PreneurCast is a marketing podcast. Author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
Pete Williams talks to Dom Goucher about his recent panel appearance at Anthill Magazine’s Entrepreneurs dinner, and about “The Marketing Symphony”, the subject of Pete’s book project with Ed Dale and Robert Somerville of The Challenge.
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Pete and Dom talks about The Marketing Symphony
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Episode 002:
The Marketing Symphony
Pete Williams: Dom, big fellow. How are you, mate?
Dom Goucher: Pretty good, Pete. Pretty good.
Pete: Welcome to Episode 2 of PreneurCast. We are back.
Dom: We’re calling it PreneurCast, but we never did get the main name, did we?
Pete: No, no. But you know, we’ll negotiate on the aftermarket.
Dom: I’m with Ed’s [Ed Dale] plan: force of marketing.
Pete: In regard to?
Dom: Well, he says if you want to take over something or if you want to be known for something, and you’re worried about people copying you or any problems like that, you win by better marketing. That’s how you do it.
Pete: Oh, yes. That actually was a thing I was discussing on Tuesday night at a seminar that I was a panelist at, which was quite interesting. We actually spoke about a few different bits and pieces for start-up entrepreneurs, and one of the things was intellectual property. A couple of speakers were off doing their usual rants and raves about, “You need to get a trademark. You need to do this,” all that sort of MBA bullshit. And I just kind of said, “Well, realistically, I think it’s just all about better marketing.” It’s exactly what Ed preaches, and me as well, is that the best form of copyright protection or marketing protection is better marketing.
Dom: And don’t forget… Because I’ve come across people because I help out with media production stuff, doing a lot of info products and I get this a lot. I’ve got one client at the moment and they’re like, “Oh, yeah. We’ve registered the trademark. We got the domain name. We’ve really thought it through.” I was like, “You haven’t shipped any content yet.”
Pete: Look, there’s a time and a place. I’m sure, like for some of the bigger corporate stuff, $180 or $200 to get a trademark isn’t much at all. So why wouldn’t you do it? But for a lot of start-ups, I think, you have that on your radar to do at some point just to confirm your market leadership and position. But realistically, for a lot of this stuff, I think it’s just about superior marketing, becoming a market leader in your market. And I think that in itself is enough sort of protection that you really need for a lot of things these days.
Dom: And I have to ask, because I’ve been in a similar situation, how well did that go down?
Pete: It was interesting. The panelists were a little bit, ooh, taken a step back. That was fine because they’re sort of innovation consultant and a marketing consultant with two of the other four panelists. So they all sort of had that MBA-style background. And that’s all fine and dandy. The audience, I think, seemed to really sort of get where I was coming from because I was the kind of the down-and-dirty entrepreneur of the panel who’s doing a lot of stuff in the real world with various businesses so I think it sort of resonated a lot with the people out there who were in the crowd, about 70 people or so for Anthill magazine, which is no longer a magazine actually, given the demise of the publishing industry. But James Tuckerman, a guy I’ve known for quite sometime started a magazine a few years ago here in Australia that was kind good in the entrepreneurial space, innovation entrepreneurial-type. It was a bimonthly magazine. ‘Bimonth,’ does that mean two a month or one every two months? I always get that…
Dom: I’m like that with you. I haven’t got a clue really what it means. It’s every two months.
Pete: Yeah, every two months. So they were doing great. Given sort of the way the publishing world, they’ve gone to an online model now. They’re doing really, really well. But I do these various sort of info evenings. This one was called ‘Entrepreneurs’ Night Out.’ And basically, they get a bunch of panelists to talk about all things entrepreneurial, which was good fun. There were 70 people there — business cards being been swapped, beers being drunk, people talking about what they do. So it was a good night out, quite a bit of fun.
Dom: Cool. What’s been your main focus this week then? What’s been going on other than your jollies out?
Pete: Other than my jollies out? The big thing this week is just getting back to shipping, just focusing on some projects and trying to ship, which is sort of the big buzzword at the moment. Everyone seems to be talking about shipping, you know? Steven Pressfield’s fantastic book Do the Work, which is awesome; Seth Godin has been a big proponent of the shipping mentality; and obviously, for those of you following Merlin Mann, his latest escapades with his book and Cranking, which is a blog post, and the Back to Work podcast that came out — all about shipping.
So just like everyone else, I’ve been focusing on shipping. And again, similar to Merlin, it’s been around the book. For those of you who haven’t been playing along at home, I’ve got a new book that’s coming out last year with a couple of very good buddies of mine, very, very smart men Rob Somerville and Ed Dale. So that book’s sort of been churning and been coming out for a while now. We’re getting to the final end of it. We’ve got the first draft, I guess you’d call it, down. And it’s just about going through that and refining it, and making it something that we’re proud of. That’s sort of been the biggest focus for me of late and will be for the next sort of four or five weeks until I head off to Bali for my fiancée’s 30th birthday. We’re going to Bali which should be fun.
Dom: So that was a nice little segue into the holiday thing. But let me drag you back to the book.
Pete: I want to talk about the holiday because I had to get injections today and my arms hurt.
Dom: Can I say a nasty word? Can I say procrastination?
Pete: Yeah, okay. Fair enough.
Pete: Yes, back on point. Bring me back. Focus.
Dom: For people who aren’t playing along at home, what’s the book about?
Pete: The book is about everything that’s not the product. The book has two underlying ethos. The first thing is based on the foundation of The Challenge or for the veterans out there, what was the 30 Day Challenge, which is a program started by Ed quite a few years ago which is designed to help people start a business using the internet as the platform. I hate saying an ‘internet business’ or an ‘online business’ because that’s just crap. It’s a business that happens to have the platform being the internet. We can talk about that entire thing in another soapbox episode if you want to.
But basically The Challenge is all about getting your business up and running, and making your first dollar on the internet. And it’s been fantastic over the six or so years that it’s been running. It’s just grown and grown, and grown very much virally. Last year, from memory, about 76,000 people from around the world took part in it. So it’s a huge, huge thing. It’s basically built on the foundation of the training so to speak, which is all completely free. For those who are interested, challenge.co is the domain. It’s awesome. I’m a faculty member of that. But again, back on to the book.
The book is basically about everything that’s not covered in The Challenge. So the theory, the context, the framing and the foundation of what The Challenge is built on, which in essence is a thing that we refer to as ‘The Marketing Symphony,’ which is four parts. So the first part is market research, then you’ve got traffic, conversion and then finally, product. So unlike a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of the people who were actually there on Tuesday night, funnily enough, who were sort of asking questions of the panel about what can I do with their business and things like that, a lot of people when they are starting out, they’re very passionate and focused on the product.
When they ask you questions about their business, they want to tell you all about the product, why the product’s so good, why the product’s so different, what’s going to make the product stand out, and why everyone wants to buy the product. But realistically, the most successful businesses do the other way around. They go market first. So that means you focus on market research: is there a market of people out there who actually want to buy what you’re selling? Does there exist a group of people who have money, with the propensity to spend it, with a problem that needs solving that they’re willing to spend that money on the solution?
You have to really focus on that first. And that’s the first step of The Challenge and the first chunk of The Challenge is all about that. Then from there, the focus is getting traffic. So yes, you may know people that need to file a tax return every year, or you know people that are out there wanting to teach their parrot to sing, or there are people’s roofs need shackling or whatever the term might be. But once you’ve got that and you’ve established that yeah, there are enough people in your area that needs a tax return, well, how are you going to get that phone to ring? How are you going to get those clients?
It’s not about doing a better tax return yet. It’s not about being out of there and cross-sell insurance or do trusts and that sort of stuff. It’s about, okay, the first thing is yes, there’s a market, how do we get people to call me? So it’s focused on then getting traffic. Whether it might be foot traffic in your business or web traffic, the visitors or phone calls, you’ve got to focus on that and get that engine right. And then once you get the traffic, then you go, “Okay. Well I can definitely get traffic to this business. There are people interested in actually looking for my information. Well then, you’ve got to build a conversion engine. That’s all about getting that traffic and converting it into sales. You have to be a salesperson. That’s something that a lot of people, they get that little vomit, they throw up in their mouth when they start thinking about being a salesperson. But realistically, you have to be.
You don’t have to be a door-to-door cold-calling salesperson, but you have to close and convert. You can put systems in place and conversion tactics in place. Once you get that down pat, then and only then is it about the product. I can give you case study after case study. When we started the telco company, which is my biggest project, venture or company (whatever you want to refer to it as) that I’m involved in, when we started that, we went traffic first. Myself and my two business partners in that particular entity, none of us ever installed a phone system. We started that business by traffic and conversion. We got the engine right to actually get traffic to the business. Our phone continually rings off the hook. We had a very strong skills set and system in place to actually convert those calls into phone system buyers.
Then we outsourced the actual implementation originally. We just got subcontractors. You can almost call them competitors to a certain extent and use them to actually do the implementation of the phone system, the actual install and support, and all that technical product stuff. And then, obviously, as we grew and the volume grew, it became much more financially beneficial for the business to actually start hiring technical staff and have it all in-house, which is obviously what we do now, that’s fine.
But the product was the very last thing we focused on. We worried about getting traffic and converting that traffic into sales. Then we worried about the product and actually bring the product in-house, so to speak. That’s a long nutshell of what the actual book is all about. It’s just sort of walking people through that methodology, that line of thinking, that structure, that framework, that every other adjective, noun and verb that you can think of, whatever one of those three words used is the correct one. So that’s the fundamentally what the book is about. Is that coherent enough? Is that concise enough? Is that long enough? Does that make sense?
Dom: Well, it is definitely long enough, dude. I, for one, am really interested in seeing this. Because to me the principle of The Marketing Symphony — yes, okay, everybody’s listening. There’s a potential for me to be blowing smoke up various backsides with this. But, the concept of The Marketing Symphony is out there, for me, with the kind of concepts that were put across in The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.
Pete: Yes.
Dom: I was a latecomer to The E-Myth. If I had read that the first time around, it would have changed how I did everything in the last seven or eight years. Literally, every single thing because he comes out with this absolutely outrageous idea. If you’re someone like me, I’m a content producer. I make product. I’m not a marketer, not by trade. I’m not an entrepreneur like that. I’m what he calls a technician in The E-Myth. So, every day, I’d get up and I’d focus in making the gold standard product. But he says in The E-Myth, that’s not a business — that’s work. Whether you work in an office for another guy or whether you work for yourself, it’s your business. But if you focus on making a product that’s just another job. He puts across this idea that you need to look at all these different systems and whatever. Let’s not go into that. But to me, The Marketing Symphony is out there with that kind of a concept for people like myself.
Pete: Absolutely. I think the big thing is that so many people, particularly in blue-collar trades, they go and do apprenticeship for four years and they learn how to fix the pipe, bang the nail, screw the screw and whatever else they do in apprenticeship. They walk away knowing their product. They know that product inside out. They know the S-bend from a drain pipe, from whatever the heck sort of wrench it might be, whatever sort of plumbing utensils and tools people use. They know that inside out. They know their product. But that’s not a business. How are they going to get clients? How are they going to keep clients? How are they going to convert clients? How are they going to turn into a revenue stream? That’s the real focus.
Dom: Yeah. In a way, even more than The E-Myth, The Marketing Symphony, when I first came across it when I first started doing The Challenge — oh, wow, it was like three-plus years ago now, when I first went through The Challenge myself, that was the first thing I saw. I came across it completely by accident. I was over looking at people and all they were doing was saying, “Make product. Make an information product. Make an information product of the future. La, la, la.” And then Ed pops up. And I remember this because it was literally an ad scribble on a lined legal pad. And it just…
Pete: Is this the one where he drew the hill and the two pieces of two roads, the country highway and the city highway?
Dom: No, no, no, no. It was even more sketchy than that. It was a four-part sort of symphony with a really hand-drawn scribbly funnel in the middle of it.
Pete: Oh, yeah.
Dom: And he just literally panned around it and talked about it. I just sat there and I almost bruised my forehead from slapping it so hard. I’ve spent years perfecting my art of product creation and I was ready. I really thought I’ve got this great product and I’m really focused on it for a while. Then that came along. I went, “Hang on a minute. He’s right. I’ve not even asked anyone if they want this.” It’s a total guess. So from an entrepreneurial point of view, The Marketing Symphony is absolutely perfect. It’s exactly as you’ve said. No traffic, no demands before you start. No demand, don’t waste any more time. Got demand but no traffic, wait until you get some traffic. But the product is absolutely the last thing.
Just to drop another name, Dan Raine, who’s kind of part of The Challenge gang, he’s out there with The Immediate Edge. He’s a lot more focused and really blunt about this in his methodologies in The Edge. A lot of people have been quite shocked by some of the stuff that he puts out and the way he tests for traffic and things. But he’s absolutely adamant. He says if there’s no demand then no traffic, that’s it. Bye. Next one.
Pete: Move on. Yep.
Dom: Move on.
Pete: It’s got to be the numbers thing. You got to do business by the numbers to a certain extent at the early stage.
Dom: Absolutely.
Pete: That’s been my week and that’s going to be my week for the next four or five weeks hopefully, just trying to bum in chair, sit down, focus, write, and get this thing finished. It’s weird. I’m a big fan of Merlin Mann and what he does over at 43 Folders and stuff. It always seems, whatever he seems to be doing, I’m trying to subconsciously or somehow manifesting the same result in my life — the whole starting with Inbox Zero and big believer in the whole Inbox Zero methodology and all that sort of stuff, and productivity stuff which is where he built his name and his brand, I guess you’d call it. And then from that, he’s got the MerlinMann.com site. If you check out PeteWilliams.com.au, it’s basically modeled off Merlin’ site. So I’ve done that. Then he comes out with the whole cranking blog posts about how he’s struggling with his book that’s again should have been shipped by now and all that sort of stuff, here I am doing the same thing. It’s quite ironic that I just seemed to be channeling Merlin Mann.
Dom: That’s not really a bad thing. You can work your way up from Merlin to eventually, Seth Godin.
Pete: Yeah. There you go.
Dom: Channeling those two guys is not a bad thing, modeling yourself on those
Pete: As long as you can ship.
Dom: As long as you can ship. How is it going? I mean, a book. A lot of people struggle with writing a blog post every week. How is that going because that’s a massive project?
Pete: It’s different to the first book. I had my first book come out six years ago now, I’d say six years ago maybe.
Dom: Oh, yeah. That’s right. You’re a published author, aren’t you?
Pete: Yeah, mate. This is the second book I’ve got coming out through a third party or an actual physical publisher. Done a couple of other sort of smaller books self-published, I guess you’d refer to them as in-between. But this is the second book that’s going to be through a traditional publisher. So with the first book, I used a ghostwriter to help me put that one together. I sat down with Michael, probably about twice a week for about six months, give or take.
Dom: Wow.
Pete: Just literally sat down one morning every breakfast and kind of gave him a big verbal diarrhea plateful of my ideas and an overview, as well as dumped on his lap about 30 books full of Post-it notes saying, “This is sort of what I’m trying to say in Chapter Two. This is kind of where I got my idea from for Chapter Four. This is sort of the scope or the flow that I think should work for Chapter Six.” And he went off and did an amazing job of taking my incoherent ramblings, some bullet points and bunch of Post-it notes with the various things all over them to make a great little book which I was very proud of. It was an interesting sort of scenario where someone pays you to write a book about marketing but it doesn’t take your advice to actually market the book. That was a little ironic and I think that’s partly why the publishing game is in the space that’s in right now. But then again that’s a whole another soapbox.
Dom: Oh, yeah. That’s definitely for another day, that one.
Pete: This one is a lot more me. I had some people help me put some stuff together early on. But this one is very much me trying to actually sit down, bum-in-chair, timer on for 25 minutes like we spoke about in the last session. I had a time and just churn through stuff and just say, “Okay. This is what I’m going to do now, small bite-sized chunks and just push through” It’s been tough. There have been months where it’s sort of… It has been the Resistance for me, as Steven Pressfield puts it. I just sit down in front it and it just freezes me for whatever reason. It just sort of came back.
I could ramble on for ages about why it is where it is. But fundamentally, we need to push this out because it’s a great a book and it’s got a great message. I think a lot of people will really want to hear it and need to hear it as well. And I think it’ll do well. I’ve got big goals for the book itself, which is probably partly why there is resistance. I think part of resistance is actually somewhat fed by big hairy audacious goals. The bigger the goal, the more you actually feel the resistance. You don’t want to ship something that’s sub-par because you know subconsciously that for it to reach that goal, it’s got to be quality and then you start questioning your own radar of what quality is.
Dom: This is something that I’m really interested in your input on…
Pete: Now seriously, for my input — get the cream and apply it. The rash will go away in three weeks. I promise you that. That’s my input. Sorry, back on point.
Dom: Thank you for that wonderful response.
Pete: That’s what my doctor told me today when I got my injection. So, I’m just passing on the doctorly advice.
Dom: Please don’t get me started on that, okay? We’ve only got half an hour.
Has putting your name on this thing got anything to do with it as well? You’ve got goals. You wanted to succeed at such a book. It’s going to have your name on it.
Pete: Oh, ego. Absolutely.
Dom: What about the procrastination side of things though? What about that? Because you are known as an entrepreneur, you’re known as a successful guy. So if you did something this public and it doesn’t — I’m not saying it’s not going to because it’s a fantastic idea and you’re working with some fantastic guys, but is that in there somewhere?
Pete: Yeah. I’m sure. The cake of procrastination is a matter of many layers. Wherever that came from but anyway.
Dom: That’s quite good though. I like that.
Pete: I like that. I’ll trademark that.
Dom: There’s a blog post in that for the big corporate.
Pete: There’s a blog post in that. I’ll have to talk to one of those panelists from Tuesday and then work out how to trademark it.
Now, I think so. There’s definitely a part of that. I think the logical side of it says, “Well, look. You can reframe anything no matter whether it goes well or goes bad. You can reframe it, point fingers, explain and justify.” A lot of different things, a lot of different ways. If it doesn’t succeed, if it goes really, really well. But on a subconscious level, which I think is as wanky as it sounds where resistance bubbles up and feeds and grows, is yeah. It has to be some of that. The ego is there. I want to make sure I ship stuff that’s good.
There are so many clichés and sayings that I think subconsciously do stuff to us as well. You’re only as good as the last blog post you publish or you’re only as good as your last album if you’re a musician and all that sort of stuff. As soon as it ships, I’m only going to be as good as that book is. Whereas right now, I’m great. But as soon as this book ships, if it’s only good, well then I’m only good or whatever it might be.
Dom: How are you beating down the procrastination? You talked about Steven Pressfield. I’ve read the Do the Work book, excellent piece of marketing between him and Seth Godin.
Pete: Absolutely. I’ve got the audio book, downloaded the audio book the other day.
Dom: I did the Kindle free thing.
Pete: I did that as well. I read that first but I’m a big audio guy. The thing I find disappointing with the audio book is actually somehow I ordered the audio book but it came on CD, MP3 CD. So I got a CD in the mail from Amazon. You couldn’t actually download the audio version, I think, at that time. I had to get it shipped on CD. But the CD came with the MP3 version of the book in six separate MP3 files, which was so frustrating. I wish there was a solution for that. A way to actually stitch those MP3 files together in just one audio book would be awesome if there was.
Dom: Hey, product idea. Quick, trademark it before anybody else gets the idea.
Pete: Listen to the next podcast. We might talk about some of the new projects that you’re involved in, that we’re doing together which kind of fits in with that teaser as they say in the biz.
Dom: So, you still dodged the question of how you’re dealing with procrastination.
Pete: Yeah, by saying crap like that and working on silly little Mac apps and stuff like that. That’s what’s causing it. How I’m actually dealing with it now is, let me blow smoke up your butt. You’ve been blowing some smoke up my way. I’m making you my trainer, my gym trainer, I guess is sort of one way of putting it in a very basic analogy. You’re my coach. You’re not my writing coach. I’m making myself accountable to you is the coherent way of saying that where I give myself deadlines. Part of it, and I think it’s the same problem Merlin’s had, is that the publisher has been almost too good to us, “Oh, yeah. Not a problem. The book is going to be great. When you’re ready to get it to us, get it to us.” That’s sort of not great because I think you need deadlines in life to make stuff happen.
Dom: Yeah.
Pete: Self-justified deadlines haven’t worked historically, clearly. Otherwise, the book will be in bookstores and that would be different. So it’s fundamentally getting you to sort of keep me accountable, just like my team are accountable to me every day with their daily emails and that sort of stuff — if you saw the presentation I did at Going Pro, Ed’s event, about how my team are accountable to me. I’m basically doing the same to you that I’ll make commitments of what I’m going to work on, and then emailing you those commitments, and then we discuss it.
Now, there’s no real stick. That’s the carrot side of things but there isn’t really a stick. If I actually don’t meet the deadline, I’m in Australia, you’re in Spain, so you can’t really come and hit me over the head with a stick. There’s no real punishment per se that we’ve put into place because hopefully, just the embarrassment of not hitting a deadline and myself, I’ll use the word ego, I guess, I don’t want to sort of break promises and not follow through. Hopefully, just the promise of I’m going to do this and being accountable, that way should be enough.
If we don’t hit that, then we’ll change the rules of the game again because it’s our game and we can play it how we want. That basically, in a coherent way, is that I’m getting you to keep me accountable. By every couple of days, we jump on Skype and I’ll email you the updates of the book. You can read it and give me a feedback. Tell me what’s crap and tell me what’s great. And just fundamentally, if you don’t read it, I don’t care. You can feel free to print it out and use it as firewood and keep yourself warm. But if you want to actually read it, then great. But it’s all about keeping me accountable. I guess I’m talking in circles now.
Dom: The important thing there though is I think that it’s an accountability thing. Because a lot of people in this situation or previously, you handed everything over and gave it to somebody, and you were almost checking their work after that point.
Pete: Yeah.
Dom: Making sure that they have done the right thing. That was a form of tight relationship, a form of difficult one to get, really find somebody who can help you that way.
Pete: There’s plenty people out there who ghost writes, isn’t it? That’s their job and they do a fantastic job of it. That was really easy for me. I just turned up a couple mornings a week, had breakfast and just talked because I enjoy talking. It wasn’t a stretch for me at all to ship that because I really didn’t do anything. I just had breakfast and talked. Whereas this actually, I’ve got to push, I’ve got to get down, I’ve got to grind through the writing process, which is interesting. The whole accountability thing, which is possibly where you also want this to go, I think it’s important for anybody, no matter what you’re in, again this is a whole another podcast which we probably should do is the lessons of how running a marathon or training for a triathlon can apply to doing your business.
That’s something that’s been with me a little bit, which I think could be a great episode. We’ll put that in, but I guess another teaser for that or a prequel would be that I think the thing that got me to do my marathon last year and will hopefully get me to do my Ironman that I’m doing in December this year, will be the fact that I’ve got a coach who is expecting things from me. It’s not whether I run or don’t run or swim in the morning — it doesn’t affect him and his family. But it’s just that accountability that he’s going to be there coaching. What if I didn’t turn up? He’s going to know that I didn’t turn up. So, I think that applies to a lot of people and why people have personal trainers for the gym and stuff like this.
It’s not about necessarily them telling you you’ve got to lift this piece of metal over your head 20 times, it’s about them just they’re going to be there when you’re there. I think anybody who does group training sessions and stuff with a friend, it’s important that someone’s there and you’re accountable to someone. So much when it comes to business, people tend to do things on their own. It’s just obviously not the case. I think it’s a silly thing to do and that’s why masterminds work really, really well. But even masterminds to a certain extent, I think, you can kind of get lost in the group. If there are six of you in a mastermind group, there’s always going to be one person who isn’t as proactive as the rest of the group and I think that’s what it is.
And there are benefits to masterminds. I’m in a few and it’s actually a mastermind that got me my first book deal and we can talk about that if you want to. But I think the real secret is having one person you’re accountable to and be the mirror for somebody else. I think that’s really helpful. If you really want to push this, ship this and get it done, I needed that mirror and that’s what you’re doing for me, which has been great for the whole 48 hours or 72 hours that we’ve been doing it.
Dom: Working well so far. We’re getting close on the time on this one. But really what I was looking at with that because something that Seth Godin wrote on his blog in the last couple of days really hit me. He wrote this thing, and it’s one of those things that make you feel a bit rubbish. He’s good at that. He’s good at that. His advice is good, but sometimes it makes you feel really rubbish. The latest thing that I read was about coaching, true coaching because I think there’s a difference between accountability and coaching. You kind of talked about it there. He basically says, summarizing the whole thing to the last sentence, coaches are fine. Coaching is fine. Having somebody to work with you, show you what to do and make you do it like directing you to do it is fine. But the true measure is what you do when they’re not there.
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: That was one of those “ooh” moment. I think it’s quite distinct between accountability and coaching. Because as I was trying to say with your ghost writer, yes, he’s fabulous. The work you did was less because he’s fabulous. But with this arrangement with you being accountable to me, you’re still doing all the work. I’m not even telling you what to do. I’m just asking you to tell me what you’re going to do and then asking you if you did it. Now, with all due respect, your mom could do that.
Pete: Absolutely. She probably could slap me if I didn’t do it. She could probably be better than you. But it’d be more embarrassing to get her to push me because she’s written for Cambridge University Press. She’s much more qualified than I to be writing stuff.
Dom: I guess what I’m trying to say is keeping it real, keeping it down at the level that everybody can do something about. If you’ve got something out there that you want to get done just — I mean, everybody says this. It doesn’t matter, you’ll hear this and read this, but everybody says this. If you’ve got something you want to get done, tell people you’re going to do it. Now Pete, you’ve gone and done it because you said it on the podcast.
Pete: Can I? I’m sorry. I’m going to have to interrupt for two seconds. I’m not going to be able to give it justice, but I’m pretty sure it was the TED talk. If you haven’t seen TED, just go and check it out; it’s amazing. There’s a TED talk about that exact point. And obviously, you can say 97% of statistics are made up. So you can sort of argue any way you want. A presentation on TED that I only saw recently and he was talking about the fact that if you say you’re going to do something — I’m going to get this completely wrong and ball it up and just not do this justice. But it was basically saying that subconsciously, if you already picture it in your mind already done, it’s actually less likely that you’ll take action because your subconscious thinks it’s already done.
Dom: Wow. That’s deep.
Pete: Yeah. I think I got that right. I hope I did. Sounds poignant enough. But it was interesting and that’s as much as I can say on the topic. It was just interesting to sort of say, “Well, okay…” He said it so eloquently that there’s a different way. He agrees with you that you want to make public declarations. But there’s a way to word that public declaration to enhance your percentage of completion, I guess, is how you could put it. I can’t remember what it was. We should go and check it out and we’ll put in the show notes if I can find it or mention that quickly at the start of the next episode. But it was just about, yeah, you want to make public declarations but you want to do it in a specific way so you don’t feel like it’s already done. Otherwise, you won’t go and do it.
I think that’s possibly a big thing about why the book hasn’t been finished yet because I’ve spent so many times in my mind lying in bed at night thinking about the blog post I’m going to write, thanking everyone when the book hits New York Times Best Sellers List. People do it. Everyone has done that. Don’t get me wrong. I wish that was the same in terms of the stuff with Jennifer Aniston, but that’s a whole another podcast again. But I think that’s part of it too that you can make that picture in your mind so real about what it’s going to be like when you actually achieve it and when you finish it, your body thinks it’s already finished.
Dom: That’s seriously deep. I think that’s a really good thing for us to finish because my brain’s going to melt with that.
Pete: Well, let’s call it a show. It’s probably about time. You’re the watch keeper. I just kind of sit here and talk. I guess back on the whole thing is, the reason this podcast is going to ship every week is because we’re accountable to each other that we turn up on time every week to talk, share our experiences, probe each other and blow smoke up anybody’s butt who’s justified to have it blown in their direction. Let’s wrap it up. We’ll start again next week with the next episode.
Dom: Excellent, mate. Excellent. See you next week.
[/peekaboo_content]
Show Notes + Links:
Books Mentioned:
The E-Myth Revisited – Michael E. Gerber
Other links:
Challenge.co – The Challenge
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