

Eventually, the specialist went up to Gillian and said I've listened to everything that your mother has said, and we just need to have a private conversation, and we will be back.”

But as they left the room, he turned on the radio that had been sitting on his desk, and then they looked from outside the room at what Jillian was doing within that space, and they found that she was dancing.

The specialist turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. She needs to be taken to a dance school.” And from there on, Gillian did ballet; she did jazz, she did contemporary; she graduated and then founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company.

She met Andrew Lloyd Webber, and she's been a very successful entrepreneur ever since. And just like that, we have two stories. We have the story of the washing machine, and then we have the story of Gillian Lynne and how her potential was discovered.

If you were to tell this story to multiple audiences on Zoom or on stage, or even the opening of an article, you are sure to get attention. The question is, what do you do next? So you have a great story.

How do you take that story and make sure it fits right in with whatever it is you're talking about? Let's find out in the second bit.

That was Hans Rosling's grandma, and it ended with “It was a miracle.” Now, if your story is about a miracle, that's easy. But what is a miracle really all about? A miracle is a before and after. It doesn't matter what story you're telling. Usually, there's going to be a before and after.

It is, I am not going to raise prices, and then I'm going to raise prices. So that's a before and after. I can't write an article, and now I can write an article. That's a before and after. So there are many scenarios where this story just fits in so easily.

Any before and after the story is a miracle, and that's where the story fits in. So you tell the story, and you go, “Well, that was a miracle.” And we, too, are looking for this kind of change, this kind of miracle, whenever we write an article, whenever we are trying to raise prices and not lose customers.

Because the story ends on the word miracle or before and after, you can continue with before and after. The last thought that you have in any story is what people remember.

That last line matters. And how you tweak that last line, that's how you can continue your speech, your article, whatever it is that you're doing.

Because even when we look at the second story, which was about Gillian Lynne, well, that ended with this potential that someone saw into that potential, but we could have ended it with it was a miracle that the mother happened to hit upon the right specialist.

So we have the concept of a miracle for the Hans Rosling story, and we have the miracle for the Gillian Lynn story. But if we ended the Gillian story with how the specialist saw potential, well, we could take that same concept of potential and put it for the washing machine story.

That last word that you choose, or mostly the last idea that you bring across, is what the audience is going to remember. They're going to remember that idea, and then you put the little bridge, whatever those words are, whatever that theme is, whatever that idea is, and then move to the next section.

You don't have to constantly think of new stories all the time because these stories already exist. You've told these stories before. It's not like this is something new. However, with TED.com and so many sites, you go there, you listen to the story, and then you move on.

Instead, what you should be doing is filing away these stories or bookmarking these stories so that you can go back, take the story, tell it as it is and then create that bridge.

So you've just heard a good story, and now you're wondering, can I use this? The answer is yes; of course, you can use it. But how often should you use it?

If you've been listening to this podcast and now we're over 500 episodes deep, all of the podcasts have one, two or three stories in them and all of them have come from somewhere.

Well, to be fair, some of the stories are my own, they're personal stories, but at least half of those stories have come from some other place.

When someone writes a book or gives a speech, they're usually talking about some case study that has existed sometime before, and somebody has already told that story, written it on some paper or written a book about it, and that's how we tell stories.

The difference between you just telling a story and getting a story from a speech is that you already know where the laughter is coming from. You know how to tell the story. You know how to pace the story.

That's not usually the case when you just pick a story from a book or when you pick a story from a report. And this is why listening to all of this video is so crucial because you then know how to pace that story and tell that story to great effect.

And with that, we come to the end of this podcast. In this podcast, we looked at three things. The first is how do you get that story. And often, it is there. It's on TED.com. It's on various speeches.

You have to listen to storytellers as they go through their speech and how they pace it and the cadence and all of that stuff.

And then you can practice that same story, tell that same story, and often get the same laughs or the same response when you're telling that story. So that's very crucial that you listen to, bookmark, and then go back and put that story into your speech whenever you're on Zoom, in front of an audience, or even in an article or a book.

The second thing is how you connect that story; what matters in that bridge is how you finish off that story. If you finish off with a miracle, then I'm expecting a miracle. I expect something to do with potential if you're talking about potential.

Whatever you finish with, that's what I remember as a reader, and I'm expecting you to continue with it. And finally, you can use as many of these stories as possible.

Still, it's very crucial if you're speaking, if you're on Zoom, if you're in front of an audience, that you pay attention to live speeches, live stories, simply because of, as I said before, the tone, the cadence, where to stop.

All of that matters because someone who has given a speech before knows where the audience will laugh or how they will react. And that's very crucial for you as well because that's what you can practice.

And it's time to find out the one thing you can do today. The one thing that you can do today is to look at one story or, instead, don't even look at one story.

One of these stories exists on TED.com; try to fit it into your own story. See how that works. And if you need some help, you can show up in 5000 BC on the forum, and I'll help you.

The post How To Always Have A Dramatic Opening Story For Your Zoom Call appeared first on Psychotactics.

Not everyone needs or wants a transcript, and it does cost a lot to produce transcripts for everything. In the past we've had AI driven transcripts, but they too have been untidy and it requires a lot of tidying up.

However, Chat GPT is different.

Learn how to use Chat GPT and YouTube to create a superb, accurate and very context-driven transcript for just about anything.

We had decided that we were only going to meet 15 people and right in the city, right in the heart of Frankfurt, at the Amaran Hotel, those 15 people showed up. And the reason why we have 15 people is because that gives us enough time to meet everyone and have a chat with everyone if possible. One of the people that showed up early was Marc. A lot of the products that we put out are in a text format. 

Some of it is like this in audio. And some portions are in video. Marc had been watching the video and he wanted the transcript and very few people require a transcript but Marc was one of them. He wrote to me, he asked me for it and you know it just got such a lot to have transcripts and so few people use them that we announced in advance that there will be no transcripts for videos or for very long workshops or audios. 

And it's a form of bureaucracy, but it's also a form of understanding where to allocate your resources in this case monetary resources. So we don't have those transcripts. But that didn't stop Marc. He told me quite excitedly that he'd found a service that transcribed videos and that his problem was solved and that I didn't have to bother about the transcription anymore.

At that moment in time, there were a lot of people and I didn't make a note of the service because I thought I'll just get to Mark later. But I didn't. We got on a plane to Vancouver, back to New Zealand and almost the month has passed and today I was listening to a podcast.

And I thought wow this is the perfect ending for a book that I'm writing which is on talent so I wanted to tell that story and put it at the end of the book but I would have to transcribe all of it and I was in Mark's shoes at this moment in time but the world has I've changed so much in the last few months that I thought, wait, maybe there is a solution. Maybe there is a solution that already exists. 

I looked for the story and sure enough, there it was. And as you probably know, YouTube transcribes everything. There's an auto transcript. If the speaker is clear enough and slowing off, then YouTube will transcribe it for you. And there are little buttons there which says show transcript and then if you look at the top on the right hand side there are three little dots and you can see the entire transcript and then copy the transcript. You have to select all of it and you copy the transcript. 

Now this is where the problem begins because that transcript is line by line by line and it could go on forever. you have to read it that way and it's not easily readable. When we write whatever we do, we use paragraphs because paragraphs are a form of, you know, this group of letters and words and then there is a space and then the next paragraph. This line by line by line, it just makes the eye have to jump so much. So it's really unreadable. Anyway, I had tools.

And if you take it into TextSoap and you just run into TextSoap, it'll put all the lines together, it'll tidy up everything. And it did. But there was another problem. When it did the transcription, All the eyes, as in I went to school, I did this and I did that. They were all the other glitches all in the text. So I took it to another stuff where it was where it was. And when I posted it in grammarly.com, it said there are no errors. Which was annoying because it hadn't fixed all of those quite obvious errors that were in the text. 

And I don't know why it was not doing it, but it wasn't. So I went to chat GPT and I said, “I've got a little problem for you. I've got this text. Can you clean it up for me?” And yeah, I posted it in chat GPT. Guess what happened? You know what happened, don't you? It tied it up everything.

And it even understood the context. In this story, this guy talks about a concept called “Tix” as in “TICS”, which are little annoyances. And when we had the transcript, the transcript that came from YouTube, the spelling of text was TICS. But chat GPT understood that there was a difference between TIX and TICS. It understood the context. 

And there you had it. You had the entire sequence. So let me Let me go over it again. I went to YouTube. I looked for a show transcript. When I clicked on that, what you get is copy transcript. You copy selected and you go right to the bottom. You then skip all the steps that I took and go straight to chat GPT and tell chat GPT to fix it.

Now there's a word limit on chat GPT, I think. And therefore I had to cut on half of it and then do the second half, but it did it in a couple of minutes. Now this is useful for many reasons. The first is it gets the spellings right. It gets the context right. But also what's happening is that if you've got a podcast and say you can't to do transcripts for all of it.

Maybe you don't write a script. Sometimes we write a script sometimes I just do it ad hoc like I'm doing right now. What I could do is in host it on YouTube, get the transcript and go through this whole chat GPT routine. And let's say you have a series of products like we did and we don't want the public to see it. 

Well, you can still post it on YouTube privately. And then when you done, what you've got is all of your transcript and you can get the video of YouTube and you're done. And that's kind of how this whole routine was very quick, very efficient and very contextual for me and I think it will be for you as well. We're all unsure where AI is going But in this case, it saved me a lot of time.

I had the resources, they didn't work, and AI fixed it for me. So there you go. Try it for yourself. I'm so glad that Marc brought it up and I know, even in this transcript, I will have to fix it because it'll go in spell Mark as MARK and it is MARC.

The post How I Used Chat GPT (And YouTube) To Create A Flawless Transcript appeared first on Psychotactics.