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MASTERYINTENSIVE

THE

Los Angeles • December 6–8, 2013

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The only way to get good at something is to completely immerse yourself in it.

To the outside world, immersion is the same as magic.

— James Altucher

TheProsperousCoachMasteryIntensive • December5–8,2013 • RichLitvin

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Welcome to The Mastery Intensive

If you are here to live an extraordinary life, generate true wealth and master the game of creating clients, you are in the right place.

But if you are here to live an extraordinary life, generate true wealth and and master the game of creating clients you’ll need you’ll need to dive deep. You see, mastery is a life-long game.

Mastery

To travel on a journey of mastery, you will have to practice diligently and hone your skills to attain new levels of competence. And you will have to be willing to spend more of your time on a plateau—to keep practicing even when you seem to be getting nowhere.

In life and in business we often reach a plateau and get stuck there, failing to make progress towards our goals. This is a natural consequence of a (very human) in-built resistance to change. However, for many people, the experience of plateaus often leads to frustration and abandoning desired goals.

In his book, Mastery, George Leonard distinguishes between three common attitudes towards attempting to master new skills or challenges—the dabbler, the obsessive and the hacker:

1. The dabbler tries many things, gets improvement, then plateaus and gets bored and tries something new. The dabbler loves the newness, so enthusiasm quickly wanes, with rationalizations. The dabbler might think of herself as an adventurer, a connoisseur of novelty, but she’s probably the eternal kid.

2. The obsessive is purely results oriented. She is inconsistent and when she hits a plateau she quits because her results aren’t increasing linearly. When the obsessive finds herself on a plateau, she won’t accept it. She redoubles her effort. She doesn’t understand the necessity for periods of development on the plateau.

3. The hacker is content where she’s at. She gets good, then doesn’t care to continue improving. The hacker is willing to stay on the plateau indefinitely.

The Prosperous Coach Mastery Intensive • December 5–8, 2013 • Rich Litvin

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There is nothing wrong with being the dabbler, the obsessive, or the hacker. Everyone is sometimes all of them. But if you want to become a master at a certain skill you must stay on the path of mastery.

Which persona are you closest to—the dabbler, the obsessive or the hacker?

How about your clients?

Mastery is a journey and a process, not a goal or destination. And society today tends to conspire against mastery by leading us to believe in the idea of instant gratification. Marketing and much of what you will come across online tends to communicate quick fixes and instant gratification. It promotes the idea of learning being linear or instantaneous. Which is not reality.

The Plateau

The problem is that most time spent at your skill level is spent on a plateau where you do not improve and you are often frustrated. If you are willing to keep practicing, often you will improve a lot, then get a little worse and then hit another plateau. Mastery is recognizing that this plateau is an improvement to your previous plateau and in order to be a master you must practice for the sake of practicing itself.

Mastery is about loving the plateau.

Can you find joy in regular practice? Can you practice for the sake of practice itself, not for reaching a certain level?

Here are some of the most important ideas on Mastery from George Leonard’s book:

1. Everyone resists change, good or bad. Expect some backsliding.

2. Any change may cause anxiety.

3. Resistance to change is proportionally to size/speed of change, not if it is good or bad.

4. Be aware of how homeostasis works.

5. Be willing to negotiate with your resistance to change.

6. Develop a support system. Particularly those who have gone before you.

7. Follow a regular practice.

8. Dedicate yourself to lifelong practice.


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9. You gain energy by using energy.

10. Maintain physical fitness.

11. Be honest with others, it will revitalize you.

12. Honor but do not indulge your darker side.

13. Set your priorities.

14. Make your commitments, Take action.

15. Get on the pathway of mastery, and choose to stay on it.

16. Don’t be obsessively goal-oriented. Be aware the peak is ahead, but don’t keep looking up. Keep your eyes on the path.

17. Your teacher is a teacher, not a guru.

18. Competition keeps you motivated.

19. Don’t be over competitive. External validation can often stop or slow the pathway to mastery.

20. Let go of vanity. You must be willing to look like a fool.

21. Don’t be too serious. Have fun.

22. Be consistent.

23. Value action over perfection.

Put In The Time

As Michael Neill once said:

If you’re looking to become a millionaire in a month or builda successful business from scratch in 90 days, I’ve got some bad news — it doesn’t work that way. Really.

I know of no way around this one — if you want to produce results and you’re not starting at the finish line, you need to put in the hours.

Our most powerful life experiences take place in a total immersion context. It’s why, in the past eight years, I have immersed myself in the study of coaching—and, more importantly, how to succeed as a coach. (And, for the eight years before that, I immersed myself in the study of Leadership. And for the eight years before that, I immersed myself in the study of pedagogy).


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I have studied, trained with and been coached by many of the best speakers and coaches in the world—some are well-known, many you’ll have never heard of. I’ve done deep, year-long trainings and I’ve been in a Men’s Group that met every single Monday night for 3 years. I’ve forgotten more trainings and workshops that I’ve attended, than I remember.

I have invested thousands of hours of my time and energy and focus and attention. I have read hundreds of books and invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my professional development. I have traveled the world to learn from the best trainers, speakers and coaches I could find. Some are well known, some you will have never heard of. I read constantly. I never stop learning. I risk everything. I fail far more than I succeed.

Your hunger is inspiring. Go out there and release that potential. Don’t let it remain bottled up.

The 13 Hidden Secrets of Being a Great Coach

These are the thirteen areas we will dive into this weekend:

SECRET #1: Lead

SECRET #2: Innovate

SECRET #3: Get Naked

SECRET #4: Listen to Your Intuition

SECRET #5: Take Risks. Fail

SECRET #6: Beyond Resilience—become Antifragile

SECRET #7: Tell Stories

SECRET #8: Be Fearless in Your Coaching

SECRET #9: Market (Without Marketing) & Sell (Without Selling)

SECRET #10: Create a Body of Work

SECRET #11: Never Stop Learning

SECRET #12: Do Deep Work

SECRET #13: Practice Radical Self Care


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Have fun this weekend.

Practice. Play full out. Lean into your edge.

Do things you’d normally not do.

Stay quiet when you crave to speak out. Speak out when you’d normally stay silent.

Speak to people you’d usually avoid.

Socialize when you’d prefer to go to your room.

Just listen when you’d usually write notes.

Write notes when you think, I’ve got this one.

Have fun. Practice. Play full out. Lean into your edge. Get uncomfortable.

If you do these things you will generate what you are asking for. You are on your way to Mastery.

And it’s a lifelong game.

Love. Rich

Don’t wait for one-hundred percent readiness. It will never come.

When you are eighty percent ready, go for it. Run straight at it. Get exposed.

Risk messing up.

—Rich Litvin

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The 13 Hidden Secrets of Being a Great Coach

SECRET #1: Lead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

SECRET #2: Innovate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

SECRET #3: Get Naked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

SECRET #4: Listen to Your Intuition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

SECRET #5: Take Risks. Fail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

SECRET #6: Beyond Resilience—Become Antifragile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

SECRET #7: Tell Stories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

SECRET #8: Be Fearless in Your Coaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

SECRET #9: Market (Without Marketing) & Sell (Without Selling) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

SECRET #10: Create a Body of Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

SECRET #11: Never Stop Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

SECRET #12: Do Deep Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

SECRET #13: Practice Radical Self Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

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Your clients want you to lead because it gives them permission to be leaders in their own lives. Do not be afraid of stepping into your power as a coach.

—Rich Litvin


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The 5 Marks of Authentic Leadership By Michael Hyatt

Many people have written on what it means to be a leader. Almost everyone identifies influence as the primary characteristic. By definition, this means that leadership and position are two different things. You can have a title, and a position of power, but this does not mean that you are a leader. Even people without these things can exert influence and thus leadership.

But leadership is more than influence. It certainly includes influence, but it is more. I believe it includes at least five characteristics. When I speak on this topic, I call these “the five marks of authentic leadership”:

1. Authentic leaders have insight. Sometimes we refer to this as vision, but that usually has exclusive reference to the future. While leaders must have vision, they need more. They need wisdom and discernment. (Click here to tweet that.)

They need to be able to look at complex situations, gain clarity, and determine a course of action. In the Bible, “[The] men of Issachar … understood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). This is what I mean by insight.

2. Authentic leaders demonstrate initiative. They go first. They don’t sit on the sidelines. They don’t ask others to do what they are unwilling to do themselves. Instead, they lead by example. Lt. Col. Hal Moore is a great example of this. Famously depicted by Mel Gibson in the movie, We Were Soldiers, Lt. Moore told his troops, before leaving for Vietnam,

We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy. I can’t promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God: that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I’ll be the last to step off. And I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together, so help me God.”

SECRET #1: Lead


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3. Authentic leaders exert influence. It’s no coincidence that influence and influenza (the flu) come from the same root word. Real leaders are contagious. (Click here to tweet that.) People “catch” what they have. People are drawn to their vision and their values. They are able to gather a following and move people to act. To change metaphors, they are like human wave pools, creating a ripple effect wherever they go.

4. Authentic leaders have impact. At the end of the day, leaders make a difference. The world is changed because of their leadership. They are able to create real and lasting change. Unless something has shifted, they aren’t leaders. They are only entertainers. There is a big difference. The measure of leadership cannot be found in the leader; it is found in the impact the leader has on his or her followers.

5. Authentic leaders exercise integrity. Not every leader is benevolent. Adolf Hitler was a leader, as was Mao Zedong and Josef Stalin. They had insight, initiative, influence, and impact. Yet their lives were not integrated with the highest values. Integrity—or the lack thereof—ultimately determines the quality of a person’s impact. In a sense, this is the foundation of authentic leadership.

Leaders must be deliberate and intentional if they are to be successful. These five qualities can guide us as we grow in our ability to lead.


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The Top 5 Leadership Skills for Sustained Innovation

by Holly G. Green

Anyone can innovate once. All it takes is a good idea, some hard work, sufficient resources, and a little bit of luck.

However, today’s business environment demands ongoing innovation to stay ahead of the pack. To make innovation a way of life for your company, get to work developing these five leadership skills:

1. Challenge your assumptions

The biggest enemy of innovation is the unspoken attitudes and beliefs we cling to about our customers, markets and businesses. And the more success we achieve based on those assumptions, the more we tend to focus on protecting the status quo versus exploring what could be.

To develop the skill of challenging your assumptions, ask: What has changed with our customers, markets, industry, or the world at large? What assumptions are we continuing to make about our business simply because we “know them to be true”? What ideas for new products or services have we come up with recently but didn’t follow through because “that will never work”?

Today’s market leaders get ahead by shedding old ideas and ways of thinking faster than their competitors. This can only happen by challenging your assumptions on a regular basis.

2. Change your perspective

The human brain tends to screen in data that proves us right and screen out anything that contradicts our prevailing point of view. As a result, we often filter, distort, or ignore the information coming in, so that we only see what we want to see.

Changing your perspective enables the brain to break out of its rigid thinking patterns and see the world in new and different ways. It opens the mind to new possibilities, and focuses your attention on what could be rather than what is or what was. It also enables you to spot new patterns and connections that others might not see – a critical factor for successful innovation.


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Changing your perspective doesn’t mean throwing out all your old ideas. Just the ones that get in the way of ongoing innovation.

3. Ask the right questions

Questions offer a powerful tool for opening people up to new ideas and possibilities. Too often, however, they keep people stuck in the past by focusing on the problem rather than the solution. For example: “Why hasn’t your team come up with a new product this quarter? What are you going to do differently to innovate?” These kinds of questions put people on the defensive and shut down creative thinking.

Instead, ask future, active, past tense questions that get people thinking and acting like the desired future state is already happening. For example: When we have successfully innovated, what does the new product look like? What problems is it solving for our customers? How is it bringing new value to the marketplace?

Imagining that the innovation already exists shifts people’s attention from why they can’t do something to what they did to achieve it. Once this shift has been made, the brain fills in with all sorts of options on how to achieve the goal.

4. Question the right answer

From an early age we’re taught that there is only one right answer to every problem. As a result, we often pass over potentially better solutions because we’re so sure the one we have is right.

In business, almost all problems have multiple solutions. Some are better, easier, cheaper, or more feasible than others. But very rarely do we encounter situations where there is only one right answer. To nurture ongoing innovation, forget about finding THE right answer. Instead, focus on identifying as many potential answers as possible. Then choose the best one (or combination of ones) that most supports your innovation goal.

Never settle for the first good answer, even when it seems like THE right answer. Good often gets in the way of great.

5. Stop jumping to solutions

Today’s hyper-fast business world creates a lot of pressure to make quick decisions. So we often tend to go with the first feasible solution rather than looking for better or different ideas. Not a good recipe for ongoing innovation!

To encourage your team to look for different and/or better solutions, ask, “What underlying attitudes or beliefs are causing us to see this as the best or only solution?” Then solicit alternative viewpoints from people who see things differently. For example, “It sounds like we’re all in agreement on the solution here. Does anyone see it differently?”


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Ask “What if…?” questions to look beyond the solution at hand. “What if our ‘right’ answer is wrong? What if there is another way to look at this problem? What if we looked at it from the customer’s perspective; how would they solve this problem?”

Ultimately, innovation comes down to changing the way we think and learning to see the world differently. No easy task, but it can be done. And those who make it a habit will reap the rewards that ongoing innovation can bring.

Call to action: Pick one of these leadership skills and work on it for the next month.


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Don’t out compete your rivals, change the rules of the game

by Jorge Barba

On his way to becoming the greatest military genius to set foot on Earth, Napoleon Bonaparte broke the rules on how military campaigns were waged. From a young age he was always overlooked, to get the respect of his peers he understood he had to fight differently. In doing so he went on to rewrite the rules of military history.

Just like Napoleon we too can learn to fight ‘differently’ than our opponents, because doing so is the only way you’ll ever stand out in a world full of ‘me too thinking’.

Here are a few ways that can help you to start thinking about how to change the game in your industry:

• Do what others are unwilling to do. Established companies have a strong incentive to maintain the status quo, it’s to their advantage to keep doing ‘what’s working’. Don’t compete on their terms, do what they’re unwilling to do and define your own rules.

• Look where your competition is not. Go out to the fringe, where’s things are changing. Stepping out of the mainstream is the only place where you’ll get unconventional insights. What’s happening in another part of the world that you could adopt and adapt in your environment?

• Challenge industry orthodoxies. Time and again, the strategy innovations that radically change customer expectations, competitive rules and industry structures come from questioning beliefs that everyone else has taken for granted. What drives success in your industry? Could you imagine alternative ways of doing things?

• Collaborate. Innovations that matter arise from cross-boundary perspectives.

SECRET #2: Innovate

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Life is too short to waste time waiting for other people’s approval on how you live it.

— Steve Maraboli

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SECRET #3: Get Naked

How to be a ‘Naked’ Consultant By Matthew Rivera, The Wall Street Journal

Consultants often want to seem all-knowing in front of their clients. But Patrick Lencioni, a management consultant and author of books including “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” says that’s the wrong approach.

He says consultants need to admit their mistakes and call attention to problems, even when it makes them look bad. By doing so, he says, they’ll gain more than they lose. It’s an approach he calls “getting naked,” and he’s written a book about it.

Mr. Lencioni spoke with The Journal’s Matthew Rivera about it:Excerpts:

WSJ: Your new book is called, “Getting Naked.” What does it mean to practice “Naked Consulting?”

Mr. Lencioni: If you make a mistake, your client is going to notice it -- maybe now or maybe down the road. You might as well admit it.

Being naked is about being completely honest to your clients, in a way that makes it clear you are going to do anything in their best interest even if it’s not in your own. By doing so, you are going to engender trust and loyalty.

One of our principles is to “Enter the Danger.” When you’re working with a client and something really uncomfortable is going on, you need to call it out.

For example, if you’re working with an executive team and there’s a dynamic on the team that’s really weird -- like maybe there are two people who aren’t getting along -- you have to be the one that says, “I don’t think


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you two get along very well. I think that might be hurting your team. Am I right?”

Nineteen and a half times out of 20 they’re going to see that and say to themselves, “This guy is willing to lay on the railroad tracks for us.” Even if once in a while they boot you out for that, most of the time they’re going to be so thankful, and they will think that you’re so different from other consultants.

WSJ: What’s happened when you’ve done that yourself?

Mr. Lencioni: I did it once with a CEO who was doing a 360 feedback program. He didn’t go over the results with his team. Finally, he begrudgingly agreed to review the feedback. I was the one to administer it. He stood there in front of his team as they went around a table denying that they had written anything about his weaknesses, even though it said on the feedback that they had some criticisms. I had to be the one to say, “Listen, somebody in this room had to write this stuff.”

This was one of my early, big clients. I thought they were going to throw me out right there. But they were so grateful that they’ve stuck with us for a long time.

WSJ: How do you think this differs from the normal approach to consulting?

Mr. Lencioni: Most consulting firms tell their employees to avoid anything that makes them look stupid: “Don’t ask a question you don’t know the answer to. Don’t admit when you don’t know something. Don’t make a suggestion if you’re not sure if they’re going to like it.” They never say it in those terms, but that’s what they teach you.

This is the opposite. This is about putting yourself in a position where you might look stupid, and when you do, admit it.

WSJ: How naked is too naked?

Mr. Lencioni: I don’t know if you can be too naked, but you can be emotionally unintelligent. Some people just have a low social IQ. Being vulnerable doesn’t mean you go in to your client every day and talk about your sick cat or you’re constantly being falsely self-deprecating. They’re not looking for that. They’re looking for honesty within the context of your job.


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When we consistently suppress and distrust our intuitive knowingness, looking instead for authority, validation, and approval from others, we give our personal power away.

— Shakti Gawain


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Steve Jobs & You Have This in Common By Marla Tabaka

If there’s one thing entrepreneurs are good at fighting, it’s their intuition. That’s a shame.When we choose the life of an entrepreneur it is not simply an intellectual decision; it is

an intuitive, emotional choice. You feel it with all your heart and know that it is the life for you. Intuition: It’s what got you

here in the first place. So why do so many business owners reject the idea of tapping into that very same intuition to make decisions?

“When you follow your gut instincts you are putting something very natural to work,” says intuitive consultant Sonia Choquette. “Your intuition will take you beyond the threshold to a place that reflects your most passionate interests and nature.”

Choquette travels the globe advising top business leaders, teaching them to follow their vibes.

Her clients know that should not be framed in the dark ages of the mind, but as one of the most fundamental, necessary, and natural sensory awareness that we possess in the modern world. People who reject their intuition for a strictly linear mindset are basing decisions on only what they see and acknowledge through the other five senses. Choquette says that this is extremely limiting.

“By using intellect only, and not your innate wisdom, you are keeping yourself from the most powerful insights,” she says.

This is demonstrated by nearly every modern leader in business, including the transformative, game-changing, paradigm-shifting genius known as Steve Jobs. His No. 1 rule of business was to trust your heart and gut. And Walt Disney believed that he could build on empire on a dancing mouse! This was not a linear decision. Disney knew this to be true from his gut; he had incredible intuition!

We all have access to this kind of intuition, yes, even you.

SECRET #4: Listen to Your Intuition


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Choquette sees it time and time again: Struggling business owners who don’t tap into their intuition and trust their own vibes are rejected by potential investors, business partners, and clients.

“People will sense your limitations and hesitate to invest in you,” she says. “If you want to be a creative leader take the intuitive plunge!”

But Choquette cautions that intuition should not be a reckless leap into the void. In her best-selling book, Trust Your Vibes at Work, Choquette writes that intuition works best on a well informed, solid foundation.

“Get your facts and turn them over to your intuitive percolator,” she advises. “Make sure that your facts are accurate; do your homework.” Choquette notes a common blind spot in entrepreneurs, “Their facts often come from hearsay,” she says. “Do you have solid resources and role models? For instance, do you listen to the news and believe that there aren’t enough customers or clients out there for you?”

Well, here’s a fact that may change your mind: Apple had the most profitable year ever during what we call the biggest global recession of all times. It found a need and filled a gap. Choquette believes that there is never a limit of resources, only a limit of intuition and imagination.

The sky is the limit if you recognize and embrace your intuition. Choquette offers the following tips from her Sixth Sensory Virtual Training program to recognize and strengthen this powerful gift.

1. Be open-minded about your intuition. Invite intuition in as a part of your natural skill set. If intuition were a radio frequency, your mind is the radio; you have to turn it on to receive it.

2. Expect intuition to show up. Ask yourself what your heart and gut say in any given situation. Your heart is 5000 times energetically stronger than your brain. Place your hand on your heart and ask this question: given all of the information that I have acquired on this topic my heart says, (fill in the blank out loud). Listen patiently for the answer.

3. FEEL the answer in own voice. Ask yourself, does that feel true? This question is designed to catch any error that you may have made in engaging your intuition. If you come up with I don’t know, it’s a clear indication that you are using your fear-based intellect and not activating your intuition. If this occurs go for a walk and pay attention to everything around you. Notice everything from the sounds to the small things that you rarely pay attention to. When you notice what is in front of you, you get out of your head and mind, freeing your intuition. Now go back to your question and answer as quickly as possible, don’t let your brain get involved.

4. Follow and trust your vibes. Intuition is a natural gift, learn to believe in it and trust it.


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5 Ways To Achieve The 3 Levels Of Intuition For 6-Sensory Living

By The FinerMinds Team

Are you still stuck living with just 5 senses?Well, the truth is that you have 6. And that 6th one is your intuition. It’s something that

we all have but unfortunately only a handful of people really know how to use it to their full advantage.

It’s a pity because everyday people struggle to make the right decisions, find their life’s purpose, and stress out from worrying about their outcomes. But if you manage to achieve a high sense of intuition, then life will become a blessing and a joy.

A lot of the ideas from this post came from Sonia Choquette and if you’re interested in really tapping into your intuition, you can check out this free interview Vishen just did with Sonia.

She’s been teaching people to unleash their intuition for over 35 years and has even written 14 books on the subject. They’ve even been translated in 17 languages! She has a PhD in Metaphysics and has even been featured on CNN, NBC, ABC, and other media.

On top of training 50,000 students, she has also been a personal Intuitive advisor to Louise Hay, Julia Cameron, Dr. Wayne Dyer, and even Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins.

To learn more about your intuition, listen to Sonia’s interview here >>There are 3 levels of intuition as outlined by psychic and intuition teacher, Sonia

Choquette and when you hit all 3, you will have success in every part of your life. The first level deals with your physical security, the second level is relational intimacy (dealing with friends, family and people), and the 3rd level is personal interest and success. Vishen just did an interview with Sonia on the 3 levels of intuition.

But before you can achieve the 3 levels, you need to sharpen your intuition so check out these 5 techniques for six-sensory living.

1. Find Solitude

The world we live in now is jam packed with information, disinformation, other people’s opinions, media campaigns, etc. So it’s pretty hard to differentiate between your inner voice and the voice of the external world.


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Spend 30 minutes each day being alone. Whether you’re meditating or journaling, these 30 minutes will allow you to get in touch with you really are and not what the world wants you to be. Take this time to let your thoughts flow and really listen to yourself. Ask yourself questions. You’ll be surprised what answers come out of you.

Most people go through years or even decades without really speaking to their heart and subconscious. What happens is you wake up one day and think, “I have no idea who I am.”

If you want to sharpen your intuition, you need to know yourself. You need to acknowledge your inner voice and become familiar with how it speaks to you and what it’s personality is. Just like you spend time getting to know someone else, you also need to spend time to get to know yourself.

Once you have a good idea of who you are, you’re intuition will become louder and louder until it overpowers all the other voices in the world. And when you find yourself facing an obstacle, you’ll find that the solutions come quicker because your conscious mind is used to listening to your intuition.

2. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes

Another part of intuition is your ability to feel what someone else is thinking or going through. This has probably happened to you already without you realizing it. Like when you’re with a friend and you can pick up that they feel sad or happy. Even if you’re in a large group of people you don’t know you can intuitively sense if someone feels out of place or stressed.

This energy you’re picking up comes from your intuition. To build your intuition on the relationship front, you need to let go of judgment and put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Try to see things from another person’s perspective.

By dong this you’ll connect yourself with humanity and be able to read people on a deeper level. This is incredibly important as everything we do involves other people.

Once your intuition gains strength, finding a soul mate, a business partner, or picking a group of friends will end in more positive outcomes. This form of intuition is also handy for seeing if someone is lying to you or even lying to themselves.

3. Acknowledge your vibes

Everyone has vibes. But few acknowledge them. The next time you feel “something” acknowledge this feeling, focus on it, and ask yourself what could this feeling possibly mean.

This vibe you’re getting might urge you to do something, warn you of something, or try to tip you off about what’s coming. This happens a lot when you meet people. You might be left with a positive or negative vibe and this is your intuition telling you something. And it’s up to you to acknowledge this vibe and analyze it.

The more you do this the more you’ll recognize your intuition when it surfaces. A great story of this came from a Silva student who right before going to Thailand for a vacation used


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her intuition to sense what the trip will be like. All she felt was a big fat NO. She told her friends immediately how she felt and fortunately for them they chose to go with her intuition. Their trip was scheduled exactly when the 2006 tsunami hit South East Asia.

So pay attention. Your vibes could save your life.

4. Play the “I Wonder” Game

Here’s a good way to get your intuition to come out and play with you. Intuition expert and doctor of metaphysics, Sonia Choquette recommends this game and it’s tons of fun. You can play this with your friends and family.

Basically you just say to yourself, “I wonder…” and finish that sentences with whatever pops up. Just let your mind wander in wonderment.

“I wonder what color the next car that drives by will be.”“I wonder who’s going to call me next.”“I wonder what will be on special at the store today.”

5. Let your intuition make money for you

When we think about wealth, business, or work, intuition doesn’t seem to fit in at all. But that just isn’t true. Some of the most successful people in the world rely on their intuition to bring in the big bucks. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey all have publicly cited intuition as a reason for success.

Most people wander through life without a clear path of where they want to be and how to get there. Instead we all just guess and test. Or rather trial and error. These errors can be costly and painful. So the next time you work with money, give your intuition a check.

Your intuition lets you know when you think a deal will go sour, if a business partner is cheating you out of your money, or where it feels your strengths lie.

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I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.

I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.

And that is why I succeed.

— Michael Jordan


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SECRET #5: Take Risks. Fail

Why Many Smart People Fail as Entrepreneurs By Rajesh Setty, President, WittyParrot

Research by Entrepreneur Weekly, Small Business Development Center, Bradley University and University of Tennessee found that the #1 reason why startups fail is incompetence. Yes, incompetence.

That definitely seems like we are stretching a bit. For someone to take the plunge and start a company, he or she needs to be reasonably

smart. Then, how come incompetence can be the #1 reason for startups to fail? The reason is that they are not talking about incompetence in an absolute sense; they

are referring to the competence that is required to operate a business. When you look at it that way, we are all incompetent in a new subject when we start on it. Everybody has to be a beginner before becoming an expert at something.

So, the real question therefore is: Will that someone put in everything that is required to move from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence in the domain of entrepreneurship – and how long will they take to get there?

This article is the result of watching several startups up close and personal for more than a decade and having conversations with dozens of entrepreneurs that I am close to.

Here we go:

1. Knowledge arbitrage has its limits

I know this now after paying a price for not knowing it earlier in my life. If smartness were the only criteria to succeed in a startup, I had lots of it when I started my first company more than 20 years ago.

I was not thinking I was smart, but I had proof to demonstrate it. A few highlights of my own life before I jumped into entrepreneurship:


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• In class X, I ranked 20th for my state (out of 450,000+ students).

• In class XII, I ranked 2nd for my state (out of 150,000+ students).

• In the common entrance test for admissions to engineering colleges, I ranked 6th for the state.

• In Engineering (electronics and communication), I ranked 4th for the university.

• There were achievements outside the academic world:

• At the age of 13 I published my first book and was awarded as the youngest writer of Karntaka state.

• Before I was 17 I had published six books (four novels, a collection of poems and a book on mathematics).

• From age 13-16 I worked as a journalist for a local newspaper and literally wrote hundreds of articles on wide-ranging topics.

So, I had the academic smarts and the literary smarts at a young age; so in theory, I should have been able to crack the entrepreneurship game. Sadly, I failed miserably. At that time, it was shock, surprise and disbelief for me and for people around me.

After several years and a lot of reflection, I know that there is no reason for shock, surprise or disbelief. Everything happened the way it should have happened. Honestly, I was not ready for the game of entrepreneurship. While I had demonstrated proof of smartness in two different areas (academic and literary), it was not easy to arbitrage the learning from those areas to make them practical insights that I could apply in my entrepreneurial journey.

The game was different. It was different enough that it had reached the limits of knowledge arbitrage. There was nothing in my experience that I could draw upon that would let me excel in the new world.

For starters, both academic and literary worlds could be termed as “solo sports” and the entrepreneurial world definitely is a “team sport;” so the game has to be different.

2. Support structure may be out of context

Entrepreneurship not only requires a strong team, but also requires a strong external support team of partners, advisors, board members and service providers. These people who are thinking of supporting you are investing their time, energy, effort and mindshare, which are all limited in quantity. Unless you show real promise with proof, investing in your enterprise is an opportunity cost for them.

This gets even more complicated if you are smart. If the startup fails, it may seem like there was no problem with you but there must have been some problem with people around you who were supporting you. So, rather than coming to support you with open arms, you


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might get lukewarm support from the sidelines. If you start making progress, they can jump in to the arcade; and if you start failing, they can just disappear from the sidelines.

Also, just because someone was supporting you in your area of smartness does not mean that person automatically will support you in another area where you have not proven yourself.

To complicate the matter, you might also come across as “not coachable,” and that alone will repel a lot of people who are capable and wiling to help.

3. Entitlement generally leads to disappointment

I have seen this time and again where someone super smart comes up with an idea and he or she is so sure of it that it borders entitlement. To add to that, the person has an entourage around to say how smart he or she is and why success is almost guaranteed. That false sense of support is something that actually hurts in the long run; but for now it is only strengthening the sense of entitlement.

The negative side effects of entitlement mentality are many. Here is a short list:

• Taking people for granted

• Not being fully prepared to face situations

• Making too many ungrounded assumptions (including the one where you think others don’t know much)

• Taking too much credit

• Not giving enough credit to others In general, I think there is only one guaranteed outcome for entitlement — disappointment

that comes with a time lag.

4. Creativity alone won’t pay the bills

You may be smart and creative and can come up with a dozen options on how to handle the current situation, but ideas alone won’t pay the bills or move the needle.

The fact about a startup in general is that resources (time, money, connections, etc.) are limited and, until product-market fit is established, it’s going to continue to be the case. Creative options for solving problems all take time; and the more options you have, the more it takes to analyze the best option to pursue. There is also the chance of getting lost in the analysis-paralysis.

You will sooner rather than later realize that coming up with ideas is not the problem; but executing the ideas that you come up with takes a lot more work, a lot more money and, sadly, a lot more time.

Why?


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Ideas have no real roadblocks in your mind. Whatever you imagine will unfold brilliantly the way you imagined it.

In real life, there are roadblocks everywhere, and it takes a whole new level of skill and influence to get your team to buy in to the ideas that you want to execute.

5. Unable to make the market fall in love with your idea

My friend Navin Nagiah, CEO of DNN Software, says, “Most entrepreneurs have passion and they fall in love with an idea. But not all of them have the necessary skills to make the market fall in love with that idea.”

I agree. Having passion is a good start and you must have it if you are signing up to go on an entrepreneurial path. There is also no question about the belief and conviction you must have on your idea. But that alone will rarely make your market fall in love with your idea.

What the marketplace needs is a story that it can resonate with. If you (or someone in your team) can’t tell a compelling story, you rarely can have a great start. You may be smart in your own field, but that won’t make you a smart storyteller. You need to invest in that craft.

The problem can get complex as you hang on to your original ideas in the name of persistence. Your past label as a super-smart person is now a liability. If you are that smart, you have to get things right and then it’s just a matter of time until the world sees your point of view. You want to keep going until that happens.

6. Lacking the beginner’s mind and not practicing effectuation

First, a definition of the beginner’s mind (from Wikipedia): Shoshin is a concept in Zen Buddhism meaning “beginner’s mind.” It refers to having an

attitude of openness, eagerness and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. The term is especially used in the study of Zen Buddhism and Japanese martial arts.

Now, we will look at effectuation: Effectuation, according to Darden professor Saras Sarasvathy, is “a logic of thinking,

discovered through scientific research, used by expert entrepreneurs to build successful ventures.” In the insightful paper, “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial,” Prof. Saraswathy outlines his research on the major difference between the mindset of the entrepreneurs and the mindset of others. Quick summary: Others will identify a goal and look for resources to help them reach the goal. Entrepreneurs identify all the resources they have and look for goals to reach with those resources. This kind of thinking is called effectuation.

Combine a beginner’s mind with effectuation and you are ready to pivot to make a business successful. Remove the beginner’s mind and effectual thinking and you will be sticking to your guns as if it’s your life.


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Many smart people unfortunately lack both of the above, and that makes it hard to digest “real” change when it is needed for the startup to survive and thrive.

My personal belief is that having a beginner’s mind and practicing effectuation is golden even outside of your startup life. It’s a great way to live.

7. Not willing to be vulnerable

If you behave as if everything is in “full control,” I doubt that anyone will go out of the way to offer help. On the other hand, if you showcase your vulnerability, you can expect a helping hand or two. Don’t take my word for it — you can do it right after reading this and you will see the results. It’s almost like magic.

You might be thinking that exposing your vulnerability will make you look weak. In fact, it requires a lot of strength to expose your vulnerability. You have to have an extremely healthy self-esteem to be bold and tell the outside world that you are after all another human being and are vulnerable in more than one area of life.

The fact of life is that everyone that you met yesterday, everyone that you meet today and everyone that you will meet tomorrow are all vulnerable in one way or the other. Some people show this and get good help, but many more just try to hide it and fight like a lone ranger.

You and I know this: nobody can read your mind, now or later. If you demand help, you may not get it; and if you don’t ask for help, they may not know that you need help. But, if you keep giving and building an emotional bank balance and show your vulnerability, there is a good chance that you will get help and more.

You need lots of good help if you want to thrive in the entrepreneurial world!


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This column will change your life: do you feel a fraud?

By Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

‘One of impostorism’s frustrating ironies is that true frauds and idiots rarely seem to experience it’

‘Achieve promotions, or win accolades, and you’ll just have more cause to feel like a fake.’

Illustration Robert Frank Hunter for the GuardianImpostor syndrome – the feeling that you’re a fraud, and any day now you’ll be exposed

– is presumably even more common than surveys suggest: after all, it’s not the kind of thing to which people like to admit. Indeed, it can be hard to tell when you’ve got it: those others might have a syndrome, your reasoning goes, but I’m genuinely out of my depth. It’s a classic case of “comparing your insides with other people’s outsides”: you have access only to your own self-doubt, so you mistakenly conclude it’s more justified than anyone else’s. This is a strange kind of self-doubt, when you think about it, since it’s premised on the idea that you’re highly talented at something, namely deception. Still, it’s no fun, and if new research is anything to go by, it might be harder to cure than anyone thought.

Two US sociologists, Jessica Collett and Jade Avelis, wanted to know why so many female academics opt for “downshifting”: setting out towards a high-status tenured post, then switching to something less ambitious. Contrary to received wisdom, their survey of 460 doctoral students revealed that it wasn’t to do with wanting a “family-friendly” lifestyle. Instead, impostorism was to blame. They also uncovered a nasty irony. It’s long been known that impostorism afflicts more women than men – one of many reasons that institutions match younger women academics with high-ranking female mentors. But some survey responses suggested those mentors might make things worse, because students felt like impostors compared with them. “One said she suspected her mentor was secretly Superwoman,” Science Careers magazine reported. “How could she ever live up to that example?”

This is only one of impostorism’s frustrating ironies. Another is that true frauds and idiots rarely seem to experience it. (“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt,” said Bertrand Russell.) Arguably the worst one, though, is that getting better at your job won’t fix it. Achieve promotions, or win accolades, and you’ll just have more cause to feel like a fake. Enhance your knowledge, and as you expand the perimeter of what you know, you’ll be exposed to more and more of what you don’t. Impostorism, as


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Pacific Standard magazine put it recently, “is, for many people, a natural symptom of gaining expertise”. Move up the ranks and if your field’s even vaguely meritocratic, you’ll encounter more talented people to compare yourself negatively against. It never stops. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find [me] out now,’” as some low-profile underachiever named Maya Angelou once said.

The only solution, many experts say, is for higher-ups to talk about their own insecurities much more. (“When people see those they respect struggling, or admitting they didn’t know everything when they started, it makes it easier to have realistic opinions of their own work,” says the Ada Initiative, which supports women in technology.) Few of us instinctively want to do that – least of all those with impostorism, or women in fields where stereotypes hold that they can’t hack it. But if you’re a higher-up yourself, you should try. One day, in an insecurity-friendly utopia, perhaps we’ll look with scepticism on those remaining few who claim never to have felt as if they’re faking it. Because they’re probably faking that.

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Never say that you can’t do something, or that something seems impossible, or that something can’t be done, no matter how discouraging or harrowing it may be; human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds. We are each the masters of our own reality; when we become self-aware to this: absolutely anything in the world is possible.

—Mike Norton


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11 or 12 Things I Learned About Life While Daytrading Millions of Dollars

By James Altucher

I was a day trader for many years, and it almost killed me.I made money by making profits on my own money and also taking a percentage of the

profits for the people I traded for. I traded up to $40 million or $50 million a day at my peak. I did this from 2001 to 2004.

I learned about day trading but I also learned a lot about myself and what I was good at, what I was horrible at, and what I was psychotic at. Things that had nothing to do with day trading.

Day trading is the best job in the world on the days you make money. You make a trade, then maybe 20 minutes later you are out of the trade with a profit, and for the rest of the day you think about how much money you made.

It’s the worst job in the world on a bad day. I would make a trade, it would go against me, and then I wanted my heart to stop so my blood would stop thumping so loudly.

I did it for years, though, because I was unemployable in every other way.Here’s what I learned. All of these lessons I will certainly use today, many years after I

stopped day trading.

A) You can’t predict the future. Everyone thinks they can. But they can’t.

This applies not just to trading but everything. You could be married for 10 years and the next thing you know you are divorced and you would not have predicted that.

You could be healthy all your life and drink your vegetables and exercise and reduce stress, and a year later you could be dead from cancer.

SECRET #6: Beyond Resilience—Become Antifragile


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You’d have much less stress if you let go of trying to predict the future.You can always seek to increase the odds in your favor. if I don’t jump off bridges, for

instance, it’s more likely I’ll be alive a year from now. But certainly a path to unhappiness is thinking the future can be predicted and controlled.

B) Hope is not a strategy.

If you get to the point where you “hope” you don’t get ruined, then you did something wrong beforehand.

For instance, if you plan a wedding outside and you don’t have a backup plan in case it rains, then you probably mis-planned your wedding, unless you are getting married in a desert.

“Hoping” is not a bad thing. I hope that every day my life goes perfectly.But if hoping is the only thing I’m relying on, then it means I didn’t really look at all the

possible outcomes of something that was important to me.

C) Uncertainty is your best friend.

A hundred percent of opportunities in life are created because people are uncertain about almost everything in their lives.

We are constantly trying to close the enormous gap between the things we are certain about and the things we are uncertain about, and almost every invention, product, Internet service, book, whatever has been created to help us close that gap.

Sometimes this is hard. If your husband betrays and leaves you, you often feel like crawling on the floor and burning all the self-help books. They all lied.

It’s hard to feel “in the now” or to “positive think” when life feels like it’s over. I’ve tried. For me it’s too hard.

But at the very least you can say…”help me.” You can say it to your close friends. You can say it something inside of yourself.

“Help me” is the most powerful, and most forgotten, prayer.

D) Taking risks versus reducing risk.

Some people take too many risks and they go bankrupt. This happened to me. And sometimes people are too cautious and don’t take enough risks.

When I first started day trading, I was so afraid of risk that if I had a small profit, I’d end the trade. But then I would take big losses and that would wipe out all my profits.

The key is that you can take larger and larger risks if you work on better and better ways to deal with those risks.


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For instance, I might be able to risk marrying someone if I know she is not a hard-core drug addict who regularly betrays the people she is close to.

I can risk driving without a license if I always stay below the speed limit (I know this is a stupid risk, but still). Once you have a method of reducing risks, it’s easier to make trades or decisions about anything.

E) Diversification.

Often I get emails, “I really want ONE job but they don’t seem to want me and now I’m miserable. How can I get that job?”

Well…you can’t.And you’re going to be unhappy. You can’t wish yourself a job.When I was raising money to day trade, I probably contacted over 1,000 people. When I

was starting an Internet business I started over a dozen Internet businesses and watched all of them fail but one. When I was trying to sell my Internet business I contacted over a dozen companies (although Google broke my heart – damn you Google!).

When I wanted to get married, I went on lots of dates. Claudia’s approach was even smarter – she wouldn’t waste time with dinners. She would only go to tea with guys. Within the first 20 seconds you know if you are attracted. So keep it to a tea.

F) Say “no.”

In day trading, if something is not working out, even if your heart wants it to work out, you have to say “No” and cut your losses.

If a business relationship is not working out, don’t put more energy and time into it.There is a cognitive bias called “committment bias.” We think because we’ve already put

time and energy (or money) into something that we have to stick with it. But this is just a mental bias. Say no to it.

You have to decide every moment if this is the situation you want to be in.Just because you were in the situation a moment ago, or yesterday, or for 10 years, doesn’t

mean the situation is right for you anymore.

G) Health.

Day trading pulls everything out of you. It sucks the soul out of your body, blends it up, and then explodes. It doesn’t turn into a nice smoothie. It explodes.

So you have to take care of yourself. If you don’t sleep enough, if you don’t eat well, exercise, be around positive people, be grateful for what you have, blah blah blah, you will lose all of your money and go bankrupt.


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And obviously, this applies to everything else in life. Every day, what small thing can you do to become a slightly better you?

The reason we get so attracted to “safe” cubicle jobs is that the pain is more subtle and sneaks up on us. It’s not the blender-drama of day trading so the need for health on a daily basis doesn’t seem as important. But it is.

H) Laughter.

The only way to survive is to laugh. There’s that saying: “Man makes plans but God laughs.” Well, you might as well be on the same side as God.

I) “This is crazy” means you’re crazy.

I’ve seen it a million times. Guy makes a trade. The market goes against him. He says “this is crazy” and puts more money into the trade. And then he loses all his money and goes crazy. I’ve had to talk people off the ledge or tell them to put the gun down.

The market is never crazy. The world is never crazy. And I will go so far as to say that your girlfriend who just lied to you about where she spent the night is not crazy.

I only care about you. And you’re effin’ crazy if you thought the world was going to line up any other way than the way it lined up.

Tough on you.I know when I feel like, “ugh, this situation is insane” that the first place I need to look is

at me.I am insane.

J) It doesn’t matter if a trade (or a day, or a life) is good or bad.

Good and bad days happen. But life is about a billion little moments that add up to all the things around you. If you let one of those moments have too much control then you are bound to be mostly miserable.

I was mostly miserable during the period I was day trading. I let that aspect of my life take control. So I stopped focusing on being a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a good anything.

All of my other constituencies went to hell.I would have nightmares. I would lose sleep. I would wake up many mornings and go to the

church across the street so I could be by myself and pray. What would I pray? “Jesus, please make the markets go in my direction today.”

I’m Jewish. Nobody answered my prayers.


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K) It’s never about the money.

Every day I get emails like, “Can you show me how to day trade?”“NO!”I know a thousand day traders and only two that won’t go bankrupt. So what makes anyone

think they will have an edge? How many people listen to me?Zero.How come?Because people are sick of their lives, their relationships, their jobs, and all the lies that

have been told to them ever since they learned how to walk.They want freedom from the BS.I get it.Day trading is the dream. You can make enough money to not care. To do it from anywhere.

To be happy.It won’t work. But people don’t want to believe it. Most people think they have that one

special something that will make it work for them.And it’s true – they do have that one special something. But you can’t get there by day

trading first. You can skip right to the being happy part. You can skip right to being free.But we never learned that. We were taught we had to do something first to earn freedom. We

were taught that suffering was the currency to buy happiness.Okay, go do it. Then cry about it. Then get scared. Then curse the craziness. Then cry more.

None of that will make you happy.Then read this blog post again. Not because it will make you happy. But because I like when

people read my posts.And laugh.


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Conventions are made to be challenged By Jorge Barba

Are you the underdog?Malcolm Gladwell has written a insightful article on competitive strategy,on how David

beats Goliath by challenging the conventions of how battles are supposed to be fought.Using examples from basketball, military war games and anecdotes of military history,

Gladwell exposes ways that inferior teams have used unconventional tactics to break the rules and beat superior opponents.

How underdogs break the rules:

• When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win.

• David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability.

• Brake the rhythm of encounters to match your speed.

• Effort can trump ability.

• Relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

• Always challenge the conventions of how battles are supposed to be fought.

• Bring your own rules to the game.

Key Takeaway:

Effort can trump ability and conventions are made to be challenged.


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SECRET #7: Tell Stories

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Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

—Robert McKee


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From The Dragonfly Effect

By Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith

Stories are all around us. They are what move us, make us feel alive, and inspire us. Our appetite for stories is a reflection of the basic human need to understand patterns of life — not merely as an intellectual exercise but as a personal, emotional experience. Stories are the way to reach out to people and emotionally connect.

The power of a story is a profound one: it can help you connect with and move your audience, and make your material more memorable. Maya Angelou once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And what’s the best way to make people feel? By telling a compelling story.


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Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story.

— Janet Litherland


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Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling By Emma Coats

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.

9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.


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14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.

15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later.

18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?

22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.


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This column will change your life: the truth about inefficiency

By Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

‘You don’t procrastinate, or miss appointments, or fail to communicate with your spouse because you’re an idiot who doesn’t realise there’s a better way. You do it because there’s a hidden benefit you’re getting’

‘Inefficiency is subjective.’ Illustration: Phil Wrigglesworth for the GuardianA few months back, the sci-fi author John Scalzi “finally did what I should have done about

four years ago,” as he put it on his blog: he broke up with voicemail. “I will never ever ever ever listen to the voicemail you’re about to leave,” his mobile message now says, “because voicemail is a pain in the ass. So if you actually want to reach me, you can either send me a text or email.” Hatred of voicemail is nothing new, but it seems to be building. Surveys keep finding that millions of messages are ignored; one firm concluded that about a third go unheard for at least three days. Increasingly, I return missed calls without bothering to listen to messages, which irritates some friends – but who’s got time to sit through endless instructions (stop telling me how to play my messages and just play them, goddammit!) when the message will inevitably require a call back anyway? Voicemail transcription services such as hullomail.com ease the pain a bit. But in an era of superfast messaging, you’d be forgiven for wondering why something as lumberingly inefficient and tedious as voicemail still exists.

Well, here’s one good reason: it’s profitable. In 2009, the New York Times columnist David Pogue calculated that American networks were making around a billion dollars a year by charging for those extra seconds of blather (“When you have finished recording, you may hang up”) and many British networks do the same. In other words, inefficiency is subjective: what’s experienced as inefficiency by me or you is perfectly efficient, actually, just so long as you’re a phone company and your goal is making money. Voicemail thus has much in common

SECRET #8: Be Fearless in Your Coaching


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with “dark patterns”, a term coined by the tech consultant Harry Brignull, to refer to the sneaky ways in which websites “trick users into doing things they might not otherwise do, [such as] signing up for recurring bills”. As with voicemail, these often look like incompetent design, but they’re not. An example: on an iPhone, at least until iOS 7, it was incredibly hard to find the option to stop advertisers tracking your browsing. Why? It was meant to be. What feels like tiresome inefficiency, born of sloppiness, really arises because it serves someone’s interests.


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10 thought provoking questions to find hidden pain points

By Jorge Barba

There are pain points you can identify in an initial sales discussion, and then there are the pain points that are hidden in plain sight. I believe these are the ones that matter, precisely because they have gone unquestioned for a long time.

How do you find them? Easy, by questioning the status quo.Whenever I give one of my innovation workshops, the part about questioning assumptions

always draws the most attention. This past Saturday, was such a day. You see, questioning (which is one of the five key innovation skills) is perceived as being irritating. Because when you question common practices and opinions, said one my guests, you get into trouble.

Yes, very true. Nobody likes their beliefs to be questioned. But, this is also a big reason why companies fail: their belief of future success is anchored in their past success.

Case in point, Blackberry. They believed that the pain points they were eliminating when they started, were still relevant. This made them an easy target for irrelevance since they never adapted.

The essence of strategy is choosing to perform activities differently than rivals do; and the most vital competitive weapon is not lower price, but new ideas. And, it is such a common occurrence, when you question assumptions about how things are done, you arrive at seemingly new ideas you’ve never thought about.

Here is a small sample of questions I used in my workshop to help this particular company find hidden pain points:

1. What best practices are we still following that haven’t changed in a while?

2. What is the real purpose of _________ practice?

3. Is it fulfilling its purpose?

4. Why do these practices matter?

5. How do we know customers care?

6. What outcomes are we denying our customers of achieving by following industry best practices?


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7. What practices exist in your industry that drive customers crazy?

8. If we were to eliminate these practices, how would customers benefit?

9. What if we let customers decide how they’d like to be served?

10. In what ways might we change/reset customer expectations by changing/eliminating/adding/increasing/decreasing ___________.

11. How are we not helping our customers be/do ______________.

12. How are we getting in their way?

13. In what ways are we being a pain in the ass? These questions are aimed at questioning the overall customer experience and identifying

pain points. But, we can also develop questions aimed at specific practices that also contain hidden pain points, such as how you market and sell your products, how you hire and develop talent, how you get work done, etc.

The point of doing this exercise is to identify ways where you are denying value, as well as how you can add new value. It is always an eye opening experience for business owners and leaders because it is like seeing things anew. We can all agree that pain points, are hot buttons for innovation!

Bottom line: To question the dominant logic about how things are done, is to push against something. Leave no stones unturned. The insights that you can identify by questioning current practices are priceless. This is how you start thinking about how to create difference that matters.


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From The Prosperous Coach

By Rich Litvin

The magic of fearless coaching isn’t in you, the coach. It’s over there in the person being coached.

The magic of fearless coaching isn’t about a style or a system. The magic is not in any one technique. You see, fearless coaching is not magic. But it is magical in its impact. Results will show you that.

Here are the key components of fearless coaching. Learn these, practice these, and your clients will thank you. And remember this: do not wait. Use them in your very first conversation with a potential client. Don’t save them until after someone has hired you.

They are most valuable to you when a potential client experiences their power right away, right there in that very first, long and extraordinary intake conversation.

The 18 Key Components of Fearless Coaching 1. Be bold. 2. Search for the Glimpse of Genius. 3. Go deeper. 4. Be okay with silence. 5. Keep some of your attention on the inside. 6. Remember that the magic is in the person in front of you. 7. Pay attention to their words. 8. Lead powerfully. 9. Hide nothing. 10. The person in front of you is God with a small “g”. 11. Come from Spirit. 12. Set a clear intention. 13. Seek permission. 14. Coaching creates miracles. 15. Invest in yourself. 16. Be YOU. 17. COMMIT. 18. Be willing to fail.

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It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that one of the most powerful ways to create new clients is to serve your current clients so powerfully that they never stop talking about you.

—Rich Litvin


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Being Undervalued Vs. Being ‘The One’

Design is undervalued. So is journalism, and songwriting, and the guy who wrote the code that made the balls in the app bounce. I can have a logo designed for $249 using one of many crowd sourced design platforms. I’ll get 30 designs to choose from and although many will dispute this, it will probably be good enough. It’s a problem for sure.

And yet designer and letterer Jessica Hische is sought after, she gets to choose who she works with and names her price. If I want to apply design thinking to a new innovation, of course I go straight to IDEO because, well who else would you go to but the best? Nancy Duarte’s company designs presentations for people like Al Gore and Bill Gates, and companies like Twitter and Hewlett Packard. If you want to shine at TED Global hiring Duarte is a no brainer.

Every day people are being well paid to use the skills you have, not because they are better than you, but because they decided that’s what they wanted and they worked towards it. They recognised the truth about their talents, they taught themselves how to see what people really wanted and they executed with difference.

Should the Samsung CEO spend his day punching his desk, while lamenting why we fall in love with anything Apple designs and brings to market, every damn time? Or should he just get on and lead the company so that it creates difference for its customers.

The answer is not to sit around imploring the industry, or the customer to give us back our value. It’s not up to our customers to value us. It’s up to us to show them why they should, and to do work that communicates our difference. There is no more business as usual for musicians, or journalists, designers and [insert your profession here, for it’s sure to be next]. No cushy numbers. No get out of jail free card. There is only work that matters.

The way forward for designers, creatives, and maybe you or your company, is not to be lumped in with the competition. It’s to demonstrate your difference. To be ‘the one’. You must do what it takes not to be just another creative or professional, but to be the creative or professional that people who want the particular must have. You might not be able to change

SECRET #9: Market (Without Marketing) & Sell (Without Selling)


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how the world values your profession, but you can change how you are valued by doing work that matters. Work that changes how people feel, not just what they think.

We have two choices. We can stand around looking at the train wreck of what was, or we can design our own futures.

Which are you going for?


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Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.

—Julia Child


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How Do I Sell My Idea?

This is probably the question I get asked the most. The truth is it’s the wrong place to start. You actually begin with a different question altogether, and that is.

How am I going to help people to care about this?

If you understand that you’re more than halfway there.

SECRET #10: Create a Body of Work (What’s your point of view that you’re willing to research, teach and even to fight for?)


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What’s Your Point of View? By Michael W. McLaughlin

As the cashier handed me my change, I asked about the name tattooed across her knuckles. “That’s my daughter’s name. She’s the center of my life and I want everyone to know,” she told me.

My first thought was how painful it must’ve been to have each of those letters tattooed on sensitive fingers. Then I was struck by the power of that tattoo to clearly communicate the cashier’s perspective and commitment.

I wouldn’t suggest that consultants start tattooing themselves to show the world what’s important to them. But you can almost always find ways to sharpen the clarity of what you do, believe, and offer to clients. And that clarity of purpose will help differentiate you in the market.

Clarify Your Purpose

We live in a world of short cuts. That’s especially true when we process new information. When visitors look at a web site, for example, they instantly categorize what they see to decide if there’s anything worth reading.

In fact, one study shows that site visitors will read only about 20 percent of the text on a web page before moving on. In response to this reality, many consultants load up their home pages with descriptions of their “unique” qualifications and “superb track record of results.”

If you get that information onto the first page–or so the reasoning goes–you have a shot at holding a client’s attention. It’s common to see consultants apply this same logic to the design of sales proposals, presentations, and client meetings.

But if you really want them to stop on your site, read your proposal, or listen to what you have to say, make your purpose and commitment to clients as clear as if you had tattooed it on your knuckles.

You’ll have more success in all your marketing and selling efforts if you state boldly and confidently what your practice stands for. Instead of serving up boring claims about how you help organizations “manage change,” grab and hold clients’ attention by showing them your compelling sense of purpose.

Offer thought-provoking perspectives on the issues clients face, and they’ll read far more than 20 percent of what you’ve worked so hard to write.


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Don’t Hedge—Get Specific

I’ve never met a client who said, “Just get me any consultant in here.” Naturally, clients want someone with experience in their business, industry, and with the issues they must tackle. But to capture their imagination, and differentiate your business, you have to show clients how you see the world–you have to express your particular point of view.

Often, that perspective is about where your client’s industry is headed in the future. Instead of resorting to clichés like “the rate of change is accelerating,” offer a definite view about what your clients can expect in the future. Make a logical and believable case, based on extrapolation of facts and trends, about how your clients’ businesses are likely to change next year, in five years, or in a decade.

Be sure to be original, though, and don’t simply rehash others’ work. Using your own experience, facts, observed trends, and research, you can put your own stamp on what’s likely to come next for your clients. As long as your forecast isn’t wild speculation, you will spark clients’ interest.

You don’t have to rely only on forecasting the future. It’s equally powerful to have a strong view on how clients should be doing things in the present. Maybe you focus on three key challenges your clients are grappling with now. Create a point of view that defines those issues, points out the implications of maintaining the status quo, and offers a general approach for addressing those issues.

Whether you’re talking about the present or the future, be specific. Avoid generalizations like “succession planning will become more important in the next three years than ever before.” Instead, tell clients where and in what ways succession planning issues are likely to be most acute.

Don’t tell clients that leadership skills will be in short supply as baby-boomers retire. Tell them which skills they will need to lead their organizations in the future and how to cultivate those skills.

“Aha” Is Not Enough

Do you remember the last time you read something that made you stop and think? You probably weren’t reading a consultant’s assertion of global expertise. More likely, you were learning something from a credible source that was highly relevant, focused on a current or looming problem, and was counter-intuitive, entertaining, or surprising.

If you can make clients stop and think, you’ve won half the battle. And that should be your objective as you develop your point of view. But your goal is not just creating “aha” moments for others. You want to build your business. So it’s essential that your point of view be well-aligned with the services you offer.


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You want a direct relationship between the issues you raise and your ability to address those issues. If you say that tablet devices will be the productivity tool of the future for sales lead tracking, you’ll want to offer clients a service to succeed in that future.

If you are successful in making clients want to learn more, you’ll want to have plenty to offer. Your point of view tells others how you think, but your service offer shows how you’ve translated that thinking into concrete action.

The Power of Perspective

Your point of view, or perspective, can form the basis of your marketing strategy. If you address the three challenges facing, say, the banking industry, you’ve got the foundation for a series of articles, speeches, blog posts, and case studies.

Not only that, a bold, forward-looking perspective can engage clients in a dialogue about their issues and your ability to help them. If you want to convince clients that you know your stuff, few things work better than a thoughtful perspective on what matters most to them. Your perspective can be a powerful differentiator in any market.

Of course, the issues your clients face change regularly. So your perspective must evolve with your clients’ needs. You’ll find consultants marketing themselves today using concepts and tools that went out with the reengineering craze. They haven’t kept up with the times. By revisiting and refreshing your perspective on a regular basis, you will stay current on your clients’ issues, and your services will reflect the changing needs of the market.

Express Yourself

There’s no need to tattoo your knuckles to tell clients what you stand for, but don’t ignore the lesson of cashier. Define what’s important to your clients, express it boldly, and align your perspectives with your service offer.

Your clients will be far more interested to learn about your point of view than about your self-proclaimed greatness. There’s a time for boasting about your credentials, but that comes later–after clients are interested in what you know and think.


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NEVER stop learning.

SECRET #11: Never Stop Learning

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Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin to see it as possible

—Cherie Carter-Scott


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E-mail Won’t Help You Win a Nobel Prize

The Elusive Dr. Higgs

This past October, the theoretical physicist Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize for his work predicting the particle that bears his name. The only problem: no one could find him.

Peter Higgs, it turns out, is not interested in being accessible. He has no e-mail address because he owns no computer. He does own a cellphone, but he only answers it if he knows the caller.

It’s easy to imagine Higgs as a recluse, but as The Guardian reported in its Nobel coverage, he’s actually quite busy. It’s just that his definition of “busy” doesn’t include an inbox.

I like these types of stories. They’re not useful as a direct source of advice (most of us probably need to keep our computers). But they do provide a nice reminder about the type of work that ends up changing the way we understand the world.

SECRET #12: Do Deep Work

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Wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.

—Hugh Howey


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SECRET #13: Practice Radical Self Care

intensive - the prosperous...

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