Last week I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Robert Cialdini talk at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas.

For those of you who didn’t make it out of your hotel rooms in time (who schedules a 10am talk at an affiliate convention anyway!!), here are the notes I furiously thumb-typed on my iPhone:

• Products already have merit.
  • Just need to use influence principles to sell, that’s all.
• Consistency – small, public, compliance.
• Liking – give them info that lets them match their experience to yours – e.g., “about us” should include personal aspects.
• Scarcity accelerates the merits of an existing product – ask what feature of your product is scarce (what can’t they get elsewhere) – can be a bundle and combination.
• Loss aversion – under uncertainty, it is more powerful for someone to lose something than gain that same thing – must tell people what they will lose.
  • e.g., gaining $1 a day vs losing $1 a day.
• The word “new” is bad in marketing – creates uncertainty and creates loss aversion.
  • “new” vs “hear what you’ve been missing”.
• Persuasion lets you shortcut marketing gains.
• Exclusivity of information – people are more persuaded by exclusive information.
• Combine scarcity and exclusivity – e.g., beef shortage and by the way, this info comes to us from exclusive sources, nobody else has this information yet…
  • Make commodity AND information about scarcity, scarce.
  • Implication = when you get exclusive info… make it known.
• Cialdini’s base assumption is always that the product has merit.
• Authority.
  • Testimonials from experts in the field.
  • When people are uncertain they don’t look inside themselves, they look to authorities – follow the lead of genuine experts.
  • Credible communicator – knowledge + trustworthiness.
  • Building trust – mention weakness in case first, then introduce strengths/power features.
  • Use “but” as a pivot into strongest argument – “take the information I just gave you and put it away…”.
• Markets are made up of people. Not econometrics.
  • “blah blah blah but here’s the point I want you to focus on”.
  • i.e., change sequence of marketing messages to “bad but good”.
• Consensus.
  • Ppl look to their peers in uncertainty – ppl just like them.
  • As simple as stating “these are our most popular items”.
  • Others must be multiple and comparable.
• You don’t get to claim partnership (with customers), you have to earn it.
• Say “join your fellow guests”.
  • Similar others – create specificity based on whatever information you have about them.
  • e.g., hotel room towel change – standard, cooperation, many others, many similar others, many specific others (same hotel room).
• Testimonials sequence has to change to match similarity of customer profile.

- Aaron P

As some have undoubtedly noticed I’ve been very busy during my travels in London and Europe, and will remain so over the next couple of months – some of my friends already know the reason for this, whilst others likely assume that I’m just traveling and enjoying myself far too much

Yes, I am indeed traveling and enjoying myself, but I am also involved with something much more interesting. I am partaking in something that can be considered a grand social experiment, which as it unfolds, I’ll be able to speak more about in the upcoming weeks.

- Aaron P

The past few weeks have been some of the best (and craziest) of the year.

In early August I found myself in New York City, at 4 in the morning, sitting in the hallway on the 36th floor of the Hilton eating a sandwich and talking to my friend Benny about life and goals. In late August I found myself in San Diego’s Gaslamp District, enjoying the gorgeous weather and thinking… wow, I’ve got it pretty good – I live an interesting life.

Right now I’m sitting in the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse at SFO, about to fly to London for what’s going to be a completely life-changing trip. More details to come later

I’ve recently been reading Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz – it’s all about self-image and the notion that we become that picture of ourselves that we have in our mind. This could not be more true. It’s probably the basis of all self growth and development. A year ago I could not picture myself doing any of the things I’ve done this year, nor would I have imagined that my “job” involves traveling the world and hanging out in cafes building websites (an oversimplification, but you get the point). But something changed over October-November-December last year… I had this burst of clarity, and formed a vivid and descriptive picture of what I thought my life would look like… and it’s pretty much the life I’m living now.

I feel like I’m at a point again where that self-image needs to be updated. Over the next couple of months I am going to be doing some truly amazing things, and my life will be better for it. I will come out the other side a different person, with a different idealised view of myself to hold in mind. In order to do that, I’m going to have shed myself of my old self-image, and burn some bridges. This is deep. It’s an idea that came out of discussions with my friend Andrew. We noticed that in our lives, as we became successful, we habitually went back and burnt our bridges. In my case, when my business became cash-positive I burnt my resume, and deleted all copies I had of it. I made a promise and gesture to myself to never need it again. In one sense, this is a sort of mental & spiritual separation between your past and yourself. But I feel that it’s also something practical – if you’re devoting energy to some past notion, idea or belief… even if it’s only a splinter in your awareness, it’s still there. And it’s holding you back. Cut it loose, and don’t be afraid to step into the unknown. Be the trapeze artist that lets go of one swing before knowing if she can grab the next one.

Your life can be whatever you want it to be – it’s just up to you to imagine it first.

- Aaron P

September

Turns out my plans for September have worked out pretty well after all… I will be in London from early September through mid-November.

Anyone travelling in the UK, be sure to get in touch!

Success Barriers

I discovered a cool method for discovering success barriers the other day. A lot of self-help people talk about them, but then quickly say that we’re often blind to them and there’s no real way to uncover them (apart from going to the $10,000 3-day seminar of course )… until now.

I actually came across the idea by accident. I was resetting some of my goals for the next 1-2 years, and building a highly regimented weekly schedule packed full of short 1-2 hour “rituals” (credit: Tony Schwartz), that if I followed would progress me towards each and every one of my goals incementally, and making sure that all parts of my life were moving forward (health, wealth, relationships, happiness).

After following the schedule for about a week, I found that there were certain activities that I somehow managed to sideline and not pay attention to… and there it was: those particular activities, and the areas they belonged to were where my success barriers were. The theory I came up with was this- for whatever reason, my unconscious mind had reshuffled my schedule, placed less emphasis on or what-have-you and basically stopped me from progressing those parts of my life. And the reason behind it… was that there was a success barrier there.

I then took a closer look at the particular activity, what would happen if I had been working on the activity and what it would lead to. And thus, I uncovered a couple of success barriers in my life – blocks put in place at the unconscious level that were holding me back.

As for how to move past success barriers… well, there’s even less information out there on that topic. Some suggest just bashing away at it, some suggest therapy-based work, some suggest reframing the issue. I’m trying a combination of everything I know, and hopefully will come up with a streamlined process at some point!

- Aaron P

Wow, what a day. Got up at about 2pm, ran some errands, did my laundry and then pondered the question: what to do in September?

So in the practice of inevitability thinking I had let my landlord know that I would be vacating my place at the end of August. I did this to push myself forward into action to do what I had to do.

And so today, I did. I sat down and worked out where my life is at and where it is headed. It was all very confusing for the first 4 hours. BUT, then I remembered… to ask myself if what I was doing (or planning to do) was taking me towards or away from my goals.

So I reviewed my big goals for this year:

1. Grow my business by 10-20 times by the end of the year.
2. Get in better shape. Take up some more physical activities.
3. Grow and nurture my social circle.
4. Travel and have a lot of fun.
5. Move towards a 4 hour work week lifestyle.

My recent stay in Sydney showed me that I really could live a 4 hour work week lifestyle – I think I did all of one day’s worth of work while I was there, and my income stayed constant. However, this goes against my number one goal of growing my business.

My original plan for September was to jump ship to Buenos Aires and learn some Spanish. After some online investigating and talking to some people who have lived there recently, the plan fell apart. A typical week in Buenos Aires would have looked something like this:

Monday – get up, language class, Spanish Study, bit of work, go out.

Tuesday – get up, language class, Spanish Study, bit of work, go out.

… and the same thing all the way through Friday. Saturday and Sunday would be going out all day and running personal errands.

I feel that if I’m going to spend an extended period of time in a given country, I want to take the time to absorb the culture and language. There’s no point moving somewhere and then trying to live like an Australian/American.

When I tallied up the potential working hours, it came out at about 5-6 hours a week of solid, interruption-free work time. I know from my recent Sydney trip and past experience that 5-6 hours is enough to maintain my business, but not to grow it. So… moving to BA violates big goal number one, so it’s off the list. Which is a bit of a downer as I was completely excited about it and told everyone I was moving haha.

Option number two is travel-and-work. This would be mostly around the US and UK, so the language barrier is a non-issue. This means more time to work on my business, and still get to see the sights and travel and have fun. The financial cost of travelling on the road, staying in nice hotels and so on and so forth would work out to about $7,000-$10,000 a month, at least from what I could dig up online. While I could make this work, for some reason spending that much money seems somewhat excessive, especially because it focusses mainly on goal #4 and is not conducive to goals #2 and #3, and only partially to #1 (it would take a lot of discipline to sit in a hotel room and work for 5 hours straight).

Option number three is to stay in San Francisco. This actually makes quite a bit of sense. Financially, my cost of living remains the same. I’ll be able to hit up goals #1-3 & #5 easily, and if I take weekend trips domestically or to Canada then I’ll get some #4 in there too. To make this happen I would have to: let my landlord know that I’m staying (or find a new place), really hammer down and focus on developing my business (i.e., set more aggressive goals and targets), and spend more time just going out and having fun. I should also keep in mind that I still do want to travel the world, and that I want to do it on my terms. So… I also need to decide where I’m headed next year (which, ironically was my original plan at the start of this year, but more on this below), and start preparing for that.

Which brings me to something interesting. My two big “impulse” decisions to jet off in September this year were largely fuelled by a couple of friends who were all about “let’s go overseas and have fun!”. One of them did, albeit a few months early and is now enjoying himself living in East Asia. The other has decided to take a different path in life, and hasn’t really decided where he wants to go. For me, this says something pretty revealing: I got caught up in the excitement of the moment, and didn’t plan accordingly. I’ve realised that decisions like these really need to be made on an individual basis. I need to decide what I want to do, and work on my own schedule (I hate to say it, but most people are pretty unreliable). My trip planning for next year will follow this philosophy.

- Aaron P