Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 30

Second Income Report – a Few Days of May

1st of June 2013

My book was on sale for 6 days. Well, it was 3 days really; I did a free promo since 29th of May.

 

A personal Mission Statement: Your Road to Happiness is very short, about 9k words. I priced it at $1.

 

The very first day I sold 4 copies. My friends bought them, although I shared the book with them prior to the publishing.

I didn’t expect them to buy. I was even a bit angry on them that they did

 

27th of May 2 more copies were bought, also by my friends. I’ve got a first review. Four stars.

On May 28th I sold 1 copy and I couldn’t pinpoint which friend made the purchase. Maybe, just maybe, it was an anonymous Amazon client’s purchase.

Hopes and fears

Prior to publishing the book I was of two minds.

On one hand, I sincerely hoped my book will become a bestseller, I will become a millionaire and I will live happily ever after.

On the other had I was afraid that people will judge my book as a product of a literary wannabe.

True to tell, I was most afraid, that nobody will even notice it.

The first free promo

On 26th of May I submitted my book to a few freebie sites which didn’t need to submit the info 10 days prior or didn’t require several reviews. It took me a couple of hours. I wasn’t familiar with the process.

I was so naive then! I didn’t even check out later if they in fact posted my book. All in all, they wanted free books, so they would surely be happy to publish one more ad?

I also believed that all who download the book for free will read it.

After one year I’m more inclined to think that only 20% of the downloader’s become the readers.

 

I found several freebie Facebook groups and posted there about my promo.

Promo results:

29th of May: 123 downloads

30th of May: 181 downloads

31st of May: 183 downloads

The bright side

467 people got my book! The ‘bestseller scenario’ clearly didn’t realize itself, but I was thrilled to put my work in front of so many readers.

It was my first work ever published! And people were willing to read my stuff!

I was happy with that. Nah, I was elated!

The Income Report Breakdown

Income: Still zero.

I sold 7 copies of my book, but I consider as “income” only the money which materializes on my bank account. Right then I had just a promise of future income. And it was shockingly low promise as well. For each copy I would get just 35 cents, after the Amazon’s hefty cut. Well, not exactly, US government got their cut too. My “cut” was only 24 cents.

Thus my overall publishing income, which I would see on my account only after a few months, was $1.68.

The encouraging fact was that my $5 investment in the cover would return within a single month at that pace. And if I could sustain it, I would earn about $205 a year on this book. After about 10 years I would break-even on my time investment too.

 

Costs: Zero.

I already included the cover cost in previous report.

Well, I invested a few further hours in spreading the word about the premiere and a free promo.

I topped that with tracking my sales and downloads on daily basis.

 

The first several days of my writer’s career brought me down from the dreams realm to the reality. But the reality was not so bad. People were reading my book.

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My First Income Report

Exactly one year ago I hit the ‘publish’ button on Amazon.

For the first time in my life I published my work. What is more, I did it in a foreign language.

And the book sales trickled right away. People were paying to read my work!

It was beyond awesome.

It was quite a struggle to get to that point, too.

I noted in my journal at the beginning of April 2013 “over 600 words in English is quite an accomplishment for me”. Nowadays I write at least 1000 words a day. That’s what I call the progress!

Why income reports?

In 21st century publishing become so easy that any individual can do it and can do it successfully. To convince you about that, I’m going to publish my income reports every month.

But I’ll do it with one year delay. I want you to make it believable that you can do it too. So you can’t look up to me right now, when I have 5 books published, when I had a couple of months with royalties exceeding $1k, when I already sold thousands of copies.

I think you will better relate to the guy who is full of self-doubts, who is discovering how this electronic publishing industry really works, who just hit the ‘publish’ button for the first time.

Each month at the first day of the month I’ll publish my income report from the year ago. I’ve been tracking my sales very diligently; I may not remember my feelings and struggles exactly, but the numbers concerning the given month will be exact.

I want you to learn on my successes and my mistakes. I’ll include as many lessons as possible in those reports.

So here comes my first income report:

Up to the “publish” day

I started writing this first book, A Personal Mission Statement: Your Roadmap to Happiness, on April 8th 2013. I finished the content on May 12th. Only then I started to worry about editing, making a cover, creating a book description, deciding on the title, making an author page, preparing a marketing campaign…

Within two weeks I did all of the above and some more. And that’s not the way it should be done right. I almost stopped writing at all, focusing on every other aspect of book publishing. It wasn’t the best idea. Writers write. I’m the creature of habit. Because I mostly abandoned writing, it took me some time to get back on track with my second book.

But I had a very good excuse for messing things up: I had no idea what I was doing.

Not. A. Clue.

You don’t have such an excuse. I treaded the way for you. You know what to expect in advance.

Lessons: Don’t postpone the majority of the work for the last possible moment. Plan and coordinate before you start writing.

While writing find the editor, cover designer and the audience interested in the subject of your book. If anything can be done ahead, like your author’s page on Amazon, do it in parallel to the writing process.

Outsourcing experiences

I had a bad experience with cover designer from Fiverr. It took me about 3 iterations to make the cover and it wasn’t what I envisioned initially. It was a compromise between my vision and what you can squeeze out for four bucks (Fiverr’s cut is $1).

The end effect looked like that:

So I paid $5, but I lost several hours to reach this not very satisfactory point. My time is worth at least $10 per hour for my employer. That’s the market valuation of my time.

I took that route because I was very cheap at the beginning. I wanted to earn money, not to spend them.

I had also my book proofread by a native speaker. She did a superb job finding a lot of mistakes. We went through a few iteration of the book edition and I have never a single complaint about its quality.

Lessons: The cheapest product is not always the one which will leave the most money in your pocket. Cheap product usually equals to the low quality.

You will spend time learning at the beginning, like outsourcing effectively. You can’t avoid that.

Ninety percent of your book’s success will be determined by the quality of your book.

- Mark Coker, “The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success”

The Income Report Breakdown

Income: Zero.

Null.

Nada.

Nothing.

Cost: $5 for an eBook cover.

Plus I spend about every free minute working my ass off for one and a half month.

As of the 26th of May 2013 it was all done for the sake of learning publishing and the satisfaction of being on Amazon as an author.

I could expect the first royalties at the beginning of August, if they would reach $10. In 2013 that was the way Amazon had operated.

Investment

45 days of a hassle devoted to hope and dreams.

When starting out, in whatever venture, expect no shorter period of uncertainty.

I will open a bit the door to the future income reports: my uncertainty was much longer than 45 days.

 

Have you any questions about Kindle publishing? Shoot them in the comment section; the chances are I’ve already dealt with them.

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What I read, what I learned at the beginning of my transformation

I dug out an old post from my Slight Edge blog, which is (sadly) quite dead right know. It was about my reading material during the first six months into my transformation.

As soon as I decided to seek for change in my life I switched from pop fiction to more serious books.

I recommend below lectures to anyone interested in life transformation. Here goes the transformational books list and the lessons I drew from them.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

I’ve read it second time and forgot 95% of it again. I’m no CEO to use management tactics.

Lessons

I wrote my personal mission statement inspired by this book.

It’s a great starting point of my progress journey.

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

It is a great book to read after The Slight Edge.

Lessons

The Importance of gratitude.

Tracking, pen and paper are powerful tools. I track my daily disciplines and expenses. I periodically track my diet and time.

Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles

New Age, wishful thinking stuff. Yes, maybe. But what an eye-opener!

Lessons

Inspired by this book I read several encyclical letters comparing their content with SoGR. I found it only slightly heretical and full of wisdom. I reshaped its content, so it is less magical and more God-oriented and I’m reading small fragments of it every day.

Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen

The title says it all.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

The scientific (basics of Logotherapy) on the one hand and based on real experienced on the other. It made an ideal mix for me.

Lessons

I’m not crazy looking to fulfill my destiny. BTW, I found similar teachings in encyclical letters.

The Unconscious God by Victor Frankl

Lessons

I believe in God and I’m not crazy.

Titan by Ron Chernow

Rockefeller’s biography. Interesting.

Lessons

The unrelenting focus and success formed from habits – that’s the pieces of John D’s story which made me think.

Start Over Finish Rich by David Bach
Your money Your Life by Joe Dominguez & co-authors

Two books on money subject. Thanks to a few simple tips (and disciplines) I’ve more than doubled my savings within 8 months.

Lessons

Track your expanses. ALL of them.

Pay yourself first.

Transformational books list for spiritual life

And a handful of spiritual lectures. Nonmaterial plane is hard to describe in terms of lessons. Just let me assure you that they contributed to my progress at least as much as the others, more ‘technical’ books did.

Saints’ books.

I’ve read about a dozen of them since reading The Slight Edge. They are amazingly congruent with personal development stuff. I recommend each and every book written by a saint. Mind you, not about them, but by them.

One saint’s man (technically – blessed) story was like a case study from Science of Getting Rich. He went from zero to a dream come true (quite material and substantial dream) within 13 years. I’ve read his letters. His amazing story is outlined here:

http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20020818_beyzym_en.html

Spiritual lecture for Christians – A Manuscript on Purgatory

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in developing his/her spiritual life. I’ve read it about 10 times and I’ll be reading it every day for the rest of my life.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/19876520/A-Manuscript-On-Purgatory

Encyclical letters.

They represent catholic philosophy and I’m working on making their message a foundation of my life’s and my progress’ philosophy.

Populorum Progressio – http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum_en.html

Sollicitudo rei Socialis – http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis_en.html

Caritas in Veritate – http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate_en.html

Laborem Exercens – http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens_en.html

Happy reading.

Can you recommend any transformational books?

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Mini Habits Review

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

― Samuel Johnson

I have a lots of reasons to dislike this book.

1. It’s full of references to scientific research.

I don’t put much faith in the research results, especially if they are not in line with my experience.

It seems that research, like almost everything else, is for sale today. It’s not enough to tell me “Mr. Professor proved that thing.” It needs to be proven in my life, too. I don’t care about opinions (and sadly that’s what a lot of research comes down to); I care about results.

Some of the research quoted in this book is compatible with my experience; some of it is not. All of it is creating much unnecessary noise in the book.

2. The author’s zeal against motivation is silly.

First of all, he comprehends it very narrowly as a feeling to do something. But in English it’s also a deep reason to do something.

Feelings didn’t work for him. Well, they generally don’t work all too well. They are transitory.

Deep reasons works beautifully for me. Better than mini-habits.

But whenever Stephen hears the word “motivation” he goes on the rampage. Dismissing real motivation is definitely a weak spot of Mini-Habits as a book which intends to help people change their lives.

But after I pointed it out to his very nose, Stephen admitted that he was overly negative toward motivation and he expanded its meaning into True-North kind of drive.

Besides, you really don’t need motivation to start a mini-habit. That’s the beauty of this concept.

3. I’m the infinitive willpower engine.

I don’t need mini-habits.

I don’t mean habits are not important; I just have a system which works much better for me.

When I decide to start a new habit, I just do it. I developed about 30 daily habits in 18 months (plus several weekly and monthly). Some of them are definitely ‘maxi’, like writing for 30 minutes a day. Most of them are medium-sized and could be squeezed into 10-minute periods of time. They are not very big, but they look like huge towers in comparison to mini-habits.

Usually I run out of the time to do my all habits before I run out of willpower for the day.

4. Mini-habits don’t work very well for me.

I’m not going to resign from my habits or downgrade them to mini size. When I introduce a mini-habit I don’t exceed the minimum expectations. I reach the quota and go on to the next habit before the day is over. I appreciate that I’ll have at least something done, but it will never grow up to the next level. For me they will forever stay ‘mini’; they are too slow for me. Four at a time? Give me a break! When I was on the lowest point of my abilities, beginning my life transformation, I started 6 habits at once. And they weren’t small.

These were the not-so-bright sides to the mini-habits, and they reflect only my personal application of this concept.

However, the concept itself is quite cool. As one reviewer on Amazon, who also wasn’t very enthusiastic, has said:

“Any book that offers good workable points on self-improvement deserves praise.”

The bright sides

Yes, the book is too long and overloaded with research examples, but it also defines concisely the revolutionary concept that anyone can change his life. What is more, it provides a step by step process of how to do it.

I’m lucky enough to have a purpose, the big idea that drives me forward every day. But let’s face it, it’s rather uncommon. Mini-habits are the solution which will work for everyone, motivated or not, with or without the big idea.

1. They work.

I could find examples of mini-habits in my life, something I already implemented using the mini-habit rules: setting stupid-small expectations, exceeding them on a daily basis and getting much better results in the effect.

I’ve already shared with Stephen how my gratitude journaling habit expanded from 1-3 entries into 25-35 entries seemingly without effort on my part.

But I have an even more vivid example—talking to strangers. I wanted so badly to talk to strangers every day, but I was unable to. I was too shy to start conversation with a stranger. Sometimes I could force myself to do it, but each time it was a monumental task. So I lowered my expectations. I was supposed to smile at strangers. That’s all. Talking to strangers is still an issue for me, but with such a low ‘metric’ I succeed more often than not. This stupid-small discipline has already allowed me to talk to dozens of strangers.

Brilliant theories describe reality, so without much effort anyone can find his own experiences in accordance with that theory.

In my opinion that’s the factor which discerns them from artificial ones.

The idea of mini-habits in this methodology qualifies as brilliant.

2. Mini-habits partly explain my success with developing habits.

I focused on the 10-minute long tasks—studying the Bible, reading a book written by saint, listening to motivational/educational materials, studying professional documentation and so on. It was only 10 minutes at a time. I could spare them, no problem. They all were stupid-small for me. So even if their scope and quantity would be overwhelming for someone else, they were mini-habits for me.

3. They are for everyone.

It’s a tool for habit mass-production for people with grit shortage, something I think which is desperately needed in our society. Instant gratification is a murderous vice which has gained a foothold in our era. No one seems to value perseverance anymore. Stephen explained in detail that it’s the way human brain works; it loves instant reward. But it also needs constant, slow stimulus to introduce a permanent change.

The mini-habits concept utilizes both of those aspects. You are an instant success because you achieve your mini expectations. And you do it over and over again giving your brain the time to conform.

Even the willpower engine – like me – can still find some areas in which to implement mini-habits. I’m overloaded with the number and scope of my habits. I have a hard time developing more of them. I usually need to give up one to add one more. But using mini habits I can incorporate a new habit without much fuss and keep it at the minimal level. I can do it for as long as I want. It may grow independently, as explained in the book; however, with my existing schedule it’s not likely. Or I can decide one day to take it to the next level and I will have the core of the habit already developed.

Even with my willpower resources I find that some tasks – like talking to strangers – are beyond me. I can do anything, really. But the cost of forcing myself to do something so uncomfortable every day would leave me dry. I wouldn’t have the strength to practice my other disciplines, to function normally.

I can easily imagine using mini-habits for achieving such “impossible” tasks.

So mini-habits work for everyone. They may not be the best solution in your unique situation, but they will always do the job.

A scientific summary

Let’s summarize it, so you can really get the picture of how powerful the mini-habits are. Take a look at the chart below:

It demonstrates the model of Standford University’s Doctor BJ Fogg, who explains how the specific behavior is occurring at a given moment in time.

You need a combined level of motivation and ability to be high enough to do something (plus a trigger).

But we are talking about building a daily habit; the behavior must take place every day. Every day you need to face the same battle. This is where the willpower factor comes into the game.

Ponder this model for a while; consider people who want to introduce a new good habit. Like with New Year’s resolutions, they are usually full of good intentions and a bit low on abilities. It’s something new; they have no experience. Their abilities are definitely somewhere on the right half of the chart. The more they want to achieve, the harder it is for them and the more motivation they need to actually do the job.

As the results of resolutions clearly show, having such sustained motivation is a rare quality. Most of us are full of good intentions, but low on actual grit which makes you do the job day after day, after day.

MH advantages

Mini-Habits recommends you make your habits stupid-small. According to the model it means you choose the behaviors which are extremely easy to do. It’s working for the masses—those who didn’t master the art of motivation and who are low on willpower.

And those two terms are accurate for the vast majority of modern society. The multitude of daily duties quickly drains our willpower and doesn’t leave us much time to ponder about our True North, thus we don’t usually have the source of lasting motivation.

So, to practice a mini-habit you don’t need willpower. You don’t need feelings to do it. All you need is to lower your expectations so you will always be above Fogg’s Behavior Model line. The behavior will always occur. You will always be developing your small habit. And it will build your abilities slowly but gradually, so after some time you will be able to face bigger challenges.

My recommendation

What is more, I know that daily sustained action – even the tiniest – always brings the result in the end. You will enjoy the tangible results of your mini-habits.

That’s why I recommend Mini Habits to everyone who is struggling with willpower and motivation but wants to introduce positive changes into his life.

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Blogging With Soul

While preparing my book launch, I was forced by my marketing expert to explore the blogging world a bit. I was reluctant to do this. I had some standard excuses like the lack of time, but it was really the question of going out of my comfort zone.

In the end I visited 25 blogs and contacted their owners asking them to spread the word about my book.

I’ve had some results, but it wasn’t the most important thing I found.

I discovered a whole realm of treasures. I have been involved in the internet marketing world for too long. I almost believed that blogging was about creating leads, driving traffic, converting the readers into subscribers and providing products they will buy. That blogging with soul doesn’t exist.

I forgot the main purpose of blogging. It’s not about getting profits. It’s about putting yourself out there; sharing your messages; sharing your experiences; sharing your opinions; providing your unique value. It’s about exchanging, not extracting the ideas, about being yourself for the sake of being yourself.

Behind each of the blogs I visited I found an individual, a distinct personality. I could find something of value for myself after reading a couple of posts on each of them. Every single one!

Now I’m wondering what was so surprising about that. In hindsight, all of that is obvious. Every human has his own unique way, his method of digesting the events around him, his techniques to cope with life.

It’s the everyday pulp from the mainstream media and big gurus which convinced me that there is something like a universal voice—almost always aggressively pushy, often boring, arrogant, preaching and without a touch of personality.

That was my impression of the content on the Internet before I made this ‘blog tour’.

Blogging with soul

I found something opposite. I found people:

Angela sharing how she managed to make her husband’s birthday party on budget. I quadrupled my savings rate during the last two years, I know quite a lot about frugality. I can appreciate the master at work.

Allie who works at home and shares her experience with other parents.

Katrina who generously shares her experience of burn out and breakdown.

Robert who came out of the shadows and tells personal stories about raising a child with a disability. That calls for loads of courage, integrity and transparency.

Chris who openly shares his life’s lessons. He has a very successful blog, but he communicated to his readers that he will back off from posting frequently because he wants to give more time to his family.

Jason who is an enormously talented writer. He is able to present deep issues in a light tone, which makes you at the same moment laugh and ponder your life.

Melanie who – among other things – shares her personal insights from Bible lectures. For 17 years I have been a member of a church community where we try to see what the Word of God has to say about our everyday life. I admire her gift to draw very personal conclusions from the Bible.

Ashleigh who articulated the idea of blogging much better than me.

Frederick who writes about what fatherhood means for him.

Roaen who is not afraid to describe her struggles to get fit.

Doug a man with the mission to take fatherhood to a whole new level.

Emilia who very openly shares working-at-home-woman’s frustrations. I appreciate her honesty very much. And she was one of the bloggers who actually gave me a hand with my launch. Thanks once again, Emilia!

Monica yet another mom who has the courage to tell about her weight loss and mean attitudes toward stay-at-home parents.

Dan who had a huge blog but found the time to reply to my mail.

Aleksandra who shared with her readers the story of her home repair after it was struck by a fallen tree. Such personal peeks into bloggers’ lives gives the Net a human touch.

Jim, another talented writer who abundantly shares his point of view in fatherhood, taking a lot from personal experience.

Kerry who offered me help but was too busy to finalize that. I shed a tear when reading her post about parents’ dilemmas.

Matt who writes so funny that I almost burst out laughing while eating my breakfast in front of computer. I barely avoid the disaster.

Jim who writes sponsored posts with such a load of personal touch that I wouldn’t have ever guessed they were sponsored if he didn’t state that explicitly.

Dear Louida. Seeing her blog for the first time I judged it as dry and impersonal, but she agreed to help me immediately. God bless you!

Some of them have giant blogs with hundreds of thousands of followers. Some own obscure pre-WordPress blogs and got a sparse engagement. But they all are people like you and me. They are all unique. They have their own problems, doubts, challenges and successes and they share them with the world. They sacrifice their time to allow total strangers to gain some wisdom from their experience.

Those people don’t preach integrity and transparency, they live them. They use their own lives as teaching materials for us. They don’t shrink from showing their weakness … and their greatness.

I judged some of them after visiting their blogs, after receiving (or not) their replies to my plea. I attributed them some low motives; I was wrong every time. That was another lesson to me.

No-gurus zone

Writing this post I wondered about our tendency to follow the big gurus. After this ‘blog tour’ I think gurus’ stuff is a waste of time. To most of them you and I are just a number in their traffic or subscription statistics.

They don’t interact with their readers. They don’t even reply to the comments on their blogs. They are dethatched from real life and common folks.

They don’t act like normal people; their blogs are just some kind of avatars, not the real substance of them. Their blogging is soulless.

I decided that people who don’t answer my comments are not worth my time to read their content. (Tweet this!)

I advise the same course of action to you. The Web is enormously huge and rich with authentic people who will gladly support you. Don’t waste your time on plastic avatars; connect with the real people. Save your efforts for those who are blogging with soul.

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How to Write a Personal Mission Statement?

It seems to be the single most searched phrase regarding the matter of personal mission statement, not “what is it?”, not “how it works” and not “why it works”.

I suppose it’s because Stephen R. Covey had quite a good way of explaining how it works, what and why in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

In contrast, the part about writing your own mission statement wasn’t as brilliant as the rest. His collaborators tried to fill that gap by publishing “How to Develop Your Personal Mission Statement” after his death, but this work is skewed towards “what and why” too.

Of course my opinion is biased, because I also wrote a book about creating your personal mission statement. But other readers share my point of view.

Anyway. I‘ll explain to you in less than 1000 words how to write a personal mission statement. It is easy. It is less about writing, really, than about analyzing yourself.

Step 1. Ask the questions.

In modern society, we spend all too much time in what my friend called “survival mode”. We think about work, commuting, organizing the day of our family, looking for entertainment to charge the batteries before another workday and enjoying those entertainments. It leaves little to no time for being alone and giving some thought to the deeper meaning of all that hassle.

And when you just sit and ask yourself a bunch of questions, when you analyze the reasons for all of those frenzied activities, when you get out of survival mode, the rest of the process of writing your mission statement is easy.

Ask yourself questions. It is really as simple as that.

I have been preaching the usefulness of the personal mission statement for the past year. I met people who said they have no purpose and meaning in life, that they don’t grasp the idea of mission statement.

Some of them were content with those excuses and did nothing more about it. But I know at least 2 people who said, “I have no purpose”, but then they made some self-analysis, answered a bunch of intimate questions for themselves and, in the effect, they created their personal mission statement.

Ditch the excuses; overcome the internal resistance and simply answer the questions.

“But which questions?!” – You, of course are eager to know the formula. But there is no formula. It’s enough that they make you wonder about you, your preferences, values and desires. I included 27 question sets (sometimes one question leads to another) in my book. But I advised my readers to answer them in random order and not necessarily all of them.

If you need some prompts, my friend Lidiya put a small (and free) booklet together which includes about a dozen such questions; almost all of them are included in my book, too.

Step 1b. Use your imagination.

Don’t restrict yourself to just dry questions and answers. Do some mental exercises, use your imagination. Put some emotions into the creation process. They’ll free up your creativity and dig out some deep stuff that you didn’t even realize is hidden inside you.

In my book I propose 10 different exercises. My favorite is imagining your funeral.

Close your eyes and see yourself in the coffin. Imagine the mourners around. What do they feel and why? What do they say among themselves? Hear the speeches from your spouse, your children, your workmates, your neighbors. Those speeches are the core of the exercise. Write down at least several sentences for each speech given.

I love this exercises because my visualization skills are very poor. It is more about words than the images and words I can play with. Tackling the images feels to me too much like work.

Step 1c. Write everything down.

Everything. Every single thought and emotion. If you skip this you may as well not start the process. Without registering the whole flow of your internal world, even the strongest emotions and the most vivid enlightenments will be forgotten sooner or later.

Step 2. Chisel away.

Your notes are your raw material. Now you are supposed to skim and trim it till you have the final product. It’s not important how many notes you got. I had several pages, about 5k words. One of my readers wrote down 38 pages.

While deciding what to keep in your personal mission statement and what to cut out, keep this question in mind:

Do I really want to think about it every day for the rest of my life?

We are talking about your mission in life. You will be reading those words every day for the rest of your life. Skip the trivia. Focus on what’s important.

2c. Compose.

The final product should be concise and precise. You should focus on several issues and roles which lay at the center of your life. Don’t include the description of countries you want to visit if you want to travel to help natives improve their lives and that’s your core mission.

You can use external material too—fragments of books, quotes of famous people, fragments of letters or love poems you’ve written/received, your favorite song’s text, the Holy Book of your religion.

3. Use and rewrite.

Once you have your personal mission statement written down, use it. Read it at least once a day. Memorize it. Repeat it to the point of boredom. Doing this you will find the points which just don’t feel right. Change them or throw them out.

You will continually work on your mission statement, adjusting it to the new directions your life will head toward.

But, that’s for the future. You need only the first raw version to write it.

I cut out 1 out of the 14 points I had built my statement around. I significantly changed 2 more. The recent change I made was changing “I’m becoming a writer” into “I am a writer”.

That’s it. You already know how to write your personal mission statement. Start the process now.

You surely agree it doesn’t sound complicated, just a few simple steps anybody can do.

Ask yourself questions.

Answer them honestly.

Write down the answers.

Use your imagination.

Do some visualization inside your head.

Write down your emotions and conclusions.

Choose several core values, roles, issues.

Edit the material.

Read the final product every day and tweak it to make it sound right for you.

My personal mission statement brought a tremendous amount of value into my life. I can’t guarantee that your mission statement will become the letter describing your destiny.

But I can assure you that you will gain insights into your life you didn’t think about previously. Make your own mission statement and use it every day. It may not bring you to the exact desired destination, but it will allow you to narrow your path, reduce the amount of noise inside your mind and focus on what’s really important for you.

I invite you to download “A Personal Mission Statement: Your Roadmap to Happiness” from Smashwords. You can choose your price (I love them for that option!). I insist you provide ZERO as the price for it.

After using my personal mission statement for almost 18 months I value it as highly as $8000 in hard cash. It doesn’t count even a dime of what my deepened spirituality, better personal relationships, new skills, bigger confidence, multitude of new habits and hope for the future are worth for me. $8000 is just the change of my bank account I give my personal mission statement credit for.

I don’t want to be paid for the word count. I want you to pay me for the actual value your personal mission statement will bring to your life.

We can settle the agreement much later. As for now, go grab the book from Smashwords and start writing your personal mission statement right away.

The post How to Write a Personal Mission Statement? appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

How to write a personal mission statement?

It seems to be the single most searched phrase regarding the matter of personal mission statement, not “what is it?”, not “how it works” and not “why it works”.

I suppose it’s because Stephen R. Covey had quite a good way of explaining what, why and how in “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

In contrast, the part about writing your own mission statement wasn’t as brilliant as the rest. His collaborators tried to fill that gap by publishing “How to Develop Your Personal Mission Statement” after his death, but this work is skewed towards “what and why” too.

Of course my opinion is biased, because I also wrote a book about creating your personal mission statement. But other readers share my point of view.

Anyway. I‘ll explain to you in less than 1000 words how to write a personal mission statement. It is easy. It is less about writing, really, than about analyzing yourself.

Step 1. Ask the questions.

In modern society, we spend all too much time in what my friend called “survival mode”. We think about work, commuting, organizing the day of our family, looking for entertainment to charge the batteries before another workday and enjoying those entertainments. It leaves little to no time for being alone and giving some thought to the deeper meaning of all that hassle.

And when you just sit and ask yourself a bunch of questions, when you analyze the reasons for all of those frenzied activities, when you get out of survival mode, the rest of the process of writing your mission statement is easy.

Ask yourself questions. It is really as simple as that.

I have been preaching the usefulness of the personal mission statement for the past year. I met people who said they have no purpose and meaning in life, that they don’t grasp the idea of mission statement.

Some of them were content with those excuses and did nothing more about it. But I know at least 2 people who said, “I have no purpose”, but then they made some self-analysis, answered a bunch of intimate questions for themselves and, in the effect, they created their personal mission statement.

Ditch the excuses; overcome the internal resistance and simply answer the questions.

“But which questions?!” – You, of course are eager to know the formula. But there is no formula. It’s enough that they make you wonder about you, your preferences, values and desires. I included 27 question sets (sometimes one question leads to another) in my book. But I advised my readers to answer them in random order and not necessarily all of them.

If you need some prompts, my friend Lidiya put a small (and free) booklet together which includes about a dozen such questions; almost all of them are included in my book, too.

Step 1b. Use your imagination.

Don’t restrict yourself to just dry questions and answers. Do some mental exercises, use your imagination. Put some emotions into the creation process. They’ll free up your creativity and dig out some deep stuff that you didn’t even realize is hidden inside you.

In my book I propose 10 different exercises. My favorite is imagining your funeral.

Close your eyes and see yourself in the coffin. Imagine the mourners around. What do they feel and why? What do they say among themselves? Hear the speeches from your spouse, your children, your workmates, your neighbors. Those speeches are the core of the exercise. Write down at least several sentences for each speech given.

I love this exercises because my visualization skills are very poor. It is more about words than the images and words I can play with. Tackling the images feels to me too much like work.

Step 1c. Write everything down.

Everything. Every single thought and emotion. If you skip this you may as well not start the process. Without registering the whole flow of your internal world, even the strongest emotions and the most vivid enlightenments will be forgotten sooner or later.

Step 2. Chisel away.

Your notes are your raw material. Now you are supposed to skim and trim it till you have the final product. It’s not important how many notes you got. I had several pages, about 5k words. One of my readers wrote down 38 pages.

While deciding what to keep in your personal mission statement and what to cut out, keep this question in mind:

Do I really want to think about it every day for the rest of my life?

We are talking about your mission in life. You will be reading those words every day for the rest of your life. Skip the trivia. Focus on what’s important.

2c. Compose.

The final product should be concise and precise. You should focus on several issues and roles which lay at the center of your life. Don’t include the description of countries you want to visit if you want to travel to help natives improve their lives and that’s your core mission.

You can use external material too—fragments of books, quotes of famous people, fragments of letters or love poems you’ve written/received, your favorite song’s text, the Holy Book of your religion.

3. Use and rewrite.

Once you have your personal mission statement written down, use it. Read it at least once a day. Memorize it. Repeat it to the point of boredom. Doing this you will find the points which just don’t feel right. Change them or throw them out.

You will continually work on your mission statement, adjusting it to the new directions your life will head toward.

But, that’s for the future. You need only the first raw version to write it.

I cut out 1 out of the 14 points I had built my statement around. I significantly changed 2 more. The recent change I made was changing “I’m becoming a writer” into “I am a writer”.

That’s it. You already know how to write your personal mission statement. Start the process now.

You surely agree it doesn’t sound complicated, just a few simple steps anybody can do.

Ask yourself questions.

Answer them honestly.

Write down the answers.

Use your imagination.

Do some visualization inside your head.

Write down your emotions and conclusions.

Choose several core values, roles, issues.

Edit the material.

Read the final product every day and tweak it to make it sound right for you.

My personal mission statement brought a tremendous amount of value into my life. I can’t guarantee that your mission statement will become the letter describing your destiny.

But I can assure you that you will gain insights into your life you didn’t think about previously. Make your own mission statement and use it every day. It may not bring you to the exact desired destination, but it will allow you to narrow your path, reduce the amount of noise inside your mind and focus on what’s really important for you.

I invite you to download “A Personal Mission Statement: Your Roadmap to Happiness” from Smashwords. You can choose your price (I love them for that option!). I insist you provide ZERO as the price for it.

After using my personal mission statement for almost 18 months I value it as highly as $8000 in hard cash. It doesn’t count even a dime of what my deepened spirituality, better personal relationships, new skills, bigger confidence, multitude of new habits and hope for the future are worth for me. $8000 is just the change of my bank account I give my personal mission statement credit for.

I don’t want to be paid for the word count. I want you to pay me for the actual value your personal mission statement will bring to your life.

We can settle the agreement much later. As for now, go grab the book from Smashwords and start writing your personal mission statement right away.

The post How to write a personal mission statement? appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

My 4 Pillars to Staying Consistent

Recently my friend asked me the question in FB group:

“I begin to wonder how does Michal uphold his consistency … or don’t you have troubled moments at all, troubling enough to throw you off-balance for even a day?”

Consistency is the key to developing and sustaining habits. I would have chosen it over qualities like courage, grit or ability to focus, because without consistency they are not of much worth.

Let me present my four pillars to staying consistent:

1. Motivation

My answer to her question is simple:

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”

- Zig Ziglar

I’m driven. Some could even say I’m “obsessed”. Partly it’s because that’s my unique internal construction. But I don’t rely on my traits alone. For about a year, every day I’ve been using my first 30 minutes to fire up.

I look at my vision board.

I read the philosophy manifesto I wrote for myself; it’s incredibly motivating.

I read some passages from two books which have helped me shape that philosophy:  The Science of Getting Rich and Manuscript on Purgatory. Both of them are focused primarily on personal growth. I think when I’m 40 I’ll know them by heart. Every day I also try to share my reflection on those passages in Lift. That way I retain them longer in the day, because I need to think on them once again.

While I do any purely manual activities (like drinking a glass of water or brushing my teeth) in the morning, I repeat my personal mission statement in my mind or I pray.

I know my mission statement by heart, although it’s over 1000 words long. No single thing in the universe motivates me more than my purpose.

I spend about 10 to 15 minutes on self-analysis. Usually I answer some thought provoking question about my plans, desires, pains, motivations, obstacles, dreams, doubts or beliefs. I do it 6 times a week as soon as possible, usually after my morning routine or at the office before starting work. It’s my substitute for meditation. I write everything down. On Sundays I read the entries from the past week.

That’s the motivational bundle of my habits. It takes me about 45 minutes each day. I “waste” almost an hour every day staying motivated. That’s my way to do the crazy amount of work for myself plus be a family man and sufficiently productive employee.

2. Habits

The second factor to my consistency is explained by this quote:

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

- Jim Rohn

I tricked even the man himself. I use habits to sustain motivation to get me started every day. But I also structured my work habits. I strive to make each component of my work a habit. I have writing habits, connecting habits, marketing habits and am developing my online presence habits.

I ingrained them into who I am. I can’t imagine not writing at least 400 words a day. That’s who I am—a writer. Writers write.

I track those habits every day. In fact, I have a habit of tracking the habits.

Supposedly, 45% of our behavior is subconscious automatic reactions. In other words, habits determine about half of our lives. So yes, they are important. They are even more important, when you think of staying consistent as the key factor in achieving results. You may have power over the other 55% of your reactions, but if you decide one thing one day and the other day something opposite, then in the long run you receive nothing. Habits compound their effects into something greater than particular parts.

I have quite an issue with setting and achieving goals, so I’m almost exclusively focused on my daily disciplines. I consider a goal without supporting habit a whim. Whenever I want to achieve something, I don’t focus on the end result; I look for ways to incorporate some daily discipline which supports this goal.

3. Adjustment

Another quote explains my next success factor:

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

- Confucius

It’s fully compatible with the idea of habits shaping our lives. It also deals with the tendency to quit after failure. The normal cycle of (unreached) change looks like this:

You start a new venture, such as exercising regularly.

You start strong and enthusiastically.

Then life comes with its demands and you fail. It’s only normal and to be expected. You are at your lowest point regarding your abilities. Who is better at tennis—a pro player with a few championships behind him or an enthusiastic teenager who decided yesterday he wants to become a champion?

But you treat this failure all too personally. You decide you are a failure and quit, if not after the first failed attempt, then after the 10th.

Does a single failure in doing your habit mean that your goal has changed? Of course not! Will giving up bring you closer to your goal? Of course not!

What keeps me going is the constant adjustment process. When I fail, I don’t beat myself up, I get up and go back to work. Track your habits not for the sake of tracking, but to have material for analysis.

Did you fail? Fine. Now take the tracking data and ponder your solution. Do you lack the resources? How to get them? Do you lack knowledge? What do you need to study? Find a core issue and solve it. Get back on track.

I’m immune to my small failures. Each of them is just feedback for me. There is always tomorrow to catch up or simply adjust my tactics.

4. Personal philosophy

And there is the question of personal philosophy.

“Your personal philosophy is the greatest determining factor in how your life works out.”

- Jim Rohn

I assure you, you have one; everyone has. Some people, like me, just extracted it from the realm of ideas and thoughts they had written down. Others don’t realize they have one, like the “I love couch, beer and TV above all else” philosophy. Regardless, it still works in their life.

Get conscious about your philosophy. If it doesn’t support your long term purposes—fix it.

My personal philosophy 2 years ago was: “I do enough to get by and then enjoy my pleasures to forget about painful reality.”

At the end of 2012, I started to study personal development. I ditched the old philosophy entirely. I incorporated a lot of different elements into my personal philosophy, things like:

“I’m fully responsible for where I stand in life, right now and always.”

“The only real failure is to stop trying.”

“Nobody can replace me in my efforts to reach the life I want.”

“Work on my progress is the most important mission in my life.”

“There are no positive and negative events. Every experience adds to my progress.”

“God demands my personal growth to serve His goals, which I understand as ‘Love to all’”.

“Humanity is in the center of economic and social life. My role is to develop my humanity to the highest standards I’m capable of.”

“Not everything is attainable. But nothing is attainable when I do nothing.”

“There is only today to act.”

It’s just the top of the iceberg. There is much more to it, but it’s out of the scope of this post.

Those convictions shaped my attitude. Clearly I reacted totally differently when all I wanted was to get by. Thus my actions and my life look quite different now.

Change your philosophy

I didn’t come up with the idea of personal philosophy; I am not so wise. It’s the concept Jim Rohn is widely known for. He didn’t only state that personal philosophy shapes your life and your actions. He also said you can shape your philosophy.

Two years ago the above passages weren’t part of my worldview. But humans have free will and the most amazing minds in the universe. You can change the elements of your philosophy and, in the effect, change your actions, your life direction and its final destination.

When your philosophy is right, then staying consistent is easy.

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The Law of Attraction for Ordinary Mortals

The Law of Attraction believers are described as dreamers and unrealistic among many other, stronger terms. “It is doing that counts; you can’t just sit on your ass and dream out your future” – rant their critics.

I fully agree. You can’t and it’s doing that counts.

Nonetheless, those arguments are used all too often to ridicule the LoA idea and dismiss it as pure stupidity without an attempt at deepened reflection upon it.

I did that in the past. I considered all of this ‘positive thinking’ and ‘hokey-pokey’ stuff as a nutrient for the weak folks, who are always satisfied with hoping and never doing anything.

I changed my mind a bit over last two years. What has happened? Life has happened.

I started to seek opportunities for making more money, for creating more time for myself and my family. And the traditional answers were not satisfying at all: stick to your career, develop steadily, study, earn some professional certificates, change your job…  And where will it all take me? In my country, only 2% out of those who earn more than $3k are specialists, and usually they earn just a little above this $3k threshold. That’s as much as following the traditional path has to offer me.

Give it a chance

I’m still a skeptic, but I want to probe the Law of Attraction, to try it before I give any final judgment. And as I started to study it, it suddenly made a lot more sense than when I just was a spectator ridiculing the whole idea.

Because LoA doesn’t say you should only dream… Yes, it says you should dream, it even emphasizes the importance of dreaming over doing, but it doesn’t stop there. It is just more comfortable for “the realists” (read: pessimists) to notice only the main, mental part of LoA and dismiss it out of hand.

Wallace D. Wattles, one of the precursors of LoA  (the creators of The Secret, refers to his work in their movie) said that:

“There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought. It is the hardest work in the world”.

I wholeheartedly agree. The longer I think about it, the more I’m inclined to agree with the LoA principles. The mental work is harder thus more focus should be put on it.

So, according to this philosophy, if you straighten out your thinking, then the doing will be easy. It will be an afterthought (pun intended).

I discovered that straightening your thinking is hard AND I didn’t really know  how to do it. Consistent action may be hard to achieve, but all in all it’s easy.

Action

Every project consists of a series of smaller tasks, which in turn can be divided into even smaller chunks. Let’s take for example publishing a book. There are at least 22 steps to self-publishing. Doing them is a no brainer, really. I went through the process first time having just a vague idea about it. Writing was the biggest challenge, but it could be divided into chapters, paragraphs, sentences and words. In the end, all you need to write a book is to type letter after letter, joining them into words and composing the sentences.

Simple, mundane work. And easy. How hard is typing a single letter? Then you just need to repeat this action about 50 to 200k times and your book is ready.

The same goes with marketing. It’s simply spreading the word about your book. If you want a huge launch, contact a thousand people. Do it one by one, email after email, tweet after tweet, phone call after phone call and eventually you will reach that number.

And you can always divide those tasks into even smaller chunks. To write an email you need to seize an address, put in a subject and write a message. Again, word by word. To make a phone call you need to seize a phone number, dial it and say the words.

Everything is tangible and easy to grasp.

Right mindset

However, achieving the right mindset, the one which allow you to sustain your action minute after minute, day after day, month after month—that’s an art. That includes some mental qualities unavailable to ordinary mortals. That is TOUGH!

And you know what? We don’t have sensible, scientific systems in place to implement this kind of mindset. We have no systems which would allow the average person to attain a successful attitude. Whoever claims otherwise is a liar and you can state this fact by just looking at the success levels in our society.

The science is still helpless when it comes to changing human behaviors. There are theories and treaties, but they all lack in the realm of massive implementation.

That’s why we need to refer to this kind of ‘magical thinking’ that the Law of Attraction offers. There may be more bells and whistles in it than real substance, but as long as you stick to it, you practice all the woo-woo stuff like visualization, faith in a positive outcome, daily affirmations and so on—your thinking is on the right track. This, in effect, gives you the impulse for the right actions.

Real-life effects

Then strange things start to happen. Like attracting the people and the events you need, even if you don’t know you need them. The LoA concept verifies in your eyes. That’s not the theory. Those are facts.

Take the average Polish guy with a mediocre command of self-taught English, who has never published anything and estimate the chances of him selling well over 2500 books on Amazon in one year’s time.

I think you have bigger chances of winning the main prize in the lottery than that.

I had no budget, no experience and no clue. But I ‘attracted’ the people I needed; Diane Arms who voluntarily edited my four books, Hynek Palatin who voluntarily made me nice covers instead of the pitiful ones I had previously, Chris Bell who designed the marketing campaign of my book which became a bestseller  and Christian Riegel who offered to translate my book into German.

I had no idea how to contact those people and persuade them to cooperate.

It just happened.

Unicorns and the like

If someone had told me about such encounters  2 years ago I would think of them as fairy tales. But heck, they were real! You can’t experience something like that and maintain your skeptical attitude.

I don’t say I buy into the whole LoA concept with the ridicule language, the idea that we are all energy and our brains are the systems generating and receiving energy vibrations.

All I say is that, in the end, it works.

Dream and do and you will achieve.

Cast one of those elements away and you won’t.

“The combined mental and personal action (…) is infallible; it cannot fail.”

- Wallace D. Wattles

What do you think about the Law of Attraction?

Share in the comment!

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How to Sell More Books on Amazon

Are you an indie author? Wouldn’t you want to know how to sell more books on Amazon? Wouldn’t you want to know the recipe for a publishing a bestseller? Small, simple, easy to follow … add your own favorite adjectives here.

I would.

There are quite a lot of books on Amazon which promise to give you such a formula. BTW, Amazon is full of low quality books which are produced by ghostwriters with the sole purpose of getting your money. It’s hard to tell the difference between them and the real books which are out there at the first glance.

Verifying their authors’ credibility is not an easy feat either. For example, those who write about weight loss and diets don’t usually provide their full body photos, so you can examine if they walk they talk.

Research

But in the case of selling more books formulas it’s doable, it’s even easy. Instead of buying all such books, reading them and applying their info I did some clever (at least in my opinion) research. I’ve just checked if the authors of those guides sell many books themselves.

It took me about 2 hours of work. You can replicate this case study by yourself or just take ten minutes to read and discover who knows what he is talking about and follow him.

I typed in the Amazon search bar 3 key phrases: “sell more”, “sell more books” and “sell more books on Amazon”. I visited the first two results pages and opened the books’ links in background tabs.

Then I visited about 15 to 20 authors’ pages.

Disclaimer:

I checked only the names under which the books were published. Authors can have pen names also and sell more books under those pen names. It happened that I know one of the pen names of the winner of my research and he sells more books under it than under his “sell more books” name (which is his real one, BTW). And my research numbers are true for the exact time of doing it.

Back to the research

First of all I checked how many books they published. If it was less than 5, I didn’t even bother to check them out. What can you know about selling more books, having published only a couple?

OK, I checked one guy, who had 3 books published, because they all were on the subject of marketing and selling books. One of his books was in 78k place on the Kindle bestsellers list and 2 more were at 250k+ places. It didn’t look like he is a good role model who can teach about selling books.

I picked about 8 authors who had at least several books published. I visited each of their books’ pages and checked their sales rank.

I ditched anyone who hadn’t at least 2 books below the #100k threshold.

Disappointment

Do you know how many authors were left after this simple selection?

Just three.

My fingers were itching at that point to write a rant about how impudent people are to pose as an authority without an ounce of substance behind their work. The curse of the internet age. I could be the #3 authority in that niche with my sales! I write the how to articles for Kindle authors and I will bundle them in an eBook one day. Thanks to my research, I see I have enough authority for the job

Anyway, I gathered some information about all their books, to compare their results: the bestseller rank, price, number of reviews, and I noted down whether the book was on the Countdown promo.

Numbers don’t lie.

I chose a couple of winners who had many books published and at least several books below the #100k rank.

Then the choice was easy.

And the winner is…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

…

Steve Scott

His competitor had 24 books, 10 of them on the Countdown promo. 11 of them were below the #100k rank. Yet, only two of them were below #30k. He had several titles over #600k. Only one of his books had more than 100 reviews. Ironically, it was a book about selling more books.

Steve’s catalogue is smaller, but it’s doing better. Among 14 published titles (I didn’t count bundles and freebies) only two of his books were ranked above #100k. A place around #134k was the worst performance of his book. 6 books had rank below #30k, which means at least 4 sales a day (720 a month). 5 of his books had 100+ reviews. 4.5 stars was the lowest review average among those five. He had only one book on the Countdown promo and it was in 8,444th place on the Kindle bestseller list.

As I mentioned before, I also know his pen name, under which he published 8 more books. 4 of them are below #10k, and the best result was #1,656 (! over 70 sales per day!) in the Kindle store.

He crushes it! He definitely knows what he is doing. And he shares his knowledge efficiently.

My experience

The results of my research didn’t surprise me at all. At the beginning of May 2013, I bought his book, “61 Ways to Sell More Nonfiction Kindle Books”. It was the first item I ever bought on Amazon. With this book in hand I set up my Amazon account, author’s account, produced my bio, first book description and published my first book. I sold a whopping 29 copies in the first month!

You can’t imagine what a feat that was for me. I had written something and people were reading it. What is more—they were willing to pay for it! It gave me an incentive to continue despite the almost non-existent financial results.

I found his advice convincing, down to earth and easy to follow. I swear that each time I implement another tip I observe an uptick in my sales.

If you look for general, platform-independent self-publishing advice, then I recommend “Write. Publish. Repeat.” by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant.

The go-to guy

But if you are an indie and want to know how to sell more books on Amazon then Steve Scott is the go-to person. No doubt about it.

His advice is more applicable to non-fiction authors, but even fiction authors will benefit from it. All in all, we are talking about selling more books, not about writing the perfect piece of art.

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