This article takes you on a surprising journey from airport walkways to creative entrepreneurs, revealing how a simple shift in perspective can unlock untapped markets and breathe new life into what you offer.

With real-world success stories and a healthy dose of marketing wisdom, you’ll discover why the path to innovation might be as easy as seeing your product—and your audience—in a whole new light.

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Why don't we have walkways everywhere? At the airport, it seems to speed up things at least by a little bit. You can step onto a walkway and reach your gate much faster than before. The reality is that people have been trying to install walkways in cities since 1893.

This is why urban planners assumed that walkways would soon take over most cities. There would be three core platforms:

“Take off” is a slightly ironic term to use, because it was the “take off” bit that made walkways popular again. After over 70 years, as airports got wider, people got annoyed at having to walk so much. Dallas Airport installed the first walkway. Similar walkways were then rolled out across other American airports and spread to Europe and Asia.

The walkway was designed solely for urban transport. Yet, the problem it solved was quite different. It got people to the gates quickly, whether they were boarding or tired after a long flight.

This shows that, while we as creators may assume our product solves one problem, we get no traction. The moment we change how the problem is perceived, the same product or service is eagerly adopted by the public.

At Psychotactics, we conduct a cartooning course. What problem does it solve? It promises to help you create a very unique character. A character that's like no other, and you can call your own.

That character can then be put on a website, blog, presentation or all of the millions of places where we seem to communicate. Hence, many, if not most, of the people who sign up for the course use it for business purposes.

Let's say we announce that the very same course, with a few changes, is meant to create storybooks. Yes, we have AI, and we also have tens of thousands of illustrators. However, many people would like to write—and illustrate — their own books. It could be a story for kids in general, or even a one-off book that is for their grandchildren.

However, even if you don't budge from the audience, you can still make tweaks to the problem. You could sell the very same “story” course as something that brings “stress-relief”. But wait! Doesn't the person who draws for their website also get great joy from learning to draw?

Sure, they do, but in that case, the stress relief is seen as a side benefit. For the third audience, “stress-relief” is the core reason they're joining. Hence, it's the same product or service, but depending on the audience you're selling to, you can expand your marketplace.

It's not like it's easy for a small business to simply do different types of courses, or even start selling to a variety of audiences. However, knowing that every product or service serves many audiences helps you to test which audience works best for you.

All of which depends on your goal and your strategy. In the case of stress relief, the class could be much like a yoga class and could potentially go on for months, even years, at a time.

The storybooks or even the creation of a character may have a limited life, but it's possible that you want to do other things, and not sell the same offering forever. When you change the problem and get a response that aligns with your goal, you've got a good thing going.

I happen to know a person—Holly—who has a candle-making business. Well, candles are candles, aren't they? Not really. There are paraffin-based candles, soy wax, beeswax, coconut, palm, gel, blended, and other speciality waxes. Who knew! Anyway, when everyone is just waxing eloquently about wax, you can solve the problem in a slightly different manner.

When I went across to her workshop, Holly had dozens of candles, but what caught my eye were these Christmas trees. What problem would a Christmas tree candle solve? It could be a collectable. People may want a new design every year.

Now, while there are hundreds, or possibly thousands, of Christmas tree candles, this one candlemaker can solve the “collectable” problem, and therefore gift-giving becomes easier and still very much a fun activity every year.

I want to put up the tree every year, and yet you may not. You may like the feel of having a Christmas tree without all the bother. Hence, it solves a problem in a tiny yet elegant manner.

In spring, Holly might create floral candles for home décor; in autumn, pumpkin-spice candles for seasonal gifts. Same product, different problem, different audience.

If you've read The Brain Audit from cover to cover, or even a chapter or two, you're likely to be on board with the concept of “one problem”. That “big” problem, you're told, is the core of your marketing. If you're selling a book, that book should solve one problem. If you're selling a course, training or even a service, stick to one problem.

The issue has been that most people don't stick to one problem. If they're selling a cartooning course, they'll try to stuff “stress-relief, character development and creating storybooks” into the same headline and first paragraph.

The advice to stick to one problem remains the same. You still need to adhere to that principle, because people can't cope with many ideas at once. They not only have to remember what you've said, but then pass on that idea to others. Hence, the one problem doesn't change.

Every product or service solves multiple problems at once. When you find your audience, you'll find the problem it solves for them, and that's when you're more than likely to meet your goal.

The post How A Slight “Problem-Change” Can Dramatically Make A Massive Difference To Your Business Model? appeared first on Psychotactics.

There are millions of articles, books and stories out there. Yet, there’s always a way to cut through the clutter. No matter how much information exists, some people are still able to communicate in a way that gets and keep your attention.

Here’s how you go about it.

Saturation of information has already been achieved. However, the client is always looking for something new, different, easier, better etc.

And that's why no matter how much stuff is churned out, your voice can still be heard. It's also the reason why you should get better at:

1- Being able to write

My theory is that “practice” is pointless. Of course, it’s not meaningless, but you have to take a position to see if you can prove something or not. Now, like everyone else, I believed that practice was everything you needed to get skilled at something.

“Practice, practice, practice, practice – we’ll turn that into a song.

A theory that seems to appeal to you might be completely wrong, but let’s say you have a different take on things. Usually, the best approach is to assume that things aren’t as good as they seem. Hence, I believed that perspective in drawing was difficult. I also thought that using a camera in manual mode meant sacrifice to the camera gods.

And so on, the list goes on. You run into a belief system that is like the sword of Excalibur. It’s wedged in the rock. To be a better explainer, you have to have at least some doubt in the system that exists and try to provide a little insight into a different way of doing things.

It wasn’t even much of a debate. I lost every time because she said, ‘Practice does help.’ And I had to agree. But I knew that there was something wrong with that idea. Why? Because when there are twenty random people in the room, practice doesn’t guarantee a result.

Even in the now overly famous experiment of 10,000 hours, K. Anders, the author, couldn’t say who would make it. Some people reach a certain level in fewer hours (say 8,000 hours), while others get it in 15,000 hours. Well, whatever the reasoning behind the practice, it’s nice, but who has those many hours anyway?

I said, “It’s not practice, it’s a pattern”. And I think I knew I’d just won the Renuka vs moi battle. I knew it because she confirmed my new concept. It was indeed the pattern that mattered—and matters. However, to explain something that seems entirely new, you have to be new.

You have to break a tiny piece of the Excalibur sword, not the whole sword. And somehow you have to win the Renuka vs you battle. However, sometimes just solving the problem isn’t the end. You have to have an elegant analogy to explain the concept.

Let’s wander down that trail, shall we?

“I used to play three-four high-pressure games, and then on the weekend, I couldn’t walk around the block. I pushed myself,” she said. Then she went on to explain all the symptoms of burnout, such as constant fatigue and disinterest.

“The problem with burnout,” she said to me, “is that you’re at peak performance level right before everything falls apart.”

But it does. Let me give you an extremely brief analogy that goes like this: A rocket is at top speed and on target, right before it runs out of fuel.

It’s more of a “like” statement. It’s like “stepping in dog poo”, like “making sure the avocado is at the correct ripeness”. It’s like this, or like that. You begin with a single statement and build a story around it. The personal story of the hockey player is a good one, but it only hits home when you hear about the rocket. That’s when you have to stop and think: Am I the rocket?

Hence, when I started out trying to sell The Brain Audit, I was already competing against tens of thousands of sales and marketing books. Just trying to explain myself would work. I could say “I’m a marketing coach”, and someone would take notice. However, what I decided to do was to isolate “one word”. That word happened to be “hesitation”.

As you probably know, that’s how the “seven red bags concept” came about. The concept works for selling the book, but it would work just as easily if you were writing a report, an article, or selling a workshop. If you simply slip in a personal story, that’s not going to cut any ice.

People can relate to a story, but they often struggle to share it with others. They haven’t lived the life of the hockey player, but they sure can relate to a rocket hurtling through space, only to lose all momentum instantly.

You often don’t need to do a lot to go from boring to elegant. You start with boring—that is incredibly important. If you want to start with “elegant”, well, that’s almost too much pressure. Once you’ve put your boring analogy on paper, that’s your starting point.

You just have to take something so out of the realm of the topic that it feels “creative”. Like “sandwiching” when learning about article writing. Or “roller coasters” when talking about how the brain continues to scan for problems.

Or how “getting the avocado to the right ripeness” is like playing the stock market. You don’t have to think about the analogy. You feel it immediately. It’s grounded in something tactile or emotional.

If an analogy of a sharpener seems too boring, talk about a blunt sharpener. If it’s about a mobile phone on low battery, talk about the last 1% that seems to linger forever. The tweak is always something small that no one is thinking about, and you’re just making a tiny change.

You have your theory that’s slightly against the grain.

Those two are cool, but it may not be enough. We must consider the third factor: multiple angles to explain the same thing.

The Brain Audit seems to suggest that instead of leading with a benefit or solution, you should start with the problem. Then, there's a litany of examples. How many? Let's make a list.

Well, I barely remember writing them, but the point is that no one seems to notice. Why is this the case? The answer is “pushback” or “objections”. If we were to examine the first point in this article, it suggests that we introduce an idea that goes against the grain.

If you're going to be slightly out there, then you're more likely to get objections. The angles of explanation are directly proportional to the pushback. If the idea is easily understood, then people don't need a lot of detail. But the moment you start to say something like “orange juice for breakfast is a terrible idea”, they want to tie you to the stake.

That's what's going to decide how many angles you use to explain the concept. You will also need to alternate some explanation with the angle.

Story/analogy

You've brought up a concept, but you can't dump everything on the reader just yet. Hence, let's assume the reader believes that “reviews or testimonials” are effective. Your article is about “reverse testimonials”, which suggests that the testimonial shouldn't be “nice” at the start.

Instead, the testimonial should demonstrate realism. The reader isn't ready to suddenly drop their point of view and hug yours. In the case of the reverse testimonial, you'd have to explain concepts such as:

As you tackle the stages, you must help your reader understand each idea with a story or analogy. That's how you chip away at the concept and develop a very sound explanation.

Which is why some explanations seem so much better than others, and how you can stand out, despite “everything” already being covered.

And that's how I win the discussion battle with Renuka, too. Though not all battles.

The post How To Explain Concepts Elegantly (And Keep The Attention Of Your Audience) appeared first on Psychotactics.

While self-help books promise transformation, true change often stems from a shift in environment. Explore how small differences can influence your daily routines.

Let's jump on the environment bandwagon because it knows where you and I are headed.

The National Endowment for the Arts was more than a little concerned, as adult reading rates had dropped ten percentage points in a single decade. However, the slump was a lot worse for teens and early adults.

Suddenly six out of ten children changed their minds about reading. My nieces, for example, worked their way through 4224 pages of Harry Potter, and then went on to the Percy Jackson series. While Harry Potter sold hundreds of millions of books, the Percy Jackson series sold a staggering 35 million copies.

Why? Did the kids suddenly hate reading again? No, that's not the case at all. Kids expressly stated that the reason they were reading much more was that they started with Harry Potter. 65% also said they did better at school since reading the books. So why did the reading decline all of a sudden?

Think of how you and I went to school as kids. We didn't clamber into a giant gas-guzzling SUV. Instead, at a particular time, we'd wave goodbye to our parents and walk down to the bus stop.

In 2022, over half of students took a private car to school. In countries where cars are not the primary mode of transport, people often clamber onto motorcycles. Yes, there are many reasons why people can't take the bus. These include budget cuts, driver shortages, and other factors, but the biggest reason is remarkably linked to Harry Potter.

If you're the only one in school with a load of books, you're considered weird. As humans, we all look for external cues. If “all the parents” are taking their kids to school by car, maybe we should too. In a world where parents are overworked, they spend two hours a day getting kids to and from school.

The environment decides what we need to do; otherwise, we are quickly excommunicated. You can't convince a 12-year-old that a mobile phone isn't crucial, and you sure can't convince parents that the school bus makes sense. They take their cues from the outside world.

Take almost anyone who drives in a country like India, and you will find they honk the horn a lot, while driving. Even on empty roads, the horn is used endlessly. Put them on a plane and let's say that person lands in Bangkok and then rents a car.

The first time they honk, they get stares from other motorists.  The second time, it's a similar set of stares. Within a matter of streets, their behaviour radically changes. Put them back on the plane, and the honking takes hold again.

We tend to find our comfort in books on “how to change our habits”, yet we make only temporary fixes. The people who change their behaviour almost overnight tend to be in a different environment.

Just deciding that you'll go to bed early isn't going to help if you live in a country that sleeps late. While Kiwis, Australians, and even Japan will have finished their meals by 6 pm, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Indians, and much of Asia will still be snacking.

If everyone around you is still up, you're pretty much like the only kid in school without a smartphone. You're considered the weird one. Often, you don't even have to go outdoors because an internal environment can prevent you from going ahead with your plan.

However, if your partner sleeps late, there's little point in you going to bed early because you're likely to be disturbed. An internal environment can dominate your behaviour just as easily.

Your environment isn’t just the city or culture you live in. It’s your desk, your phone screen, your playlist, the people in your chat window. Each of them is quietly shaping your behaviour.

We believe grit, discipline, and willpower are what drive change. But even the most determined person struggles when the environment is working against them.

Just as kids stopped reading when the cues disappeared, we can deliberately design cues back into our lives. Leave the book on the pillow. Keep the phone in another room. Sit next to people doing the thing you want to do.

When I joined a French course last December, the environment looked perfect: real people, real energy, a proper classroom. But it was chaos in disguise. There was no sequence, no accountability, no design.

Yet, when you encounter a well-designed environment, everyone benefits. People stop honking, start reading, go to bed earlier, and do things that they know are beneficial to their needs.

We like to think change happens from the inside out — that if we shift our mindset, our world will follow. But most lasting change happens from the outside in. The right environment shapes our attention, and attention shapes our reality.

Without design, the environment is just noise.

The post Why Habits Can Be Temporary And Environment Matters More, Instead? appeared first on Psychotactics.

However, when those grumps happen to be your prospects or clients, you better pay close attention. Why? Because they’re they are key to finding out your uniqueness for your products and services. Uniqueness seems so hard to find, but grumpy people are everywhere.

Here’s how you harness the grumbles to your benefit.

I subscribe to Netflix and Beamafilm, and I watch hours of YouTube, but I keep coming back to Apple TV.

Why do I do that? The answer doesn't lie in my behaviour alone, but drives the behaviour of tens of thousands, possibly millions of viewers. They re-subscribe, not because they want to get back to Apple TV. Instead, they're eager to watch just one series.

The name of the series is Slow Horses. The series bumps up subscriptions—and pulls back clients, like me, who've left a long time ago. Slow Horses pulls people back because it's utterly unique.

Like any idea, it’s difficult to pin down. We tend to think of it as an inherent quality—as if some products are born unique. They’re not. Almost always, uniqueness has to be invented. Invention, as you might expect, is a costly process. How are you supposed to guess what your clients are thinking?

People don’t know what they want. What they do know is what annoys them. They’ll complain endlessly. And if you listen closely when they’re grumpy, you’ll find they’re handing you clues about what to fix—or how to stand out.

Almost anyone can write a good story, but the great ones are where the characters come alive. For me, I needed a series where I could recognise my own family. Characters that worked with each other—but also against one another.

That messy, interlocking dynamic makes a story come alive. Slow Horses gave me that. It wasn’t Apple TV that solved my problem—it was Slow Horses. But because Apple TV gave me access to it, the platform became unique in my mind.

That’s the essence of uniqueness: it’s born from listening to frustration, then solving it in a way that others don’t.

When we step into a modern marketplace, we're swamped with dozens, sometimes thousands of options. The uniqueness—or grumpiness—gets buried under pricing and features. But they ignore one issue::what turns people into grumps?

One of New Zealand's national comfort foods is a pie. Many Kiwis grow up eating meat pies at school, sporting events, or family gatherings. Classic fillings in the pies include mince and cheese, steak and cheese, chicken and mushroom, or bacon and egg. At lunch time, it's not uncommon to stop for a pie.

“Well, they're not like they used to be,” said the owner, Lewis Mazza. “Pies made in New Zealand often have filler; they're not made with good ingredients.” The list goes on: Too generic tastes, mass-produced, tough, or rubbery pastry.

But what's the biggest gripe of all? It's called “butter”. Pies used to be made with a generous helping of butter. “Our pies—Rollas Pies— are exactly 50% butter”, says Lewis.

And yet it does quite the opposite. Rollas has existed since 2024. In barely a year, they've got four outlets on the go. Apparently, people felt grumpy enough to want the original buttery version of the pie.

Yes, they're grumpy about pastry, about having to deal with fillers and terrible tastes, but the butter reminds them of the past. Their biggest grumble may not even be about the butter content, but rather about how things “seemed better in the past.”

The question is: if you have endless money, why should you be grumpy? I'll tell you why. It's because your neighbour is also filthy rich. Somehow, you want to demonstrate that you're richer. To do so, you have to buy a car where you can talk about the paintwork.

The Lamborghini Revuelto Opera Unica sells for over $3 million. At first glance, it’s just another hypercar. But the paintwork tells a different story—a two-tone fading effect that took 475 hours of hand-painting using a spatula, with another 85 hours spent on the interior. There's no machine spraying paint on this car. It's just painstaking human attention that turns engineering into art. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can get a cheaper version of this car for a mere $608,000.

When you realise why they're grumbling, you can increase the value severalfold merely by something with paint. That's because you know it's not the paint you're selling. Just like the pies sold “the wholesomeness of the past”, the paintwork is signalling “I'm richer than you”, and that's what makes it unique.

Before I moved to New Zealand, I couldn't remember seeing a range hood in a home. Rangehoods are extractor fans. You cook, they sit above your stove top and suck out the smoke, steam, and especially the cooking odours from your kitchen.

Well, I grew up in India, and the smoke, steam, and the aroma of food were a plus. Even so, rangehoods are almost in every kitchen in New Zealand, and so reluctantly, I used it as well.

At high setting, it's about 70-80 decibels, similar to a vacuum cleaner. I love listening to podcasts or music while cooking, and without my noise-cancelling headphones, I hear nothing. However, even when speaking to my wife, Renuka, I have to turn the rangehood low or off.

The Schweigen Silent Rangehoods solved this grumble in a clever way—the motor isn’t in the kitchen at all. It’s mounted outside the house. Suddenly, the kitchen becomes a quiet, social space again. The problem wasn’t “how do we make a better fan,” but “how do we stop the noise?”

Interesting, isn't it? People are continuing to grumble about noisy rangehoods, but most manufacturers continue to turn out rangehoods with features and benefits. Yet, they don't tackle the main point of contention.

Our marketing business started in 2000. Hence, despite being around for over 25 years, we at Psychotactics have stayed below the radar. You don't find us advertising, doing mega launches, and despite having many books, we aren't on any bestseller lists. Theoretically, this is a formula for hardship, if not a lot of uncertainty. Yet, we've thrived for decades because one of the main sources of income is the courses we do every year.

At the very core, we're dealing with a grumpy audience. What are they upset about? Most online courses feel cold and disconnected. You log in, you watch a few videos, and you never hear from the instructor again. At Psychotactics, the focus isn’t on videos or lectures—it’s on conversation and feedback.

You’re not left alone. You post your work, you get critiques—often within minutes, and you learn from others. The grumble was “online learning is isolating.” The sales page on some other course may say “it's a cohort,” but that's just another catchphrase. You still end up feeling quite alone. On a Psychotactics course, this problem is solved very elegantly.

You come to rely not on the teacher, but on the group. On days when you don't feel like showing up, you do so because of your colleagues in the course. On other days, when you're running at full steam, you also want to show up to bolster the spirits of your group. People learn from each other's mistakes and discover how to solve the same problem in various ways.

Clients don't always know what they want, but they know what they don't want. The solid proof of this grumpiness doesn't show up in client comments, but instead in their behaviour. Once people get to know each other, they tend to reach the end of the course and acquire a skill. But where do you get the most dropouts? It's in the first or second week.

I want you to think about that phenomenon for a minute. The first week is when people are most eager to learn. They signed up and spent a few thousand dollars, so why bail out right at the start? The reason they do so is that they haven't formed bonds with each other.

It's easy to simply believe that you're not so good at something and quietly leave. It's much harder to leave once you realise that everyone wants you around, needs you, and you need them.

Or as an African proverb says: If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group. People are constantly looking for a group of friends. Smart, interesting people, a bit like them, but also opposites of each other.

But it's the primary reason why they come back. We also know this fact to be true, because if they join another course and the group isn't as vibrant as the one they'd experienced, the clients complain. Our job, therefore, is to pay attention to this grumpiness and make sure they never feel alone.

Whether it’s a silent kitchen, a pie, a hand-painted car, a spy series full of flawed characters, or a course that actually talks back to you—uniqueness always starts the same way: by listening to complaints and solving them better than anyone else.

If you want to find uniqueness, start listening to grumpy people

The post How To Use Grumpy People To Find Your Uniqueness appeared first on Psychotactics.

However, a lot of this understanding of talent is an illusion. It’s based on what we have been told and also our current behaviour. How can we overcome these barriers and become better learners?

Let’s find out.

Sold as a luxurious gourmet ingredient, it is marketed to mimic the earthy decadence of real truffles. But here's the catch, there are no actual truffles in most truffle oils. What you're tasting isn't the essence of a rare foraged fungus, but a synthetic compound, usually 2,4-dityapentane.

This is manufactured in labs to simulate the aroma of truffles. Chefs and foodies are often misled into believing that they are experiencing the complexity of real truffles when in reality they are being served a chemical illusion.

Real truffles are subtle, they are nuanced, but truffle oil is blunt and it's loud. The fact that the label says truffle is borderline dishonest. Consumers pay a high price for this opulence.

We grew up believing that we are talented in some areas and not so talented in others. And these ideas are a bit like truffle oil. It's an illusion that we buy into. So how do we know it's an illusion? In this article, we'll cover three points.

When my niece Marsha was about five years old, I looked down at a piece of paper that she was holding, and there was this scroll. Why is your handwriting so bad? I asked her. I can't do anything about it, she responded quickly. Everybody in our family writes badly.

I asked her. Oh, she said, my mama told me. She told me that everybody in our family has bad handwriting. As you're listening to this story, you realize that something is wrong here. There is an illusion being created, and this is an illusion that has been perpetuated by the source.

The source of all of our learning is a parent, a teacher, a friend, and then finally ourselves. We have four separate sources. Let's start out with the teacher.

We go to school, and we're five or six, and the teacher is probably 22 years old. She's just out from teacher school. She doesn't know much about anything, let alone teaching.

And she tells you that you're good at drawing, you're good at writing, you're good at this, you're good at that, and you start to believe it. As a five-year-old, as a six-year-old, you believe what adults tell you. Because you don't know any better.

She believes that some students are smarter and others not so much. She believes that some have skills and others have other skills. And in a very short time, we get saddled with this kind of information that we take for the rest of our lives.

We think that we're talented or not talented. We want to live up to the expectations of our teachers, so we do what they think is important. And then when we go home and we show our parents, they encourage us.

What happens is we start to go down pathways that are engineered by our teachers and then unwittingly fostered by parents. Now parents are also or also were 22 year olds. They barely knew what they were doing with their lives.

They probably had two or three kids. There's all this balancing act of just keeping a household together. They're paying bills, and then they have to get across a message to you.

And while they care for you and bring you up to the best of their abilities, they're still fudging through it like most parents do every single day. Your teachers, they're one source. Your parents are another source, but then you have friends.

And maybe some of those friends run faster than you or draw better than you, or at least that's what you believe to be true. And after a while, that becomes a reality, and you become the fourth source. You start to look in the mirror and go, I'm not talented enough.

And just at that moment, you become like my niece. She's five years old. She doesn't know Sunday from Monday, but she does know that everyone in her family has bad handwriting.

We believe in what we see, how we do things and how much struggle is involved. And then we come to a conclusion that we are either talented or not talented. This takes us to the second part, which is about simplified structure.

If you look at a chair catalog, you'll find hundreds, maybe thousands of options, different sizes, different colors.  But there's one thing that is common for every single chair, and that is that you can sit on it.

It doesn't matter whether you're underweight or overweight, and overweight by quite a lot. You have that confidence that when you sit on the chair, it's not going to break. And the reason why it doesn't break is because it has structure.

The shapes, the sizes, the colors, they're all what we call vocabulary. They're a different way of expressing the same thing, but the underlying structure has to exist. Now, when you ask your parents or your teachers, or even your friends to explain structure, they don't do a very good job of it.

And right up in the front is this whole bunch of numbers, 2.8, 5.6, what are they supposed to mean? If you ask a photographer, they will tell you that's the aperture, and immediately you're intimidated.

You don't know the structure, and you're already scared about something that you can't remember or can't figure out. There is shutter speed, and then there is ISO. There's ISO 100, 200, 500, 25,000, even 100,000.

And finally, shutter speed, which also has numbers, 2,000th of a second, 500th of a second. All of these are numbers and names, and there doesn't seem to be any structure. But that's not the way a trainer looks at it.

And then you're supposed to figure out how this triangle works. Now, if you go on YouTube, you don't have to spend more than five minutes before you start yawning. And the reason why you're so intimidated and so tired immediately is because there is no simplified structure.

And this is very important. You can have structure, but it can be very tedious. And when you have simplified structure, you realize, oh wait, somebody has taken this apart. Somebody has deconstructed it. Somebody has said, let me make this less boring and more exciting for the learner.

People understand a concept and then they don't know how to explain it. So they don't have simplified structure. My other niece, Kiera, was going to a camp, and she wanted to know how to use a manual camera.

They were not allowed to use their phones, but they could take a camera. When I gave her my manual camera, she looked at all the numbers, and she said, what are all these about?

Now try explaining to a nine or 10 year old what aperture, shutter speed, and ISO means. So I told her, look at this numbers right in the front, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. If one person is standing in front of you, you go to one.

If four people are standing in front of you, four. And if eight people, and she says eight. So we sorted that first part out, and then we went to the second part, which is the ISO. And I told her, just keep that at a fixed amount. And she said, oh, I can do that. And finally, we didn't even look at the shutter speed and all those fancy numbers.

I just told her to turn the knob until she had enough light. So that was simplified structure. And when I explain this concept, it's better if I have a camera in my hand, and I'm showing you what I'm doing.

But even here over audio, you can understand approximately what's happening. So it's simplified structure. And when you have this simplified structure, people get it.

And better still, you become the teacher because you can explain it to someone else. Without simplified structure, we go back to our source, our teachers, our parents, our friends.

And then we say things like, we have to practice, practice, practice. We have to work really hard. You have to do a lot of this while learning, simply because there is no simplified structure in place.

You were given something that was complicated, something like the exposure triangle. And that is a bunch of exposure triangles that you're dealing with every single day of your life. Everything is made complicated because someone did not know how to explain it to you, or when they explained it to you, it was just complex.

The source, which you're depending on, it's usually not reliable. The structure is often in place, but it's not simplified enough. And this is where the concept of working hard comes in. But the problem is that you can end up working too hard, and it is counterproductive.

This takes us to the third part, which is where we don't have to work harder, but we have to work smarter. But what is smarter? Let's find out.

I once heard a neuroscientist talking about how we learn. But she wasn't talking about the brain. She was talking about our stomachs. She explained the sensation of feeling full. When we are so stuffed that we feel like rolling across the floor, we can't add another morsel.

We should stop at around the 30 or 40-minute mark, because that's all it can take, especially when it's dealing with new things. When it's dealing with elements that it hasn't encountered before, 30 minutes is a very, very long time.

If you are already familiar with whatever it is you're doing, then you could go for much longer. But in general, when you're learning, that's what the whole idea of learning is about, is that everything is new.

And if you go past the 30 or 40-minute mark, all you're doing is going back to what your parents told you to do, what your teachers, what your friends, and what you told yourself, that you have to work harder.

But after a point, that work, whatever you're doing, it doesn't matter. Your brain is like your stomach. It's stuffed. And while you can understand this phenomenon, you still feel the need to somehow keep going.

When I started learning French, I started out with 25 new sentences, and then 25 existing sentences. I found that I could eventually have 25 new sentences, and then 75 existing sentences. And that took me no more than about 45 minutes.

I wanted to work harder. So some days, I do 600 sentences. Some days, 800. And I'd be proud announcing this to other friends who were also learning the language. But what did I remember?

Out of 25 sentences, I might remember 5. And even those would have grammatical errors in them. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't put in more time in the day.

This morning, when I woke up, I did my French for about 40 minutes. And when I went to the supermarket, I was listening to the sentences all over again. So there is an advantage in leaving something, putting in a space, and then coming back after a little while, then putting in an even longer space, and then coming back.

A professional will use this technique a lot of the time. A writer will do a first draft, walk away from it, get some feedback, then work on the second draft. And depending on the size of the chapter, depending on the size of the material being written, work on the third draft.

She's not learning something new, but the subject matter is new, the words are new, the thoughts are different. And so, there is this slowness about it.

They're actually learning what they don't know, and that's why the process is slow. That's why the process needs the space in between. Unsurprisingly, this is how it works for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not all at once, but with the space in between. And this brings us to the end of this article.

In this article, we covered the source, which is our parents, teachers, friends, and ourselves. We then moved on to the fact that we didn't just need structure, but we needed simplified structure. We need a system that is so simple that we don't have to think about it.

And finally, we looked at the space between the learning, that instead of just cramming everything together, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we should have space. And that's how the learning process becomes smarter, not harder. Spending more time on something, that's usually counterproductive.

You get slower, you struggle more for no reason whatsoever. You think that you should work much harder, and this brings us to the most important point in this article, and that is the source is what you have to look at. You have to determine whether the source of the information was credible in the first place.

Was that 22-year-old teacher, 25-year-old parent, your friend who was six years old, are they reliable sources? Were they reliable sources? And all of the information that you're getting right now, is it a reliable source, especially when it comes to talent?

Because we see that people can draw, write, dance, cook. When they're 30 years old, 40 years, 50, the age doesn't matter, and it happens in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. The source is like the truffle oil.

It is an illusion, and we bind to that illusion, and we think it's real, and it's not real. Well, not most of the time. Some of the time, you do get good truffle oil.

The post Why Learning Is So Tiresome (And How To Identify And Overcome The Barriers) appeared first on Psychotactics.

Clients get into a course very excited to learn. Then they go off a cliff. They don’t show up as often, if they show up at all. This dropout factor isn’t a new problem. It has existed for hundreds of years, but it’s only recently that we’ve understood how to get better results while spending less time.

Let’s find out how to quell and even get rid of the dropout factor once and for all.

What he's less known for is losing employees. Before Ford started the mechanized car production, it took between 12 to 14 hours a day per car. I know this sounds like a very quick turnaround, but it's a lot.

This activity was considered very slow. It needed skilled workers, and everyone was frustrated. And when the Ford Moving Assembly was started, that time of 12 hours, it dropped dramatically.

For one, the new method didn't need extremely skilled workers, and yet they were able to put together a car in barely 150 minutes. This change got production time by almost 80 to 90 percent.

The work was repetitive and mostly exhausting. The Ford Motor Company kept losing workers. It was at this point that Edsil Ford, Henry's son, put forward the idea of a five-day work week.

Until that point, it was common to have just one day off, and the five-day work week was considered revolutionary. People assumed that workers would get lazy if they took two whole days off.

They changed because it was going to make a big difference to their business. In this move of having two days off, it did reduce total output by a tiny bit, but more importantly, it reduced fatigue.

Fewer mistakes were made on the job, and Ford stopped losing workers. Eventually, despite output reducing a smidgen, the production per worker increased once the five-day work week was introduced.

Less is more, less is more, less is more. But it's one thing to hear something like this, and quite another thing to implement it in your business. Because we had our own battle when we conducted our courses, and we've been conducting courses all the way from 2005.

And when we first started training clients 20 years ago, they had to do assignments for six days a week. Now this seemed logical both to me and to the clients.

We had a lot to cover. If we dawdled over the duration of the course, we'd achieve a lot less. Hence, six days seemed perfectly logical. Nothing went wrong at first. In fact, nothing went wrong at all.

Our story wasn't similar to Ford's. Despite the strain of having to run a business, to do a course, clients stuck to their goal. It helped that our courses were often called the toughest in the world.

It therefore attracted people who were determined to get to the other side. Six days was a lot, but no one was willing to throw in the towel. Then for no particular reason, I changed it to just five days. But the first change was not for the clients, it was for me. Because in the past, I'd be exhausted after a course.

I would barely be able to speak a sentence for a week. I would sometimes be like this. We have to…

It was like my brain had just stopped after the course. As you know, after a course, we tend to go on a month-long holiday. But for the first week, I'd just be sleeping, often just looking at the ceiling.

It's only on the second week of our holiday that I'd come out of my hibernation. And you'd think, well, if you covered the course in six days, and then you did it in just five, it's not gonna make such a big difference. But it did.

When you have one day to recover, it's just one day. And in that day, you don't know what can happen. There could be other housework, there could be duties, there could be any amount of chaos. So sometimes you have zero days to recover. And having two days was enough of a buffer to relax, maybe not sleep that much, but to just wind down a bit.

During the course, I was a better teacher. And after the course, the recovery wasn't more than a couple of days. And we never got a chance to ask the clients because they went through their six day a week course.

And I say, what if this course were to go for six days out of seven? And they think I'm completely insane because five days seems like a lot every week, especially when you're running a business, but especially when you're dealing with life, just life takes so much out of you.

They think I'm completely bonkers to even make such a suggestion. They don't know that we had these courses running in the past over six days. So we tried another experiment.

We shrunk the working time to just four days. The clients still had to show up five days a week. However, the assignments were scheduled for just four days. On the fifth day, they get to read, they get to watch some videos, but mostly to visit other groups.

So they're all in groups and they visit each other every day, but they don't get the chance to visit other groups. It just takes too much bandwidth to do your work, to look at the group's work.

So it's on the fifth day that they get to travel a bit within the groups. And they see what the others are up to, so they get ideas, they see the mistakes. And this will not be possible if we had five days of work.

What's been the result of this two-decade experiment? The first and the most obvious result is a chunky reduction in exhaustion. Exhaustion is pointless, even if you're someone who loves their work.

With the tiredness greatly reduced, we started to look at output. We started to look at the results the clients were getting. In the cartooning course, for example, clients would get to a certain position about eight or nine weeks well into the course. And now, they get similar or better results in the fourth week. It doesn't make sense. I know.

And how can clients get better in a shorter period of time? And this is the kind of redesign that you have to do in your head as a teacher, as a trainer, because if you have all of this extra work that people have to do, you're exhausted, they're exhausted, nobody is thinking.

And when you think, you can recalibrate, change things around, and less is more, really starts to live as an idea that's working, not an idea that you throw around and put on stickers on your desktop. Many years ago, I was like most people. I grew up on the diet of you have to work hard or you won't succeed.

I agree that specific work needs to be done to get much better results. Hard work seems like such a good feeling at times. I know that clients would say, this course went for three months, and that's 90 days and I wrote 90 articles. But as the teacher, I know the quality of those articles. I know how exhausted people were once they finished the course.

And then after the course, there would be this drop over a cliff. Most of the clients would learn the skill, and they're not write articles. We reduced the workload, and then I gave them a self study.

Now self studies have not worked that well over the years because groups need a leader, they need a teacher, they need someone to mentor them through the process.

We went to Thailand, and guess what? The article writing group has continued to write because they're not exhausted. And even in that group design, even in that course design of the follow up, they don't have to write articles the whole time.

It's broken up into write stories this week, do the first paragraph the next week. And so they're assembling many articles, writing great articles, but without the exhaustion.

And yes, there is a minimal dropout because the teacher, the guide, the leader, the whatever you want to call it, is not around. But they're still doing their article writing several months after the course has ended. That exhaustion factor isn't so great.

And it brings us all the way back to the Henry Ford story. They were dealing more with dropout. You can be very successful. You can innovate in any way you want. But when client staff gets exhausted, then they don't look forward to the experience.

This is one of the secrets, if you want to call it, about Psychotactics. We've never had to advertise much. In fact, we have not advertised at all. We don't do much PR. We barely do any social media except posting photographs. And yet, clients come back repeatedly to do the courses.

And the courses are the high-priced items in our offerings. And the reason why they do it is first because they get a skill. They are guaranteed a skill, not just more information, but also because there is no dread of tackling another course that just saps all your energy.

It probably just applies to you personally. Maybe you work five days a week and then go, let's go on the sixth day, and then a little bit on the seventh.

And it's just draining you slowly maybe, but it's still draining you. So yes, less is more. And this one, it's a practical application that you can use today for yourself and for your clients. And if you've got a company, it's for your staff. This brings us to the end of this podcast.

Well, five days, that's enough. Take two days off.

The post The Dropout Factor: How To Reduce Dropout When Teaching Or Learning appeared first on Psychotactics.

But often it’s just the first step that feels impossible. How do you make your clients move ahead quickly and recommend you more often than ever before?

Let’s find out how this principle works.

The speaker that went before me made a pretty tepid presentation, but at the end of his presentation, he said something that got people to stand up and run to the back of the room and get whatever he promised. So what did he promise?

At that point, I learned a very crucial lesson. He had promised them a bonus that was of extreme value, and so naturally they got up and ran. Over the years, I thought, well, that's the lesson.

But there was a secondary lesson hiding in plain sight, and I didn't pay attention to that until quite recently. And for want of a better term, I'll call it the 90-10 principle.

Now, of course, you've heard of 90-10 somewhere or the other, but just listen to this one, because it's very useful whether you're teaching, you have a product or even a service. So what is this 90-10 principle about? Remember the guy who stood up, made the presentation, and then gave them a really important bonus?

Well, the bonus was very crucial, but what was also important was how he was going to implement that bonus. He was going to install the software on their computer, test it, and see that it ran. And then they would just have to press a few buttons, and they could use the software as they pleased.

He had done 90% of the work for them, and then they just had to do the remaining 10%. And how is this important? Clients come to me all the time, and they'll say, I don't know what to do, I don't know where to start. And many of us think that this is about procrastination.

But the reality is that people get stuck at the beginning, not at the end. A friend of mine, Marina, who lives in Florida, she said to me, I would love to draw, but I don't know what to draw. And you think, well, there are so many sources.

But when you're on a course, the teacher gives you the assignment and tells you how to go about it, looks at all the mistakes that you could possibly make, and then all you have to do is the final bit.

In the article writing course or the storytelling course, people have to come up with stories. And in the past, I would make them get the stories, refashion the stories, cut it down to size, and then somehow connect it to their article.

And this was almost 90% or 100% of the work. And people struggled day after day. They do their work, but they struggle. And it hit me at one point that I have to give my clients 90% of whatever it is that they have to do, so that they can do the important part, which is the last 10%.

Let's say you are a copywriter. You want all the information from your clients, because of course you have to write the sales page. And let's say you generate a questionnaire which has 20 questions. Based on what you know, you pre-fill the answers and you send it to them.

So you read whatever information they send you, you fill the answers and you send them a draft. And then they only have to correct what's wrong.

In fact, we had to deal with this situation when we were redoing our kitchen, because the person, the kitchen person, kept telling us that we had so much choice. She kept telling us, we have thousands of handles that we can juice from. We have this kind of doors, and we have that kind of cabinets.

And it left us flummoxed. We couldn't get started. But what if she had, as a service, just given us three options? Well, we could then go from there. We could somehow work our way and say, oh, we don't really like this. We like that.

So she would have done nine-tenth of the work, and then we could have just done one-tenth. So it works really well with services, but doesn't work with products. Recently, my sister-in-law got a very fancy and expensive knife.

And one of the things that I often say to people is you don't want to sharpen the knife, because when you sharpen the knife, you're taking the middle of the knife. Instead, you want to do what lots of butchers do, which is they hone the knife every day. They hold it up and they go, they're not sharpening it, they're honing it.

And the chances are no. That's because 90% of the work hasn't been done. When she was buying the knife, the person selling her the knife should have shown her how to hold the honing blade, and how to get the best out of it and not destroy the knife.

So, they would have not only sold an additional product, but they would have given her that demonstration. And then, maybe they could have even told her, okay, let's put an alarm, let's set an alarm every three days, so that you get into the habit of it.

Let's do this for just two weeks. And after that, it becomes normal. As things stand, she has the knife. She has no honing blade. She has no technique. Guess what?

That knife will have to be sharpened. It will probably take a few months, but they're going to have to take that metal off the knife. And that's a pity, because when nine-tenth of the work is done, when 90% of the work is done, then it's not very hard for you to go ahead.

Most people get stuck with that level of procrastination simply because the starting point has too many factors, there's too much to learn, it's too much of an uphill climb, but it's just frustrating.

Even with training, as we had the examples of giving the stories so that they just have to create the continuation or giving them the reference cartoons so that they just have to look at it and then create cartoons of their own, that's very crucial. But even small things count. Sometimes a client will ask you a question that seems like a very silly question.

They'll say, I have this program on the iPad, which is called Procreate, and I can't move my images from this folder to that folder or, as Procreate calls it, from this stack to that stack. And you think, surely, you can go on YouTube. Surely, there is some kind of manual.

But here's the very crucial bit. That client is learning to draw. They're learning to overcome their frustration at not being able to draw.

They want to do something very perfect. So, there are so many things that are going through their head and so many things that they have to do. If you can just meet them 90% of the way and say, here are the steps, and this is the only thing you have to do, well, they do it.

They procrastinate right at the beginning. So whether it's services or products or training, do 90% of the work for your client, and then give it to them, and watch how they complete the 10%, and they move faster than ever before.

And this is what's happening on this podcast as well. When you listen to the podcast, notice how you're not downloading the podcast. You're not having to find the podcast and do all of those steps.

In fact, it gets downloaded and presented to you, and then you just have to press one button. And that's why you listen to the podcast. Now, imagine if we had to go through all of the steps.

You'd never listen to the podcast. You'd be out on the road. You'd think, oh, I don't have the time to do this. I don't have data. There are all of these problems. And these problems got solved for you, which is why you're listening to this podcast.

The post How To Outsmart Procrastination With The 9/10 Principle appeared first on Psychotactics.

But are we really distracted? Or is it congestion, instead?

Let’s dig deeper into this slight nuance, and find out if distraction may be a good thing after all.

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Okay, let's test this term, shall we? Let's say you get in a car, and you start driving towards the country. As you get out of your driveway, you'll notice your neighbor taking out the garage. Then there is also the mailman delivering the mail.

The leaves flutter to the ground, and the clouds seem to be pushing the trees forward. Are you still focused? Of course you are. You don't suddenly veer off the road and crash into the nearest tree.

Most of us function superbly well, and we are focused enough to do the task at hand. Now let's just say that you are learning to drive. Do we even need to describe how rattled you are likely to be? The trees, the neighbors, everything seems like a flashing red light.

Plus, you're battling with brakes, acceleration, and who knows what else. Hence, the opposite of focus isn't distraction. Instead, it's congestion.

Because if we take these two individuals, and they could just be you, when you are already adept at driving the car, you don't feel any frustration or congestion, and distraction doesn't bother you. But the earlier version of you, who is just learning to drive, you feel crushed by congestion. And this isn't very different from how we operate on a day-to-day basis.

Let's take an example of my day. I happen to be learning not one, not two, but three separate languages. This sounds insane, doesn't it? How does so much language learning not lead to congestion? The answer is, it depends on how much control you have over the situation.

Let's say I decide to boldly announce that I'm learning three languages. Now, your assumption is likely to be that I started learning all the three just last week. Instead, it's not the case at all. With French, I've covered 83,476 reps in a little over a year. With Spanish, it's just 18,343 repetitions. And with Thai, I'm just 661 repetitions old.

Because you realize that when I'm dealing with Thai, which is just 660 repetitions, that's completely different from 83,000 repetitions. Which means that there's more control over French, less control over Spanish, and absolutely total congestion when it comes to Thai.

Because in Thai, I don't understand how it sounds, I don't understand the tones, I can't read the alphabet, and the only thing I can say in Thai is hello, thank you, and I'm bored. Hence, having different levels of learning in progress is crucial if you're going to take on any work.

And while all this talk of three languages sounds very impressive, all of us are operating on a completely different scale than we used to. We're talking about the difference between an adult, any adult, and any five-year-old. Even the laziest, most incompetent adult can achieve and control several things with less congestion than a five-year-old.

That five-year-old has a problem even tying shoelaces. Even that is a big achievement. So if we extrapolate this idea, we start to understand how you can become multi-talented.

You can learn to cook. You can learn to draw, sing, dance, do a podcast, write a sales page, and do it all in a single day. Because the people that seem more talented than you, the people that seem to be achieving more than you, they are just that adult.

And, unfortunately, for now, you are just the five-year-old. The reason why the five-year-old is struggling is because of the volume of congestion. The reason why we struggle in so many areas is because we too have that congestion.

We think of it as distraction, but really, it is congestion.

The post The Reason You Can’t Focus (Why “Distraction” Has Nothing To Do With Focus) appeared first on Psychotactics.

However, every business owner has fears; they just don't share them with you. Here are a few stories on business fears and how to overcome them.

When clients look at us, me in particular, they see an almost unblemished trail of success. But you can’t see the fear behind what we’ve been through. Yes, it’s fear. Let’s go into story land and learn about the fear and possibly how to overcome it.

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And what was interesting to me was that it didn't really call it stress, it called it fear. And kids do this correctly. They go up to a parent and they say, mama, I'm scared. They're fearful. And as adults, we can't say the word, I'm scared.

So we say, I'm stressed. But in reality, it's fear. And today's episode is about three instances of fear that we had at Psychotactics. Yes, it's story time. So let's get on to the first episode, the first section, where we talk about the stress of relaunching something when it has just failed.

I can't remember the exact date, but I think it was around 2010. We had launched the copywriting course. This is where you write sales pages, when you're selling a product or service, and only three people signed up.

Did we have the wrong audience? We didn't know the answers, and nobody knows the answers. And finally, nobody asks the questions. Nobody from our list asked us, hey, did you fill up the course? Is it 50% full? Is it 25% full? Is it 100% full? No.

So we went ahead with the course, just three people, and they were excited to be on the course because it felt like personal consulting.

Do you just ditch the course? We decided to run it the following year. And when we did so, something unusual happened. The course filled up in under 24 hours. It was the fastest selling course in the history of Psychotactics. We've never had a course before or since that has filled up at that speed. And you know where this could have all ended? It could have all ended in fear.

The fear that we were doing something wrong, we were going to the wrong audience, we were doing something that we shouldn't be doing. We couldn't call it stress because it was fear. It was, are we going to fail at this early juncture in our business?

And usually when something goes wrong very early in your career, or even much later, you start to blame yourself and you don't need to blame yourself. You just need to relaunch it and see how it goes. And in doing so, you overcome that fear. So maybe you won't have the fastest selling course.

Maybe you'll go from three people to five people, or from three people to one person, and then after that, you'll figure out what you were doing wrong, if you were doing anything wrong, and then you'll fix it. Because when you think about it, anything that you do is like making a dish.

The first time you make it, it's not going to turn out so well. But sometimes, the 15th time or the 50th time that you make it, something goes wrong, and you just have to renegotiate and go, okay, I'll make the same dish tomorrow, and we'll see how it goes.

That's the first fear of something just failing without any understanding of why it's failing, or what we did, or if anybody else was supposed to do anything. And that's the first fear. But the second type of fear, it's more annoying.

You know that it's going to scare the heck out of you when you try to do it again. And that's precisely what I had to do when I had to go for a speaking engagement in Wellington.

When I first started speaking, I had lots of speaking engagements, and yes, it took me away from Auckland quite a bit. I love speaking, I love getting on stage, I love audiences, but on this one occasion, I completely bombed.

I had just listened to a sort of podcast or audio recording, and this person said, you know, you shouldn't have slides, because slides take away from your presentation.

It wasn't for me, but I followed their advice anyway. And when I got on stage, I forgot what I had to say. This wasn't just minutes after I got on stage. I'd been on stage for about 10 minutes, 12 minutes maybe, and then I went blank.

And if it were some free speaking engagement, maybe I wouldn't have thought so much about it. It's still terrifying, but I wouldn't have thought so much about it. Instead, this was a company that had paid me to be a professional, and somehow I'd goofed up.

So I exited the stage, went to my hotel room, locked myself there, and didn't show up or didn't emerge until I had to go to the airport. And when I got to the airport, I was hoping nobody would recognize me. That's not the end of the story. That wasn't the fear. The fear was that a couple of years later, I was scheduled to speak at the same venue in Wellington.

Now, it's not the same audience, it's not the same speech, and I have my slides, and I'm a completely different person, but it doesn't matter because the fear, or what we call stress, is still embedded in our systems. It was certainly embedded in my system. The fear was all the way from Auckland to Wellington, when I got to the hotel, when I got to the stage.

And then, you know the story, it ended well. And this is a second type of fear that we have, where we know what we have done wrong. We know sometimes the exact steps that we should have taken.

But we call it stress, and we avoid that situation over and over again. It might not be monumental, like standing on a stage in front of an audience. It might just be something that we have to do at our workplace or in our home, and we failed at it before, we know why we failed, and we decide we're not going to do this again.

Yes, it is scary and that's what kids would call it. They would call it scary and then they would back away. And you, if you were a parent, you would say, okay, let me just walk you through this. Let's try it again.

Because you want to overcome that fear that you had, knowing fully well that you were the one responsible and you know how you got into that mess. To get rid of the stress, to get rid of the fear, you just have to do it again, and maybe again. But eventually, it'll go away. So those are two kinds of fear.

The first one where we don't know what we've done, but we just do it again. And the second time where we realize the mistake that we made, and then we go ahead and attempt it one more time. But the third kind of fear is the most insidious of all, and that is the fear of being an imposter.

You know that in the year 2000, I got to New Zealand, and at that point, I was a cartoonist, and a very good cartoonist, by the way. I got a substantial amount of work, considering that I was brand new in Auckland, and yet I wanted to do marketing. I wanted to take that time off, those three month vacations.

I didn't know it at that point in time. I didn't know it was gonna be three months or two months. I just wanted a different life from what I'd been leading back in India, where I was working quite a lot, taking time off, but not taking these huge chunks of time off.

I went to the library, maybe 30 books at a time. And that's when I decided this is what I want to do. I want to do marketing. But I felt like an imposter. I would go to networking meetings week after week, every Friday.

And I'd stand up and talk about marketing. But I didn't know anything about marketing. When I got my first consulting job with the Sofa store, I told the owner, I'll be back on Monday with a plan.

And I signed up for two workshops on the weekend. Spent about $3,000 on those two workshops. Didn't even go to one of them. But that's how much of an imposter I felt. Now if you're in your kitchen and you're trying to make a different type of bread or a different dish, you're not going to feel imposter syndrome.

I had to go from being a cartoonist to somebody who knew what they were talking about. And I didn't know anything about marketing. Words like marketing strategy and tactics, well, they really scared me.

This is one recurring fear that comes true for all of us. Sometimes people get on to an article writing course or a cartooning course, and they start to write really well, and they draw really well. But at the end of the course, they decide that they are just learning.

It's, I couldn't have learned all of this stuff in 12 weeks. I couldn't be so good in 12 weeks. Surely something is wrong. And I had to do something similar. I had to overcome that fear that I was just learning. I had to tell myself, you know enough. And you know what? We do know enough.

When we launch a course, we don't worry about how many people are going to show up, what's going to happen. We just go with the flow. And if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. If I have to go and speak to an audience, Renuka will tell me, you better prepare. And she'll tell me this about 16 times.

But I already know, to overcome that fear, I have to be prepared. And finally, I don't have Impostor Syndrome. Well, I'm saying that, but every time you learn a language, every time you learn something brand new, there is a certain Impostor Syndrome that comes in. It's a beginner syndrome, and beginners are supposed to be fearful.

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But is that the case? And do we have any control over what's happening around us? How do you stay calm even when things don't work for you?

Here are three questions to ask yourself to stop you from falling apart.

We were renovating our kitchen. Since the old kitchen had to be dismantled and removed, we hired a dumpster. This dumpster was located just outside our house and looked enormous.

Yet, within a day of the work starting, it was filled to the brim. The dumpster company wouldn't remove any excessive junk, and it looked like we'd slightly exceeded our quota. Then things took a turn for the worse.

It consisted of an enormous amount of packaging material and cardboard. It wasn't a last-minute decision, either. They'd taken the time to black out all the delivery details and even ripped off the packaging information so we could not track them down.

They knew exactly what they were doing and even tried to force some of the junk onto the top of the dumpster. Then, realising they might be caught in the act, they threw everything on the lawn and drove away.

Surprisingly, we had a chance to get back at these jokers. Like many “crimes”, the perpetrators often make one tiny mistake.

In this case, they had left one label with the courier's name and the tracking number. It was easy to find the address details on the website or call the courier company to explain the situation.

Except, we decided to do nothing about it. We realised they were somewhere in the neighbourhood, and we had at least a tiny chance of confronting them, but we decided to let it go.

Letting go doesn't always work. There are things you should pursue. However, in most situations, we have a few benchmarks that keep us sane.

1- Can I change anything?

Well, I guess I've done the same before. Right after that honking incident, do you think I feel better? Not at all. My heart is racing, so much of what happens next depends on the other guy. He might give me the finger, which then gets me really mad.

The problem with something that just happened is that… it already happened. It’s now part of the past. There’s no undo button when you knock over a cup of water. You can yell, jump up and down, even swear—but the carpet is still wet.

We often react strongly to events that are just seconds old but already unchangeable. I call this the “present-past.”

We all live in what I call the “present-past.”

We have wanted control since we were babies, and we’ve wanted things to go our way. And when life breaks the rules we’ve come to expect—like traffic rules, or how websites should work—we react.

If the answer was “no,” I’d stop fretting. I’d stop getting angry at unexpected rain, service downtime, or a waiter's mistake. If you can't change anything, let it go.

However, there's a little twist that comes up when you're dealing with other people. Maybe it's the waiter at the restaurant, or someone who could do a better job. Shouldn't you complain? Shouldn't the organisation do something? It depends on if “they” can change anything.

Let's look at the other side for a change.

Imagine you went out for dinner and the service was not as amazing as you'd expect. Maybe the waiter mixed up the order. At this point, most people get really upset.

“I need to speak to your manager”, they say angrily.

If you were to go back to the restaurant a day later, would the waiter be fired? Not at all. That's not because the restaurant doesn't care about your complaint. If they're smart, they'd give you a free dessert and even take the item off your bill, but they're not likely to fire the staff member.

It takes a lot of time to get the staff member up to speed. Even if you are able to fire someone on the spot, you have to replace them with someone. That someone has to be trained, or needs some time to get used to your system.

This is why you will run into situations where nothing changes very much. The restaurant or the service provider has other issues they need to consider. The job market may be very tight too, and they may not get as many applicants.

However, since there's always going to be hiccups, it's best to take those hiccups as part of the experience. Yes, you can complain, but most of the time it will not result in you having a better experience.

You will be angry, your friends and family will feel the frustration, and all you'll end up doing is complaining for the rest of the night.

I'd get upset, and then go on endlessly. At some point, I decided that in most cases, the organisation can't easily make changes.

Hence, if I step into a café and the coffee is bad, I simply pay the bill and don't drink the coffee. I move on to the next café and with a little luck, they meet with my expectations.

If the lawnmowing guy is always messing up, you have to complain or get a completely different service. If the coffee is terrible several times in a row, you'd have to let them know, or move on. However, barring a recurring problem, you can quite easily ignore the problem.

Why? It's because the organisation can't easily make changes. If you want to make changes, you'll have to make those changes to yourself. That allows you to keep calm even when things go awry.

Remember those guys who dropped their junk on our lawn? We could have gotten revenge. While we were on our walk, we spotted the van and the remaining packaging material outside their house.

Would dumping our garbage, or even theirs, as payback be better? I don’t think so. Even if we could justify our actions, it would only bring us some petty satisfaction. On the other hand, it could also start an unwanted battle.

While this may sound like being walked over, that’s not the case. I’ve seen the other side of the battle too. When I was 13, my parents were involved in a property dispute that went on for over two decades when I was 40. Was it worth it?

I don’t think so, which is why sometimes it’s better to do nothing. In this case, it might have been better to come to some agreement and settle. Both sides are never going to agree on the terms, but it’s possible to come within striking distance and settle.

We’ve had issues with the neighbour and the fence, and it got settled with a little give and take. On the other hand, we’ve had our products pirated for over two decades, and we’ve never bothered to go after the pirates. Sometimes, you just don’t bother.

Well, that rule is true for most things in life. Your calm is more important than winning some petty points here and there.

There may be some things that you have to fight for, but most of the things that drive us crazy don’t fall into that category. Instead, it’s the tiny, inconsequential things that set us off. And things don’t get better, so why bother? Stay calm.

1- Can I change anything?

Yes, that’s a heck of a checklist when you’re upset, but work on it one item at a time. You’ll be shocked at how quickly you can get to calm and stay calm all day long.

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