Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn

Today’s guest used to suffer from crippling shyness that left him unable to have even basic conversations with strangers. Today, he’s an expert in social theory and the author of Superhuman Social Skills, a practical guide for anyone looking to increase their social circle and get comfortable socializing in any context — whether with friends, business partners, or complete strangers. This episode isn’t just for those who suffer from social anxiety; it’s for anyone who wants to get more out of life by establishing deeper connections with the people around them. Listen in as Tynan teaches us:  * How anyone can overcome crippling social anxiety * A simple method for winning over new friends and becoming a social superstar * How to tell better stories Get Superhuman Social Skills on Amazon. Learn more at Tynan.com.  How did you get superhuman social skills? I was very shy and had social anxiety all the way from my early childhood to college. If one of my friends brought over one of their friends who I didn’t know, that would be a pretty uncomfortable situation for me, especially if that friend happened to be a woman, and especially if she was single. I just had nothing to say, so that was very difficult for me. As you can imagine, my dating life sort of followed suit which eventually led me to get involved in Pickup because I realized that if I didn’t fix my social skills, particularly around dating, my life wasn’t going to end up where I wanted it to be. So, when I was first exposed to this whole Pickup thing, it was the first time I realized that social skills were a learnable skill. Before that, I thought you were born with whatever social skills you had and that was that. But I went really deep into Pickup (which you can read about in the book The Game) and it totally transformed my dating life but it also transformed my relationships with my friends, with my family members, and especially with new people. My fear of talking to strangers was gone. It’s funny because I now meet people and they find it hard to believe I was ever shy, but it’s true! I really started off pretty bad. Can you give us an example of how your lack of social skills affected your life early on? I have tons of those moments. That was my entire high school experience basically. One that really stands out was the tipping point for me actually, and the reason that I eventually got into Pickup. There was this girl the summer after my last year in high school, and for whatever reason we started hanging out. Almost every day that summer she would come pick me up in her car and we would drive around and basically just do nothing. I had a massive crush on this girl, but I had no idea what to do about it. It wasn’t even that I was thinking about what to do. I knew that I had no idea what to do, so why even think about it? Finally, the end of the summer is approaching and we’re at this party with all her friends, so I’m feeling very awkward. I’m not talking to anybody. But then this girl takes me into this hallway and she says, “You know Tynan, I have something to confess to you.” I thought, “Oh my god, what could this be.” She says, “Well, I have a huge crush on you” and I said, “Wow, that’s great, I have a huge crush on you, this is amazing” and we kissed. Wow, what a high point for me and I remember thinking, “This is great, this is my new girlfriend,

Do you make most of your income through short-term jobs, contract work, and freelance assignments? If so, you’re going to love Diane Mulcahy. Before she wrote her first book, Diane taught a class called The Gig Economy at Babson College, named by Forbes as one of the “top 10 most innovative business school classes in the country.” Listen in to Professor Diane Mulcahy to learn:  * How to prepare for the future of work, where the gig economy rules * What it means to take responsibility for your own career to live the life you want * Why those with a side hustle are set to rule the new work order Get The Gig Economy on Amazon. Find out more at DianeMulcahy.com.  What’s your back story? It started when I read an article that used the term The Gig Economy, which was the first time that I had seen that term before. I swear to God I got goosebumps when I saw it, and I had a moment of epiphany where I felt like, “Oh my God! That is it. That is the thing that I have been thinking about for the past several years.” I had always been trying to figure out how can I work differently. I don’t want to be a full-time employee. I don’t want to have just one job. I like to be able to do a variety of different things. I like to be able to take time off. I’m an avid traveler, and I had taken chunks of time off to go backpacking and things like that. I wanted to be able to incorporate that into my adult life. So when I read this article and I saw this term, I immediately created a syllabus. I was doing a little bit of pro bono work at Babson College at the time and despite not having any previous teaching experience, I got the syllabus approved as an experimental course. The funny part of this story is that when the department posted the course as part of the next semester’s listings, hardly anybody signed up. You have to have a minimum enrollment for experimental courses, and it didn’t make the cut, so the course was cancelled. But I tried again the next semester and got the enrollment that I needed. That was five years ago. I’ve been teaching it to groups of MBA students since then, and a lot of the content in my book was informed by my experience teaching The Gig Economy to my students. Why did you feel it was so important to teach The Gig Economy to others? If we look around us, and especially if we’ve been in the corporate world and have worked full-time jobs over the course of our careers, we see a lot of people who are not happy in the work that they do, in the jobs that they have, in the type of life that they’re leading. I live in a major city, I don’t have a long commute. I do work that I think is interesting, but I know a lot of people who aren’t in that situation and I was very dogged by the idea that there had to be another way for people to work that was more interesting, that was more exciting, and that made people more interested in the work that they did. Work that would give people more flexibility. Do you see the gig economy as an integral part of the way people will work in the future? First, I would say I don’t think the traditional job world is for everybody. But I suppose you could equally say that the gig economy is not for everybody. What I would also say is that the traditional job world and the gig economy are increasingly colliding. What we are seeing in the traditional job world is a shortening of the median tenure in any one job. What that means is that you’re always looking for your next gig, even when you land a new job,

If you work in healthcare, you know that some of the statistics are pretty staggering. Each year, thousands of patients in hospitals die or are seriously injured through errors — whether it’s through faulty systems, out of date surgical approaches, or medical process failures. But Dr. David Kashmer believes that there is a better way. Dr. Kashmer designs and builds high-quality health care systems, using a data-driven approach. In turn, these proven methods and tools make our patients safer, our healing procedures more effective, and our costs lower. In this episode, he talks about the current transition in healthcare, and why it is more important than ever to use the tools available to make significant improvements to the system. For anyone who is passionate about improving our hospitals, this episode is for you. Get David’s book Volume to Value on Amazon. Learn more at DavidKashmer.com.  What’s frustrated you about health care? We have not routinely used a lot of the tools that can help take us to the next level of quality. They exist, they’re out there, they’re being used in other industries, but whether we have NIH syndrome (“not invented here”) or something similar, we don’t take advantage of a lot of the work that’s already been done by the experts. We’re really in our infancy when it comes to our approach on how to improve health care. When I trained in Lean and Six Sigma, I realized, “Oh my gosh, there is this incredible tool set out there. How do we get it to the very busy people in healthcare who are at the tip of the spear helping patients? How do we get those tools in their hands? That would be a really powerful combination.” That’s where a lot of my work came from, in trying to solve that challenge. When did you first notice the results of these better tools? I remember distinctly when I was training in transplant surgery, we did a liver transplant on a patient in what is typically considered a very brief amount of time for a liver transplant. We didn’t rush, we did everything the way we normally did it, and when we looked up at the clock at the end of the case, we said, “Oh my gosh, how long did that take? Wow, for a liver transplant, that was unusually quick.” Liver transplants take a median of about four hours. This was more than an hour faster than what we typically see. And yes, we had done all the connections, all the anastomosis. We’d done everything we needed to do, but it was markedly faster.  I’m not chalking this up to incredible ability on my part. I was fortunate to be part of an excellent team, with an excellent lead surgeon. I was not the lead surgeon, who was incredibly talented and a large portion of why this case went so well. Still, there were many other things that had to line up. What it made me do is think back on what lined up to produce excellence, and how is it that we can capture that lightning in a bottle every time to make each event go the best way it can. What is the #1 takeaway from your book? Healthcare is in transition, and that means those in healthcare need to be better than ever at promoting quality and value. Value for our patients, and quality in the outcomes we see. These tools are useful not just to avoid defects, but how to make excellence routine.  It’s time to use these advanced quality tools that already exist, because waste is less tolerated than ever with our current system.

How long does it take to successfully execute a business idea? Ari Meisel believes it only takes one day. Ari and his co-author, Nick Sonnenberg, successfully launched their business in just 24 hours — and that was nearly two years ago. In this episode, you’ll learn how to: * Launch a lean startup * Use data to optimize your business * Make yourself a more effective worker If you’ve ever been frustrated with an inability to execution, or you just feel overwhelmed with your never-ending pile of work, this episode is for you. Get Idea to Execution on Amazon. Learn more about Ari’s company at GetLeverage.com.  What laid the foundation for Idea to Execution? When I was 23 years old, I was working in real estate, and I was living a very unhealthy lifestyle. I simultaneously reached the milestone of $3 million of personal debt and I was diagnosed Crohn’s Disease. After having worked for three years straight, 18 hours a day pretty much, I was in a situation where I could barely work an hour a day. I was so sick and weak. After I hit a real low point in the hospital, I began the process to overcome my illness through self-tracking and self-experimentation. A big part of it was dealing with the stress aspects of my life. That’s when I created a new system of productivity, which I would call “less doing” (as in Less Doing, More Living) with the overarching framework of teaching people how to optimize, automate and outsource everything in their lives in order to be more effective. Now, fast forward a few years… I’ve been pain-free, medicine free. I’ve taught and spoken around the world, I’ve got two books on less doing. In August 2015, I was having dinner with my good friend, Nick Sonnenberg. That morning, coincidentally, a very large US-based virtual assistant company went out of business. We were talking and brainstorming about what we thought went wrong. Between the two of us, we’d probably worked with 30 different virtual assisting companies over the years. We’d outsourced thousands of tasks, and Nick suggested we start our own virtual assisting company. 24 hours later, using free off the shelf tools with two assistants, 10 clients and not a single penny of funding, we launched Leverage. We have grown to a team of over a hundred professionals, that can do anything for any business or person — as long as it’s legal. We service over 450 clients, doing a thousand hours of work every week, ranging from: * Graphic design * Shopping * Travel planning * Website development * Research * Everything in between. How is Leverage different from other VA companies? There are no services we’re aware of that do the range of things that we do. You have general virtual assisting companies that are great with scheduling and research, and maybe travel booking. You definitely have developers who can do WordPress and travel specialists who can do travel and translators and writers. But there are no services that we know of that can do a bit of everything, or really a lot of everything.

What is the best approach for marketing and selling to your customers online? Should you focus on email? Facebook ads? Chatbots? Steve De Mamiel and his dog, Samuel, are here to show you “the mongrel method.” Steve’s goal is to make marketing simple and approachable, so that you can make better connections with your clients. By the end of this episode, you’ll know why you need to stop selling and start solving. Get The Mongrel Method on Amazon. Learn more at MongrelMethod.com.  Why did you write a marketing book about your dog? I had a career in sales, and I was running sales training for small teams. One of the challenges for trainers is that everyone hates training. They dislike the time out, they’re distracted by other things, and they hate sitting in a classroom environment. Plus, everyone knows that 80% of the training is lost in three months. In a lot of those coaching sessions, I told stories about my dog. I had a number of analogies where I would connect what the dog did back to the sales team. For instance, I talked about going to the vet. Usually, I knew full well what was the problem. My dog would chew and swallow just about everything, so he was often in pain. The vet would go through this process of poke and prod, taking temperatures, and other things. Then he’d ask me another set of questions, and finally, he’d treat the dog. In sales, I used to say to the team, “You have to do a diagnosis before you come to a prognosis.” I’d say that because sales people often immediately jump to a solution for the customer, simply because they’ve heard it a million times before. But most customers get upset if they start to explain their issue, and the sales person essentially cut them off and says, “You need to buy XYZ.” Trust starts to unravel, and the customer feels unheard. What else do you cover in The Mongrel Method? One of the key ideas in the book is what I call “customer intent.” That’s an idea that replaces what’s traditionally known as “market segmentation by demographics,” or to a lesser degree, marketing personas. I take it from an approach that these days — using Facebook, Google, and YouTube if you’re running advertising there — you’re able to actually look at what the customer is doing, what other interactions they’re having, what they are investing their time in. For example, if somebody was buying a backyard swimming pool, they have to do all of these things upfront to enable the swimming pool to be installed. A lot of sales people might think, “A typical customer for a backyard swimming pool equals two kids, they live in a middle class house, they have a nice big backyard. I’m going to target that market.” My view on the world is that you should be looking for people who are doing things that are prerequisite to having a pool installed. That might be, “Do they have to get approvals in place? Have they spoken to landscapers who might finish around the pool?” In many industries, there are a lot of things that need to happen upfront to enable that person to become your customer. If you’re looking at it from that perspective — you’re forgetting about their income, where they live, all of those biases and preconceptions that a lot of people come in with — then you’re looking at instead exactly what the customer is doing, and the clues they’re giving to show that they’re invested in your product or service.

How do you become a peak performer? Jim Klopman, the author of Balance is Power, believes that your balance is the most powerful — and often, the most neglected — pathway for getting in peak performance shape. In this episode, we talk about how balance is your sixth sense, and why continually retraining your balance will not only improve your wellbeing, but also prevent life-threatening injuries. If you are a human being who works on a computer, you don’t want to miss this episode. Get Jim’s book Balance is Power on Amazon. Check out Slackbow.com.  How did you get so interested in balance? When I was 50 years old, I went skiing with the famous Stein Eriksen, who was really the founder of the slope-style, fun, stylish skiing. He was also one of the greatest racers in the world. I came away from that day going, “Well, I want to ski well into my 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. How do I do that?” It wasn’t fitness, because I wasn’t as fit at 50 as I was when I was 30. The fitness space has gotten so scientific and so good at keeping people fit. It’s remarkable, in terms of diet. So I knew it wasn’t that. I thought, “Maybe there’s a degradation in skills.” But the more you think about that, that’s not true because the more times you do something, the better you get. What were the components that were missing that were causing people to not ski as well? And what was the component in other sports? Why would a golfer skill start to degrade in his 40’s? Why would a baseball player skills start to degrade in his 30’s? It just didn’t make sense to me. Then I thought, “Maybe it’s balance.” I went out into the marketplace, and there wasn’t any balance training worth a damn. So, I developed some of my own and my skiing got remarkably better. Then I tried it on other athletes, and they became more agile and coordinated. I thought “Maybe this is the missing link” and I went down the rabbit hole. From there, I discovered, invented and created a lot of things that I don’t think are really being explored in the scientific space at all. Why should we be concerned about our balance? Over the age of 65, falls are the number one cause of accidental death and accidental injury. Now, it’s not considered a disease by the NIH, it’s considered an accident. And while there are not as many deaths from falls as there are from cancer or heart disease, it’s close to that of strokes. That number has nearly doubled in the last 15 years. It’s not going down, it’s going up. Many diseases are going down because of better medical care, better fitness, and better diet. But deaths from falls and injuries over the age 65 have nearly doubled in 15 years. It’s become a huge problem, and nobody’s addressing it. The federal government is kind of addressing it. They say falls are a $30 billion a year expense, and they’ve got $30 million study that they’re doing, which I think is kind of comical. The study is based on studying elderly people who have bad balance. That’s like going to smokers who have lung cancer and saying, “We want to talk to you about helping you with your smoking problem.” It’s too late. Balance is something you need to be working on earlier. One of the most important things we have in the book is the four main causes of why people are losing their balance, and why this is an unseen disease. It only pops up after you’ve become injured. If you’re over the age of 45 and you go to the emergency room,

Honorée Corder’s first self-published book sold 11,000 copies before anyone had read it. To date, she’s sold more than 800,000 copies of her self-published business books. Her latest book, The Prosperous Writer’s Guide to Finding Readers, reveals her favorite strategies for finding readers. In this episode, Honorée shares some simple tips that any writer can use to sell ten, a hundred, or even a thousand copies of their book at a time. Get Honorée’s book Finding Readers on Amazon. Check out Honorée’s website.    How did you get started as an author? I was living in Las Vegas at the time, and I was a single mom. I had gone to a personal growth seminar and Mark Victor Hanson, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series, was a speaker. I’m sitting in the back with my computer and I’m typing notes when Mark comes over, he sits down next to me and says, “Who are you?” and I said “I’m Honoree” and he said, “What do you do?” I proudly said, “I’m a business coach and I’m a speaker.” He looked at me and says, “Everybody is a business coach and a speaker, honey.” Then he said, “You must write a book.” Those five words changed my life, without question. But I have a very snarky and sarcastic sense of humor, so my initial thought was, “Well, how hard can that be?” I started asking him questions. He asked if I had a presentation that I had given multiple times that audiences liked. In other words, there were people in the audience who had requested me to give the same presentation and I said “Yes.” He said, “Write that book down. That’s your book.” “Write that presentation down, sit down at your computer, and type the presentation as though you were giving it.” The presentation that took 45 minutes to an hour to speak took me three days to type (I type 120-130 words a minute). The original book was called Master Strategies for Explosive Business Growth because that was the title of my talk. I had an equally awful cover to go with it. My boyfriend at the time was a “graphic designer,” so he designed it. I didn’t have it edited, because I took English class, so I thought it’s got to be perfect. I don’t remember what the back cover page said. It probably said, “Honoree’s an idiot for producing the book this way. Please use it in your next fire.” So I have this book and I’m proud of it, and then I meet Jeffrey Gitomer who wrote The Little Red Book of Selling. I had quoted him in the book, so I’m introduced to him and I said, “Oh my gosh, I just got my book and I’m so excited and here, you’re on page 47!” He sits there, he’s paging through the book, and he’s reading. He’s being really thoughtful and I’m thinking, “This is great!” After a few minutes, he says to me: “Your writing is actually really good. You’re a good writer,” he says. “But this book? This is shit.” He said, “This production, the production quality, this cover… It’s just awful. The title? Honey. What are you doing?” Now, I am always very careful what I say to people. I am acutely aware that you could say that to someone and they could take, “This is bad” as “You are bad.” My book is something I created. But I’m not my creation.

Today’s episode is with Kathleen Davis, author of You Never Told Me That! Kathleen’s book is about the difficult conversations every parent needs to have with their kids in order to help them thrive in the real world. If your son or daughter is about to graduate from high school or college, this episode is a must listen. Get Kathleen’s book You Never Told Me That! on Amazon. Check out Kathleen’s website.  What is the #1 takeaway from your book? People tend to think that our kids just pick things up. That’s not true. There are so many basic things that we really need to tell our kids about, and we need to spell them out. We’re either afraid to have the conversations, or we think that they’re not important enough to have. Some are simple, like “Why do you get up and make your bed in the morning?” “Why is it important to open your mail?” Then some are serious things, like consent or teaching your kids to develop empathy. When my son was in second grade, he was being bullied and there was a kid that kept putting notes on his desk. The notes would say, “I’m going to beat your face in,” and he wasn’t joking. A lot of kids at school were afraid of him. He actually did have my son’s face on the ground in the playground quite a few times. My son was terrified of him. So, I said to my son, Henry, “Hey, do you want to invite him over?” Henry was like: “Are you out of your mind? We’re not having him at our house! What’s wrong with you, mom?” I’m like, “Well, honey, here’s the thing. I have a feeling there’s something this kid feels really bad about. People don’t go around saying ‘I’m going to bloody your face’ unless they feel bad. They just don’t. Maybe he doesn’t have any friends? I don’t know what his deal is, but maybe let’s just invite him over and then we can sort of break the spell.” Of course, Henry was like, “No, you’ve lost it. Just be quiet, mom.” We didn’t invite him over, but ultimately, the kid stopped bullying him. School ended, he came back the next year, and he and Henry were friends. It turns out the teachers were afraid of his mom. The apple did not fall from the tree. But my point with Henry was that you can‘t just think about what’s happening to you all the time. It’s not all about you, it’s usually not anything about you. It’s about this kid, and what he’s probably going through that’s making him do this. Try to focus on that and you might have some better insight into why he’s doing it. I think that’s what I try to teach my kids all the way along. I try to remind myself of that in business, all the time.   Why did you decide to write this book? My son, Henry, is really into climbing. He’s into bouldering especially, but he also wants to do some regular climbing. He’s at the rock wall six days a week and he is constantly watching climbing documentaries and free solo. He can’t wait to try out for the collegiate climbing team. He lives and breathes the idea of climbing. I kept waking up in the middle of the night, in a sweat. The dream I was having was Henry would just look back at me, he would make eye contact, and then he’d take a step off the mountain and just disappear. I think I was having these dreams because he was so blasé about the idea of dying and falling off a mountain...

When you hear the term “consultant,” you probably think of someone in a fancy suit, talking about strategy in a corporate boardroom. But Jonathan Dison, author of The Consulting Economy, says most consultants don’t actually do that. Consultants are just normal people with skills, who get hired to work on projects. And if they pursue consulting full-time, it’s possible for them to earn $250,000+ per year. In this episode, you’re going to learn: * How to get started as a consultant * How you can land your first clients * How to make a full-time living doing work you love   Get Jonathan’s book The Consulting Economy on Amazon. Check out Jonathan’s company Bench Watch.  What is the #1 take away from The Consulting Economy? The main idea is that you can make a job out of being a consultant. It’s not like you need to go out and advise the biggest companies in the world. That’s like 5% of the consulting market. The first step is to carve off your niche. The process starts with thinking about what you really like to do and who you like to do it for. In other words: what type of industries or clients are you interested in. One of the biggest hurdles that we see — and we’ve done this hundreds of times — is people have a tendency to want to tell people that they can do more, that they can do everything. And then the client doesn’t know what you do really well, and better than anybody else. This was something that I learned early in my career, in a super painful way. We had gone to a client, Hewlett Packard. This guy got us a trusted interview and introduction there, and we’re trying to sell him some work. We went in there and man, we told him we could do everything — from mergers and acquisitions, to technology implementations, to project management. It was a smooth pitch. We walked out of there, we thought we had it made. And this guy, this former executive at HP did us a big favor, which was very painful. He said: “You’re not going to get anything out of that, and I’ll tell you why: You told them you could do everything and they don’t believe that. I don’t even believe that, and I’m your friend. You didn’t tell them what you do better than anybody else.” Carving off your specific niche is almost counterintuitive. To narrow down to the ONE thing that you do really well, and that you like to do well. Because that’s the other thing: people want to buy people that love what they do. If you’ve got an energy and a passion about something, that’s part of what they’re paying for. Because they don’t want to do that well, so they believe that you’ll bring the passion and just pour yourself into doing a really good job for them. Pick the one thing that you like the best. Even if you put it out there and it fails, you can still rebrand yourself to the next thing quickly and easily. Because there are so many people out there looking for you that the market’s going to tell you pretty quickly whether they’re buying what you’re selling. And for you to change that to the next thing on your list is about a 30-minute process. So if you really love the digital marketing, put yourself out there in that niche. There are thousands of consulting and staffing firms that have clients already,...

Do you feel frustrated because your website just doesn’t convert visitors to buyers? That’s what Marie Wiese helps companies with. She believes that there are five key things that every website has to have in order to get people to buy. If you’re selling anything online, you don’t want to miss this episode. Get Marie’s book You Can’t Be Everywhere on Amazon. Check out Marie’s company at Marketing Copilot.  Do you remember a specific experience that laid the foundation for your book? Yes, I can tell you very specifically that moment. It was the days and weeks after 9/11, and I know that seems odd but I’ll tell you the story leading up to that. I’d left a large corporate job with one of the major banks in Canada, which also owns a bank down in the United States. I was working in a corporate job in the late 90’s in corporate banking, and I got recruited from there to go join what was essentially my first entrepreneurial experience. It was not a startup, but it was a software company in “growth mode.” I was brought in for sales and marketing. I was part of the team that helped the company raise about $25 million to start building out the company down in the US market, particularly on Wall Street. A bunch of things happened in the evolution of being part of that team and part of that job. 9/11 devastated some of our anchor clients down on Wall Street, so what we were doing to test out the product down there fell apart overnight. The preferred shareholders wanted their money back. There was a fire sale of the company, and in that moment, I realized as VP of sales and marketing that there was not a great structure for confirmation of value proposition within the business. It was just hype. That’s what laid the foundation for the book. The framework that you need in order to help a business launch, grow, and evolve. People used to say to me “Nobody goes to my website. I’m not an e-commerce company, so my website’s irrelevant.” Then this huge tipping point happened with social media, and suddenly business owners were coming to me saying, “Oh my gosh, my website’s terrible! How do I fix this problem?” What do you mean by value proposition? What would you actually do to prove that something has value? Here’s how the world works today: I am a buyer looking for something for myself personally, or for my business. The first thing I will likely do — if I haven’t asked a colleague or gotten a referral — is to go online and start searching for information to help with the buying decision making process. When I search for something and I land somewhere in the online world, we have less than eight seconds to compel somebody to click and do the next thing. Generally that has to be anchored around: Why should I do it? Why should I buy it? Why should I care about this? At the end of the day, that is value proposition. Whether that’s a value proposition as a result of an ad word campaign, as a result of a home page, whatever.  I think a lot of companies don’t do a good job when you hit the home page of their website of saying, “This is why you’re going to stay here and this is why you’re going to choose me.” It’s about reaching out to people in a human way online to see if your value proposition resonates with them. To determine if they will choose you. That doesn’t mean I’m going to buy from you right this minute, but I want to start a relationship with you,

For years, Eric Barker has been one of my favorite bloggers. He’s an avid reader who shares all the best stuff he learns from a wide range of books. In this episode, you’re going to learn how Eric built up his email subscriber list of 300,000 readers. The answer is surprising, because even though his articles are syndicated on Business Insider and TIME, those sites are not actually the main drivers of his popularity. By the end of the episode, you are going to have a clear game plan for getting your ideas to spread, and you’ll also learn how Eric is marketing his new book, Barking Up The Wrong Tree. Key Takeaways: * The number one takeaway from Barking Up The Wrong Tree * How to establish your own personal definition of success * Eric’s advice to authors who want to get featured on reputable sites, like Business Insider and Forbes * How Eric’s writing has changed other people’s lives * What it means to create “valuable content” * Eric’s marketing plan for the launch of his new book * Eric’s advice on reverse engineering the type of book you want to write. “The critical thing about success is knowing yourself, and knowing your signature strength.” —@bakadesuyo “If you make an awesome product, marketing is easy” —@bakadesuyo

In this episode, you’re going to get a master’s course in book marketing. Here’s what you’ll learn: * The #1 thing that helped Tucker Max sell over 3,000,000 copies of his books, and hit the New York Times bestseller list three times. (Think it was fame or media attention? Nope.) * The story of how Tucker met Tim Ferriss right before the launch of The 4-Hour Workweek * How Tucker knew that book was going to be a mega bestseller * Book marketing strategies for some of our past guests If you’re an author who gets frustrated with all of the options you have for marketing your book, grab a pen and paper because you’re going to be taking notes. Get Tucker’s book The Book in a Box Method on Amazon. Check out Tucker’s company at Book In A Box.  How did you get your start in book marketing? I didn’t start in book marketing, I started as a writer. You know, it’s funny. Authors ask me all the time for book marketing advice, and they say, “Okay, how do I get my book to sell?” I always tell them, “You can’t.” Then they get all confused and upset. They’re like, “What do you mean I can’t sell my book?! You sold all your books and you did all these tricks and media stunts. Tell me how to do that!” What I have to explain to them is that none of that actually made my books sell. The reason my books sold is because I wrote things that people wanted to buy. So I say that, I’m like, “Have you written a book people want to buy?” and they always say one of two things. Either they say, “Yeah, of course man, just assume that the book’s amazing,” which usually means a book’s terrible. Or they look at me dumbfounded, as if they had never even conceived of the fact that they should think about the reader. That’s really the main problem with almost all book marketing, is that it does not start when it’s time to sell the book. Book marketing starts before you’ve even written the book. You have got to conceptualize in your head, “Who is the person I’m trying to reach with this book and why will they care?” If you do not answer both of those questions very specifically and very effectively, nothing you can do will market a book.   How can you test whether people are willing to pay for your stories or your information? The way I did it was by giving my stuff away for free. It’s very counterintuitive, but there are three things about free that really help. * People don’t value free very highly. * It lowers the barrier to entry to zero, which makes it easily accessible to anyone. * Because you’re not charging, there’s no other sort of weird information signal coming in. By giving it away for free, the other thing that really shows you if people care is if they share it. If someone reads something of yours and shares it with people — especially with the type of people that the book is aiming to get in front of — that’s almost a foolproof indication that you’ve got something super amazing on your hands. I think for people who like teach specific things, like informational nonfiction, is to ask do people come to you all the time for advice? Do other people bring their friends to you for advice? Do people ask you to come speak? Do people tell you you should write a book? Not just two or three. Do you hear this a lot? The best place to experiment with selling something is to the customer you want to sell it to,

Today’s episode is with David Basulto, the author of Life. Camera. Action. When David was 51-years-old, he invented the iOgrapher, a device that turns your iPhone or iPad into a Hollywood filmmaking powerhouse. His device is now used by thousands of video enthusiasts all around the world, including Steven Spielberg! In this episode, you are going to learn: * Simple things you can do with your mobile device to become a pro filmmaker * How David invented the iOgrapher * Benefits of having a book as a business card They say “the future of content is video,” so if your organization or company does any online marketing whatsoever, you do not want to miss this episode. Get David’s book Life. Camera. Action. on Amazon. Check out David’s company at iOgrapher.  What is the #1 takeaway from your book? The number one thing is that you’ve got to have awesome audio. You’ve got to upgrade your camera’s microphone. Because even if you have your eyes closed and the video is horrible, you can still keep your audience listening if you have great audio that’s entertaining. If you want to go low budget, just use the head buds that come with your iPhone. That’s going to give you better audio than the phone itself, even though the technology is always getting better. You can get a nice entry-level lavallière microphone for like $50, and then you’re in business. You sound like a pro. There’s a microphone called the Rode Video Micro that you would put on top of the iOgrapher case. Now you’re going to get shotgun type microphone, where you’re going to get 6-8 feet around you, directionally. It’s going to be so much better than having nothing, I promise you.  Especially people doing Facebook Lives, and all this live video that’s the rage right now. Have good audio or you’re going to lose your audience. Who is the one person you most want to read your book? I would say it’s the educator out there. Knowing how many of them don’t know the power of having video in their workflows, most of the times because they’re afraid of it — they don’t know it, and they don’t want to look stupid doing it. I really wanted to empower them to use these types of things in their classrooms. It’s funny because I was in the film industry for years and when I got into teaching, I saw how hard it was. Basically you are babysitting dozens of students every day. You’ve got to keep them entertained and teach them something. You don’t really get into it for money. You get into it because you love teaching and you want to help people out. I have such a big affinity toward teachers, and I want them to do well and I think having them read this, they’ll see that they can do some more things in the classroom and really empower their students. Let’s say you’re the Spanish teacher and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to get into video.” But what about making your students create commercials in Spanish? Or let’s say you’re the English teacher and you are teaching Macbeth in the classroom. Now we can film that and as we’re done,

For the past several decades, Rob Waite has studied what makes executives and entrepreneurs effective. Rob’s career required him to master this topic. He’s been an international senior executive for Fortune 500 companies, CEO of a large privately held company, and CEO of a successful private equity-backed entity. This episode is for anyone running a business. Rob breaks down what the most successful executives do differently from those who run their companies into the ground. Get Rob’s book No Magic Bullets on Amazon. Check out Rob’s company at NoMagicBullets.xyz.    Why did you pick the title No Magic Bullets? I have seen executives all over the world, entrepreneurs at every level, chase “the next big thing” when it comes to management theory, book ideas, etc., that deal with one thing. What ends up happening is their teams get emotional whiplash every couple of months. It’s the new way they’re going to do things, the path to business nirvana. People fall into this trap too often. Nothing comes perfectly easy in business. You have to continuously learn, evolve, and progress. That’s hard to do.     What’s a common example of business people latching onto “the next big thing”?  I’d researched the top selling business books over a 50 year period, and one book that has been on the top selling list since 1959 is titled The Magic of Thinking Big. Now, that makes a lot of sense. You do need to think big, and it was written by a gentleman who is a PHD, but the cover goes on and states: “Learn the secrets of success, magnify your thinking patterns, and achieve everything you’ve always wanted.” If that isn’t a magic bullet statement, I don’t know what is. That’s very typical of often how certain types of books are promoted. A modern example is Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s a great book that people should read, but my perspective in No Magic Bullets as “getting the right things done.” Because I saw a lot of executives read Getting Things Done, they loved it, they had their teams read it. Then everything was about the process that the author derived and they never overlayed on top of it. They kicked up a lot of activity, but activity doesn’t necessarily equal accomplishment. The better questions business people need to think about are, “What’s our business strategy? Who are the clients we want to serve? Are we in the best markets for ourselves?”   I’m guessing you’re not a big fan of The Secret. That’s right.   What is the #1  idea that people need to take away from your book? There are seven capabilities that I write about, which all work in conjunction with each other. If you decide you only need to focus on one or two, you will get out of balance. But if you view how you’re approaching your company, your business, or your career through the lens of the seven strung together, you will have greater success than you’d otherwise envisioned.   What are the seven capabilities? * Understand the purpose of a business. * Create a strategic value proposition. * Get the right things done.

Laurens Bensdorp is the founder and CEO of Trading Mastery School. Over the past 10 years, he’s made a risk-adjusted return of more than five times the S&P 500. In this episode, you’re going to learn a better strategy for investing — whether you are an experienced trader, or just starting out. Get Laurens’ book The 30-Minute Stock Trader on Amazon. Check out Laurens’ company at Trading Master School.  What is the #1 take-away from your book? The main take-away is that it’s possible to trade profitably, and have consistent annual double-digit returns, beating the benchmark, using a simple automated trading system, and only working 30 minutes a day. It isn’t only for sophisticated investors. People do need to have, of course, some knowledge about the markets, but it’s not very hard to learn. We use historical data, and on a daily basis, we have our decision-making process programmed into the computer. The computer is basically doing the work for us, and on a daily basis, tells us what to buy and what to sell. Since we have more than 25 years of historical data, we have a very good view of how this strategy actually worked over the last 25 years. That part is documented in the book of when to buy stocks, when to sell them, how much to buy, and how much to sell.  Who is your book for, and who is it not for?  It’s not for people who want to predict market. What you see many times is people who trade on fundamentals, where they basically see the values of a company, and then make a prediction of what the stock market price will be. Based on that prediction, they’re going to buy. It is very difficult for people to trade like that. Warren Buffett, of course, trades like that. But we’re talking here about somebody who has 65 years of extremely well-developed skills. We follow price action, and we measure price action through technical indicators. We’re basically making decisions based on what has happened. Those decisions have a certain expectancy. Our strategy is for people who want to increase their returns on a consistent basis using a quantified trading approach. What results do people get after reading your book or using your software? People can trade in a way that suits their personality. Everybody is very different in their personality. Based on your personality, you have different strategies that you can trade. You have different lifestyle preferences, as well. For example, in the book, there is one strategy which only trades on a weekly basis. Which means that during the week, you do not need to take a look at the market at all. That part is very interesting for people who have a very high-paced job. They might travel a lot, or they just don’t have time to put in their trades every day. So they only need to do it once a week. On the other hand, we have also strategies that are a lot more frequently trading on a daily basis. For those strategies, there’s a different personality. To give some more insight as far as the returns, the strategy in my book where we only trade once a week has got a tested compounded annual growth rate of 19% over the last 22 years. To compare that a little bit the benchmark, as most people when they look at the news, they see the S&P 500 et cetera, and the S&P 500 only made about 7%. That’s the simplest strategy Then, we have other strategies as well where we combine different directions with a different risk management as well. Then, we get all the way up to the best one that has a 39% compounded annual growth rate.