Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 7

Fanatical Prospecting Book Review

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From my point of view, Fanatical Prospecting is a great personal development book. It is probably good for prospecting too.

I don’t prospect. I fear rejection like any sane person, and according to Jeb Blount, the author of Fanatical Prospecting

prospecting is hard, grueling, rejection-dense work.”

Thus, I built my business ventures to avoid prospecting and rejection. My customers come to me; I don’t look for them. I qualify them before I get on the call with them. And I don’t really need new customers. My attrition rates are low. A few new customers a month is more than enough for me. When COVID robbed me of my health and sanity, I did nothing in my business for three months. My revenue slumped only by about 50%.

I didn’t really need to read this book. I read it because it was a lecture in my mastermind. And I don’t regret it at all.

No CONS

Usually, I start my reviews with some negatives. Well, I cannot do it with Fanatical Prospecting. I’m the guy who didn’t need the book, and I’m delighted with it! I liked everything in Fanatical Prospecting. On the other hand, I can enumerate a massive list of…

PROS1. Very well written.

I’m an avid reader. I read 50-100 books a year. And Fanatical Prospecting stood out, significantly.

It’s a nonfiction book that reads a bit like a thriller. It has just enough stories to illustrate the points. These are real-life stories, short and to the point. The author doesn’t beat the dead horse. The material is meaty and delivered in a common, simple, understandable language.

This is just a great read. Which leads me to another PRO…

2. Extremely Quotable.

I have 157 highlights of this book in my Kindle. It easily positions it among the top 5% of the books I read. Maybe even 1%.

Most of those highlights were great soundbites – powerful one-liners, like:

In sales you are owed nothing!”

“Prospecting is hard, emotionally draining work, and it is the price you have to pay to earn a high income.”

“Elite salespeople, like elite athletes, track everything.”

“Effective delegation begins with effective communication.”

The above is just a sample out of dozens and dozens of great quotes I highlighted.

3. Brother from Another Mother.

I also liked the book because it was so in line with my own personal philosophy. I found myself nodding furiously in agreement about every other chapter.

The importance of tracking? Checked.

You cannot be delusional and successful at the same time.
“Delusion gets you nowhere.”

The importance of perseverance? Checked.

Just remember. In sales persistence always wins. Always.”

The importance of small consistent daily actions? Checked.

Every major failure in my life has been a direct result of a collapse in my self-discipline to do the little things every day. Frankly, that is all failure really is.”

Every fear is real? Checked.

This is why you feel physically anxious before you ask. Your mind reels, palms sweat, stomach tightens, and muscles become tense as you subconsciously prepare for ‘no.’ This is the root cause of your feeling of fear.”

C’mon! This is the exact description of what I had felt when I worked on overcoming my shyness. To the letter. It’s like Jeb had been in my head and described my bodily sensations.

4. Secrets of Trade.

Jeb has the amazing ability of getting to the essence of things. Fanatical Prospecting is full of tiny tidbits revealing secrets hidden in plain sight. Just a few of them:

The secret: Speak in public, regularly.”

This refers to the secret of being good with sales calls. I wouldn’t have ever thought of it. But hey, Jeb is the expert here. If he states that public speaking makes you a better salesman, who am I to argue?

There is only one technique that really works for getting what you want on a prospecting touch. Ask.”

Amen to that. We overcomplicate things, not only in the sales process, but in life. One technique; drop mike.

The easiest, fastest way to get someone’s attention is to use the most beautiful word in the world to them—their name.”

How to Win Friends and Influence People 101. Yet, it’s the underutilized secret even for those who read the book.

The ‘single most powerful technique’ to get past gatekeepers is to use please twice.”

“Yes, it’s as easy as this. ‘Please, could you connect me with your boss, please?'”

5. Ruthlessly Honest.

I loved how the book started – from telling why the sales profession is so hard and so profitable at the same time.

Prospecting is hard, emotionally draining work, and it is the price you have to pay to earn a high income.”

Jeb Blount doesn’t beat around the bush. He goes straight to the point and he doesn’t try to paint the sky pink. If something is “hard, grueling, rejection-dense” (another of his description of prospecting), he states it in plain words.

The author is also not afraid to articulate his position on things that get on his nerves. They get on my nerves too.

Political correctness has run amuck.”

“In your life, mediocrity is like a broke uncle. Once he moves into your house, it is nearly impossible to get him to leave.”

6. Funny.

Not hilarious. Just funny enough to crack a smile from time to time and lighten the mood. And Jeb’s sense of humor is right down my alley.

Privacy? Forget about privacy. You are in sales.”

“(…)smartphone. Twenty minutes later, you find yourself watching a video of a chimpanzee riding a giraffe around a circus tent and can’t remember how you got there.”

“Get it through your thick skull that nobody cares about you or what you have to say. They want to talk about themselves.”

7. Productivity Tips.[image error]
Photo by Monstera from Pexels

I consider the productivity tips sprinkled throughout the book to be the most universal message of Fanatical Prospecting. Seriously, stay-at-home moms could have used them with success.

For salespeople, though, most time management problems are self-inflicted.”

Most time management problems are self-inflicted for every profession where you are free to choose your own schedule. Every freelancer, health practitioner with a private practice, business owner or even independent specialist in the corpo environment commits the same productivity sins.

The two biggest prospecting derailers for sales professionals are e-mail and mobile devices.”

“Those are the two biggest derailers for everyone who works with a mobile device and/or email.”

“You cannot be efficient when you are constantly being distracted.”

The above applies to virtually everybody. Yet, with the stubbornness worthy of a better cause, everybody tries to multitask.

The most expensive thing you can do in sales is spend your time with the wrong prospect.”

That hit too close to home. I already pre-qualify my prospects; yet, still the most worthless time I spent is on the prospecting calls with someone I shouldn’t have been speaking in the first place.

8. Personal Development.

Especially the last part about mental toughness was very inspiring. If Jeb wasn’t a great salesman, he could’ve become a great motivational speaker.

Mental toughness is just icing on the cake. The whole book is full of powerful statements which applies directly to one’s ability to be honest with themselves and do the work. Self-discipline, self-awareness, proper planning, mental attitude – those things are the part of the sales and prospecting processes as much as they are part of life.

As I already stated, I didn’t need to read Fanatical Prospecting very much. I’m a business owner, but I’m in the early stage of my business, where my sales skills are not crucial for my success.

However, as a solopreneur, I am my business. So, while the prospecting message was mostly an interesting piece of research for me, the personal development teachings ‘in the background’ were the most valuable for me.

Summary

I recommend this book for every entrepreneur. If your business depends on your sales skills, you will find it doubly valuable.

However, I found Fanatical Prospecting a personal development book first and foremost. And a great one in this field too.

The last time I checked, every single human being could have used some more personal development. Thus, I wholeheartedly recommend Jeb Blount’s book to everyone.

The post Fanatical Prospecting Book Review appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Consistency Is Easy and Makes Your Life Easier

My friends nicknamed me Mr. Consistency. Clearly, they thought I possess this trait at an extraordinary level. However, there is nothing extraordinary about my consistency. It is mundane, even boring. It is not so difficult at all.

Most think consistency is hard, difficult, impossible, tough, unstable, untenable, and unsustainable.

Most people are wrong.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.”

— Henry Ford

It’s enough to change your thinking about consistency to attain it.

How Do You Change Your Thinking about Consistency?

I have a few ideas.

1. Realize that Humans Are Wired for Consistency.

How often do you touch your mobile phone screen? Quite consistently, right?

How often do you scroll through social media? Again, consistently, right?

How often does a gamer play a video game, a smoker light a cigarette, a pill addict gulp a pill, and an alcoholic sip a drink?

The same answer applies.

Humans are creatures of habits. Pshaw! As far as we know, all vertebrate are creatures of habits. We share the part of the brain where habits are stored — basal ganglia — with the most primitive animals — snakes, pigeons, alligators.

I can hear the objection: “But wait! I meant consistency with good habits is difficult!”

You say so?

How many people have the same friends they had a week, a month or a decade ago? How many people have the same spouse for years? How many people have been going consistently to work? How many students have been going consistently to school?

The answers to the above questions are: billions, billions, billions, and billions.

So, are friendship, love, work or education evil? Nope.

Bad habits glue to us without much effort. Most good habits need some cultivation before they solidify. But both good and bad habits use the exact same biological mechanism.

2. Examine Your Life.

Unless you are sick and there is something seriously wrong with your brain, you already have plenty of habits. Pick a few you are satisfied with and grateful for. Maybe you take a minute to decompress in your car when returning from home?

Maybe you exercise regularly?

Maybe you read a lot? Maybe you clean your room/house?

If you cannot recall any other good habit, you probably brush your teeth, right?

OK, so you have some good habits. It already says a couple of things about you:

-you are capable of creating good habits; difficulty level aside, you were able to develop some.

-your good habits benefit you; that’s why they are called “good!”

Examine your life and your habits. Think of how your life could look, if you didn’t have them?

Extrapolation

For example, I know very well how miserable my life would be without a habit of brushing my teeth twice a day. I developed it only as a teenager. And toothaches plagued my life prior to establishing the habit. My teeth rotted and ached like hell. It’s enough to dedicate two minutes in the morning and in the evening, to spare myself terrible torment.

However, you must perform this mental exercise on your own, taking examples from your own life. What benefits do your habits provide? What do they prevent and protect you from?

Reflection

Also, recall the process of creating your habit if you can. Maybe it wasn’t difficult at all? If developing this specific habit was easy, maybe other habits you have were easy to build too?

The grandest habit I have is writing at least 600 words a day. When I built my writing habit nine years ago, I had been aiming at 400 words a day. It took me about 30 minutes ripped off from my insanely busy schedule. Yet, I don’t recall any difficulty at all. The difficulties I had, I label now as inconveniences and discomforts.

I wanted to write! I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to change my line of work. I didn’t deliberate with myself if I should write on a given day or not. Runners run and writers write. End of story.

I remember creating another habit — drinking a glass of water first thing in the morning. It was annoying; I wasn’t used to consuming anything at all for about 2–3 hours since waking up. And I almost never drank water. I didn’t like the taste of it. Yet, in a few short weeks I developed this habit. It stuck with me ever since.

3. Realize the Power of Time.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

You can do that only through reflection and rumination. Your subconscious mind doesn’t understand the concept of time. All it knows is “now.” As far as I know, you cannot teach your subconscious what time is, like you cannot teach a chimpanzee to fly like a bird. Those two entities are incompatible.

We all intellectually know the concept of the compound effect. But the theory is not enough. I had once in my mastermind a very successful guy, an owner of a multimillion dollar company. He struggled to save money. I remember other guys from the mastermind explaining to him how one dollar saved today can be turned into several dollars down the road, and I realized how dumb that was. Taylor already knew how the compound effect worked. He wasn’t stupid! He helped to build a very successful business. He simply didn’t feel the importance of it and its repercussions.

You need to internalize the knowledge and feel it at your gut level.

This was the purpose of recalling your good habits and counting their benefits. It’s one thing to intellectually understand good habits are good for you, and it’s a different story to actually experience they have been good for you.

Scientists claim that about 40% of our daily actions are automatic. You drive your car, put your shoes on, brush your teeth and you don’t think about those activities at all. You just do them.

But those automatic actions don’t determine only 40% of your life. They determine about 98% (where does this number come from? My personal hunch). You see, the actions you don’t perform regularly have very small overall impact on your life.

One day you eat a carrot, another day you eat a burger. Those actions nullify each other.

But those 40% of activities you repeat every day? They compound. Eat vegetables every day; or eat fast foods every day. The output of those actions will quickly cumulate in your life.

Time. This is the true power behind consistency. Time is the most powerful force in the universe. With time, a river could cut out a Great Canyon in the rock.

Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.”

― Ovid

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Consistency is a way to leverage the most powerful force in the universe in your life. Try to keep that in mind when the next impulse to eat junk, watch junk, or “kill time” will arrive.

4. Killing Time Is Suicide in Installments.

Inactivity has consequences.

Time will be your friend or your enemy; it will promote you or expose you.”

― Jeff Olson

Always. A decision to do nothing is not indifferent. It makes the time to work against you instead of for you.

Do nothing, and suddenly instead of riding the tide of time, you are crushed under it. When you put your life on hold to mindlessly watch another TV series, play a computer game or scroll through social media, you make time your enemy.

Make rest a necessity, not an objective.”

— Jim Rohn

It doesn’t mean you will not rest. In reality, we need loads of time to pause and charge our internal batteries. Eight hours of sleep. Half an hour of exercise. Time for socializing. Quiet time for your mind and soul.

Have you noticed? There is no single modern app or entertainment platform on the above list of necessary activities. When you let yourself be sucked into mental entertainments, you make time your enemy AND you don’t get any rest. You still need to cut time for charging your batteries and for all the work you have to do.

5. Consistency Is Here and Now.

The classic mistake we make when thinking of developing good habits is that we focus on the perceived difficulty of doing something for months and years.

But you never have to do something for months or years. Consistency is a chain built from many links. When it comes to actual action, it is only the single link that matters. When you read, write, exercise, write a thank-you note, eat a vegetable, or meditate, you do it here and now! Not in the upcoming decades!

The effort is scaled down to the next few minutes or hours. That’s it.

Anticipating years of struggle and toil in advance is as stupid as worrying about your kids’ college grades… while the kid in question is currently the baby crying because of a wet diaper. You should deal with the wet diaper, eruption of teeth, first steps now. The time for college grades will come.

6. Consistency Is Small.

The size of activity doesn’t matter. At least, when we regard consistency. Whether you write a paragraph a day or a chapter a day, consistency of the activity is actually the same. It’s the number of repetitions, not the scope of your activity that defines the consistency of your actions.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

― Bruce Lee

Yes, you can condense the same effort into one day. You can do 100 consecutive pushups instead of doing five pushups for twenty days. In the short term, you will surely gain more than a guy doing five pushups a day. But when it comes to continuity and sustainability, your 100 pushups means exactly nada.

Unless, you can do them the next day too. And the day after that, and another…

Hmm, actually, consistency is not small. It is size-indifferent. However, starting small makes the whole process so much easier. First of all:

“Well started is half done.”

Image by meisjedevos from Pixabay

 

When you try to attempt something ambitious, like writing for an hour a day or going to the gym every day, you set yourself up for failure. The initial resistance is huge! In most cases, you don’t even start. You just fiddle with this thought and talk yourself out of it. In those few cases when you actually start such an activity, the resistance is big every time you try to repeat a habit. And you eventually talk yourself out of it.

When you start small, the mechanism is opposite. There is little to zero initial resistance, so you actually start instead of just thinking of it. The next day, it’s easy to continue, so you continue. You grow your streak with almost no effort. The best part? It’s ridiculously easy to scale up your habit once you built it.

Back in 2012, I created a habit of gulping a glass of water right after my morning workout. One glass. As I mentioned, I built it fast. Soon, I added another glass of water — I had an empty glass, so I filled it again and went to my desk to continue my morning ritual. While reading, journaling and the like I sipped that next glass.

Nowadays, I’m at the level of four glasses of water before I finish my morning ritual.

Consistency is easy. Change your thinking about regular activities. Doing them is not difficult.

We are biologically wired for consistency.

You already have good habits. You are capable of developing them.

Time will pass anyway. Your habits let you leverage it to your advantage.

Wasting your time is a big no-no. Time for a rest is necessary.

Consistency is built here and now, not in the distant future.

Starting small is smart. You can upgrade an existing habit almost effortlessly.

Wrap your head around the above concepts and become consistent. This is how you make your life easier and advance to the top 1%.

 

Originally published on Medium.com.

The post Consistency Is Easy and Makes Your Life Easier appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

The Slight Edge Report Year Nine

The 9th year of my The Slight Edge journey might have been the most tumultuous one. A lot happened to the world, to my business, and to me. I made it through only thanks to my daily self-care habits, which I don’t even recognize as such. They have been a part of my life for so long they became a part of me.

So, despite the heavy blows from life in a few different areas of my life, I survived and rebounded. Like every year since reading The Slight Edge, here comes the detailed report of my progress in the last twelve months.

HEALTH

My health had been excellent… up until October when I got COVID. I was steadily losing a few last stubborn pounds. I wanted to keep my weight at the bottom of the range I planned for myself, instead of bouncing from the top number all the time.

COVID

Physically, COVID wasn’t very straining for me. Of course, I was sick just a few times in the last several years, so I wasn’t used to feeling so crappy. I spent a solid eight days in bed with a relatively high fever. Not fun at all.

But it didn’t hamper my physical prowess. I kept doing my morning mini-workout during those eight days. I remember that one day I did 50 burpees in a row! Another day, I did over 100 pushups. My lungs barely noticed the intruder.

But my whole system… that was a totally different story. First of all, the recovery took forever (or it felt like it). After four months, I felt almost like my old self. Almost. But those four months…

Recovery

The fatigue was a constant companion. Yes, I could do 100 pushups. But then, I needed to quickly catch at least a 30-minute nap. I felt like I slept all the time. It definitely was an after-effect of COVID. One day during those eight days of sickness, I napped FIVE times. I think that was my life record. The lockdown and the weather didn’t leave me much choice of exercises. I walked a lot.

Hunger pangs were terrible. I swear it was another post-COVID symptom. I was ravenous. I gained 4-5 pounds till February, mostly because I couldn’t stop eating. Well, I could. I fasted a lot. But when the hunger pangs hit me, I ate around the clock. I could gain five pounds in one day.

But the worst was my mental state. I wouldn’t called it depression. I had had depression before; that wasn’t it. Maybe, hmm… “a constant discouragement?” Can you imagine how it feels to live for weeks and months in the state of constant discouragement? Let’s summarize it with “awful.” It affected everything – my family life, my job, my business…

Shoulder

In January, as a way to recover from my pitiful state, I tried pullups. I shouldn’t have. My shoulders weren’t ready for that. Plus, I think COVID also supported inflammation processes, so the pain was greater than just caused by straining my shoulders.

I went to a doctor a few times. Initially though, he helped me very little. I got a steroid shot after a month which helped with pain. Then, he just made me visit him regularly hoping that the situation would improve itself. It didn’t! So, I started the real treatment only around April/May. And it went painfully slow.

I got a nice birthday gift from the team in my day job – two rehabilitation sessions with a pro. I booked the first session in the middle of June. That lady inflicted some serious pain, but it helped. Nonetheless, I’m writing those words at the end of July, and my shoulder is still in shambles.

 

Now, I have my weight under control. Less hunger pangs and more fasting put my weight under 140 lbs., exactly where I want it.

RELATIONSHIPS

In September 2020, we had a 20th anniversary of our marriage. I prepared some surprises for my wife and I nailed it. She didn’t expect any of what was coming. Luckily, the lockdown measures were very light at the beginning of September. I rented a room in an inn a day before the anniversary. I gave her only a 2-hour warning before we drove there. We’ve been in that place a couple of times, and the food there is excellent. My wife really enjoyed the stay.

I prepared some gifts. Nothing exuberant – the main gift was a funny Power Point presentation made from our photos. She enjoyed it so much that she watched it a few times.  

The next day, we went to a nearby park established in 17th century, called “Romantic Park.”

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We spent a couple hours there, ate lunch at the inn, and went back home. I also gave her a bouquet of 20 roses.

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…and Downs

I felt like we were getting somewhere… for 2-3 weeks. Then, a very ugly situation arose between my wife and my daughter. I won’t get into the intimate details. It just opened my eyes as to how far from mental stability my wife was. The progress made by the anniversary celebration was illusory. My heart ached again.

Frankly, it hurt so much, I lost my desire to work on improving this marriage. What helped me was accountability from my mastermind. I obligated myself to keep alive the communication in my marriage by everyday attempts to strike a conversation with my wife. They have been helping me with this discipline for months.

Ha! I also surrendered the intention of my marriage to Holy Mary. I guess it worked. There were developments which quickly got my wife out of her shell. We got COVID; her mother began to have troubles with her alcoholic son; people we know were dying (which is always a wake-up call for someone who doesn’t live a spiritual life); her mother had a car accident and landed in a hospital…

So, I kept working on my communication and my marriage. The latest development was a conversation with my wife about work-life boundaries. I felt she interrupted me when I was at the home office all too often.

In fact, she saw no boundaries at all. If she wanted to show me a Facebook meme, she was bursting into my office even without knocking. A few times, it was funny how she ran away even faster than she burst in because I was on a video call. We agreed that I will work only till 6 pm – and that she will consider the time of my office hours sacred and won’t interrupt.

It’s still a work in progress, but we made a slight progress. At least, we have a talking point whenever she barges in before 6 pm, and she becomes mindful about her requests of my time.

Family and Other Connections

At the beginning of the lockdown, I decided to reach out to my sisters and other family members more often. Sadly, I must admit I wasn’t on top of that resolution for long. But for a few (several?) months, I called 2-3 family members every week. I also had more calls with my friends. I used my walks to call them (if I didn’t pray).

In my mastermind, in the autumn 2021, we created Come as You Will Be in 2023 visions. Part of this vision for me was working on my relationships. Among other disciplines, I decided to have a call with my fellow mastermind buddies at least once a week. This was another resolution which didn’t ever solidify. Nonetheless, I made a few dozen calls during the months that came.

I also kept a tiny habit of bumping into my kids’ rooms when I was using the upstairs bathroom. This one was spotty too, and I still struggle to maintain this habit.

Encouraged by my confessor, I also had serious conversations with my sons telling them how little time was left for us together (my eldest is going to college this year, and the other son is just one year younger), and that I wanted to spend more time with them.

When my godmother got sick with COVID in April, I kept texting her every day (she had troubles catching her breath and talking) till she recovered.

Relationship Feedback

One more thing about marriage and relationships – thanks to being open and vulnerable about my marital struggles, I got quite a lot of feedback from others, which surprised me. You see, for me it was normal that my wife has been treating me the way she did. But so many people reacted with compassion and outrage to my fate that I realized my marriage is not normal, and my wife definitely has problems. It wasn’t just my imagination and hurt feelings.

I wrote it in Trickle Down Mindset back in 2015 and I was right: people are our input sources. Another place where people’s input helped me immensely was dispersing of a COVID fog.

It’s hard enough to be mindful of your own feelings and actions in normal circumstances.
It’s close to impossible when your own physiology entraps you. However, it’s almost easy, when you need to report those actions and feelings on a regular basis to other people. You need to use your conscious part of your brain to articulate any verbal report at all.

It’s easy to notice patterns in such situations, even if you are almost blinded by your own weakness. When you report the same impotence, neglect or failure for the third time, it’s hard not to notice it. And even if you don’t notice, the people who listen to your reports will notice.

My friends and mastermind buddies helped me to get out of the COVID-induced brain fog. They, and my habits – I’ll tell more about this in the Personal Development part of this report.

Support System

I didn’t just get moral support and advice from my relationships in the last year. Plenty of times, I got tangible help.

I admitted my financial struggles, and I got a lot of help. My mentor, Aaron Walker, put me on the support plan – for three months I didn’t pay for my mastermind. The payment is bigger than my mortgage instalment, so you can imagine the relief.

My mastermind buddy – a Texan real estate millionaire – lent me money for the production of The Art of Persistence’s audiobook. Also, he gave me $500 to play with my ads without much pressure. All he requested of me in exchange was to give a report on how I used this money.

My sister, who was bored and out of a job, helped me for free with some Resurrecting Books reporting.

Anthony Smits helped me a lot with different projects – editing, formatting, cover design, and more. He never expected anything in return. I paid him anyway, but I could pay him when I could afford it, not when he delivered the results.

In the middle of December, desperately looking for any ways to make more money, I reached out to Dave Chesson. He immediately responded and generously spent 30 minutes on a call with me. I implemented very little from what he advised, but I was very encouraged by his response and willingness to help.

When I reached out for help with my book launches, fellow authors responded and shared my books with their followers. It resulted in several hundred copies sold.

At the end of December, a buddy from my mastermind tribe asked me to coordinate an update of his book. I told him my hourly fee, and he agreed on the spot. He paid me $250. The money arrived at the beginning of January, exactly when I needed funds the most.

New Friends

I regularly spoke with Marc Reklau every second week for the whole year. We missed maybe a couple of calls. Marc is a very successful author, which is a benefit in itself – you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.  
But he is also a great friend, and I always have enjoyed our conversations. I remember one of our calls in the middle of my COVID brain fog – he practically provided a coaching session for me. It encouraged me in the darkest period.

 

I was in loose contact with Alex Strathdee from Advanced Amazon Ads for months. About once a month, or even less often, we had a 30-minute to 1-hour call. Around March, he introduced into our small circle Denis Caron who does coaching and ads for fiction authors. We got on the first call on 27th of April.

Wow, what a blast we had! We felt like nerdy nerds who finally discovered that similar nerds exist in the universe. We spoke the same language (the dialect of Amazon book ads). I didn’t have to explain what CPC is, what impressions are or how important the conversion is from clicks to sales. At the end of the call, I proposed we meet bi-weekly instead of once a month. Alex and Denis were reluctant to agree, but they finally did.

Good for them; and for me. Those calls were highlights of my months. I mean, I can share what I learned and learn at the same time. And I talk with the guys who literally understand my meaning in the middle of the sentence. This is simply cool.

We will probably start a podcast or other form of broadcasting. We made each meeting about a specific aspect of advertising books on Amazon and recorded them, so it’s just a matter of packaging this content. Having a specific topic also helped us to stay focused and, keeping in the back of our minds that this content may be published, we restricted the goofiness and expert jargon.

Still, those calls are a s*itload of fun for me.

Daily Accountability

Around the middle of January, I complained in my mastermind group that I cannot find an accountability partner who could have been a match for me. Thus, I was forced to keep myself accountable. Which works most of the time, but when my mental state degrades (COVID brain fog!) or exhaustion creeps in, I was lost. I had no support.

I’m simply the best accountability partner I know. Most probably, there are better ones out there; I just haven’t met one yet. That’s not bragging; check out the characteristics of a perfect accountability partner according to Darren Hardy:

https://go.darrenhardy.com/accountability-partners-resource/(watch the first video)

I fit the bill.

Soren, one of my mastermind buddies, volunteered to keep me accountable on a daily basis. We decided to have a short call, 5-15 minutes, at the beginning of each working day (six days a week). In the last several months we missed just several days, usually when one of us was on vacation or had a random life event.

Quickly, we narrowed down our accountability to one item a day, according to The One Thing theme. The famous question from that book is: What is the one thing that will make all the others easier or unnecessary?

Well, we don’t exactly stick to this exact meaning. But we don’t let each other name some everyday busy stuff the One Thing. You know, invoicing, prospecting, customer service and the like. It must move the needle. Soren made me hammer out my 12 Week Year goals and then I made a point to connect my One Thing to one of them. This is how I managed to publish 91 Medium articles or publish The Remarkable Power of Consistency despite all the hurdles, health troubles and under-optimal mental state.

We don’t just speak of business. We don’t restrict our priorities to business activities. It was actually Soren, who pushed me to discuss work boundaries with my wife. I helped him when he had a serious parenting crisis. Well, “helped” means I was there to patiently listen to him. This is what friends are for.

Samos

My nightmare trip to Greece will probably get its own section. I couldn’t NOT mention in the RELATIONSHIPS part meeting with my friend, Anthony Smits. We had met for the first time during the online Transformational Contest organized by Early to Rise in 2013. He has been my weekly accountability partner for several years. And we finally met face to face.

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Awesome!!!

We spent quite a lot of time together. We worked on a few projects of mine (podcast pitch sheet, BookBub ads graphics, etc.). I helped him with some computer maintenance. His wife entertained my wife. We had together a few dinners and spent at least a couple of evenings hanging out on our balcony and sipping drinks.

FINANCE

August 2020 was almost a record month of mine, approaching nearly $7,000 gross profit. The biggest contributor was my business, Resurrecting Books, which reached the record $4,700 in August.

And then, Amazon announced that they were opening up Canada for all authors to advertise. September wasn’t too bad, only because the revenue from that month applied to my customers’ results from August. But then, the ResurrectingBooks revenue dived below $3,000 a month, and stayed there. In fact, in November I made less than $2,000, which was the worst result since August 2019.

Part of this sudden blow was losing a bunch of customers from the Canadian market. When I had the Advantage account, the whole market was almost solely my own playground. The ROI was great – especially for the amount of work I put into generating those results.

So, all the Canadian ads were highly profitable, but the catch was that I ran them mostly for my author friends, who were managing their own ads on other markets. I had those gigs only because I had the Advantage account in Canada and they didn’t. Of course, it made no sense for them to keep paying me when they could just move to their accounts. One of them commented when cancelling our deal: “You surely have seen it coming, and prepared yourself, right?”

Right, I had seen that coming. Wrong, I didn’t prepare my business for that, not even one tiny bit.

Also, Canada was a solid contributor to my own royalties. I’ve been selling there between 170 and 370 copies every month since March 2019. My sales dwindled to 60-120 since August 2020. My Canadian royalties shrank to about C$250 a month (from C$400). And the clicks got way more expensive.

Dwindling Book Sales

On other markets it wasn’t much better. Lockdowns caused Amazon’s delivery of physical goods to get hectic. And books weren’t essential goods. Messages on the website that “This product will be shipped with a lead time” didn’t instill much confidence in customers. The paperback sales shrank, and the competition for Kindle and advertising eBooks increased severely.

Thus, my overall revenue dropped by 8%, then 21% next month and over 23% on the following one. The race to the bottom stopped in December, but only on paper. Remember:

“Gross is for vanity, net is for sanity.” — Jim Palmer

My costs were actually a few hundred bucks higher in December, so my net income hit rock bottom, less than $1,200. It was less than I was making on some months in my day job prior to my transformation in 2012!

Before the end of 2020, I consumed practically all my financial reserves. Even the bank account for bills had been emptied.

Desperate Attempts

You need to remember that my mental state was pitiful through those autumn months. Financial troubles didn’t help one bit to improve my sanity. Oh, of course I put my trust in God. Yet, everyone who ever went through some hardships knows very well how it works in the dark period. There is always a tiny “but” lurking in the back of your mind. So, I trusted, but I was full of anxiety. I trusted, but I was scared.

Despite my dimmed mental faculties, I realized the financial challenges as early as October. First slowly, then more and more frantically, I tried to generate some additional income. My author friends found some success with bundling their old books, so I decided to do the same. With the help of Anthony Smits, I put together my whole How to Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day series and published it in one volume in the middle of December.

I gave him another bundle to create, but we both were so buried with our other projects that this one is still in the back burner.

It was desperation which made me ask my friend to invest into my audiobook. I had no cash to fund this, but I had all other required resources, connections and processes.

I opened my coaching on Coach.me and notified my email list about it. Crickets. I got just a couple of random folks from Coach.me, and the results were as random as usual – one person quit after a week, and another after a month or so. Ironically, I got the only response from my email list at the end of March, when my financial situation improved. One of my readers has been on a quarter-long digital hiatus and read my email after three months.

 

During that period I took any gig I could. I organized a promo sale for a traditionally published author. I took a manuscript translated from Polish to English and guided the author through all necessary steps to publish the book on Amazon. I coordinated that book update for my millionaire friend.

Financial Recovery

All the side gigs and money I saved on ads and my mastermind allowed us to survive through Q1 of 2021. Fortunately, the least I made was $3,800 in February; that’s net, for sanity.  

In April, some payments cumulated (for example that coaching client paid me for three months in advance) and it was actually my best net month ever! Well, it was about $50 more than the previous record month, but still a record.

May and June weren’t overly abundant (around $4k each), but July was another month when I could pay all the business expenses, bills, taxes and still was able to save some money. Again, it was mostly due to the accumulation in payments (for example, I finally got paid for the work with the book translated from Polish; we had some formal issues with this one).

Nonetheless, recently I got some promising customers and quite a lot of new projects from my existing customers (about 20 books in the last several weeks). It looks like the tide has turned.

CAREER

In the last year, a few germs of new careers emerged or the existing ones further developed.

Coach

I got a few more coaching clients. One of them I remember clearly – a business owner from Azerbaijan who had been an Olympic runner. He couldn’t apply the same discipline he employed to his running into his business. I helped him to overcome the initial resistance and, within a bit over a month, he was able to get his new project up and running.

With a couple of existing ones, I expanded my service to serve them better. Apart from the daily online contact, we have monthly/weekly coaching calls.

 

Knowing my inclinations, my supervisor in PwC gave me the coaching assignment in our department. I led several 1.5-hour sessions of soft skills workshops. I had a blast! It was so enjoyable! The pure joy I experienced with those workshops took me by surprise. I simply loved doing them – teaching and learning at the same time.

And, I guess, those workshops were also kind of speaking gigs. All in all, I got paid by my employer for those hours.  

Oh, and there is a happily ever after story connected to that. In the middle of June, I was hanging out at the company’s event and my supervisor, totally out of the blue, told me she is willing to invest $6k into my business coaching certificate.

OK, that made me interested. She also alluded that once obtaining the certificate, I may pursue the coaching career within PwC. Since I’m sentenced (by my wife) to work there anyway, I would love to switch from the IT stuff into coaching.

Speaker

I gave several more podcast interviews in the past year. I gave four online presentations about advertising books on Amazon. I gave a webinar for Phillip Morris Poland about motivation and productivity, based on my PwC workshops.

What is worth mentioning, I didn’t ask for more than a half of those gigs. People had awareness about my services, and they came to me and asked me to give some kind of presentation.

I don’t like many aspects of those online events – prepping the slides is the least pleasurable, that’s for sure. Coordinating everything and triple checking all the technical details is not fun either. But I immensely enjoy presenting itself. I know what I’m talking about; I have zillions of personal examples under my sleeve, and I teach. I love teaching.

Business Owner

Progress in this area was reached at the cost of many failures. The most painful lessons are the best remembered.

In November, I lost Nicole, my onboarding specialist. She moved to a full time job, but I expostulate myself the fact I didn’t provide her with enough work. She kept repeating that it was fine, but I guess it wasn’t.

In the beginning of February, I hired a VA. The recruitment process revealed all kinds of red flags, but I ignored them. I decided, I will hire her anyway and train her up. That wasn’t the greatest idea in the history of business.

Yes, she poked hundreds of holes in my feeble processes. Yes, I learned a lot about asynchronous communication with a team member. But I paid a handsome ransom with my time for that; and with my peace of mind. I hoped to delegate some tasks and be freed up. In the effect, I spent my time and energy on training, delegating and then double checking most of the tasks.

At the end of July, I demoted my VA to just creating the ads for customers. This is something she does reasonably well without any supervision. And I’ll look for another VA, and this time make sure a person fits to the role.

Lesson:

My biggest business takeaway from this past year is how much depends on a business owner in small business. Practically all the pitfalls I experienced were due to the after-COVID brain fog. This is when I lost Nicole, lost most of the revenue, and hired the VA. Self-care should be #1 priority for every business owner.

Ironically, I’m pretty good at it. I have my daily rituals to keep my soul, mind and body sharp, and I stuck with them even during the worst periods.

But I was hammered with external events and circumstances. Amazon opening advertising in Canada and the revenue slump, the overall COVID situation, marital struggles and the awful brain fog as the icing on the cake. Hmm, so it was good I already had my self-care disciplines established. Where would I have been without them at such times? I shudder to think of it.

Amazon Ads Expert

The frail connection I had with Alex suddenly morphed into a true mastermind when Denis joined our couple. While exchanging experiences, I realized how much I know about this business. And the guys often look up to me and listen to my opinions.

I mentioned my speaking gigs being an initiative of others. Kris Krimitsos invited me to be a speaker at the Podfest summit. Quite recently, an author who found me through Dave Chesson and started advertising a couple of his books, asked me to be interviewed on his podcast, Writer on the Side. We spent the bulk of the episode talking about the ads.

In January, an author contacted me about reviewing his book. It took us about two months before I finally got my paperback copy. But we also had a conversation about Amazon ads for his book. The book’s rank was quite high, so I said it would be better if I don’t use my random keywords approach. So, he hired me to train his team to run the ads. I priced this consultations at $100 per hour and he agreed without hesitation.

I had two or three Zoom calls with his team, and I also recorded a video about his book description. Recently, he purchased another three hours.

It seems, I actually am an expert.  

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

I will say it again – my good habits are the core of my personal development. The habits I started back in 2012 and 2013 – like gratitude journaling or my morning ritual – are still serving me as well as they served me nine or eight years ago. I owe them not only my progress, but my sanity.

All too often, I tried to do too many things at once. And I tried to do them myself. It had led straight to the burnout. But I never really burned out. I had some dark periods, but I never burned myself to the vegetable level. In fact, I got feedback from my friends, quite a few times, that during my struggling periods (like COVID and afterwards), I was active at normal level (instead of being hyperactive).

I owe that to my habits. Quite a few of them are directed toward self-care: meditation, exercises, drinking enough water, walks, reinvigorating my motivation every morning… And that’s even not mentioning my spiritual disciplines!

I don’t say I made my life fireproof. But I certainly strengthened myself mentally, physically and spiritually. When tough times came, I kept going.

Come as You Will Be in 2023

In October and November 2020, I worked on a vision for my life at the end of 2023. I set some goals, but in the last seven months I made only meager progress on them.

One of them is the mastery of Tiny Habits. I created several such habits to sprinkle my days with them. Some of them stuck. I think the most solidified is pausing before I unlock a screen of my iPhone to set an intention and objective of this usage of my phone. Some other habits are still far from being established. For example, bumping into the rooms of my kids whenever I’m upstairs.

I also want to be a certified Tiny Habits coach before the end of 2023. The only progress I made there was adding Tiny Habits to my PwC workshops curriculum.

And I hopelessly failed at developing myself in the areas of empathy, emotional intelligence, curiosity, listening skills and humbleness. Mostly, because I have no daily disciplines connected to practicing those skills/traits.

SPIRITUALITY

The main development in this area was getting a spiritual director – a regular confessor. My spiritual accountability partner had been nagging me for this for a few months before I mustered my courage and asked an elderly priest in the parish where my church community functions. He only inquired why I would want such spiritual direction and agreed on the spot.

Attribute it to the Holy Spirit or to decades of experience of that priest, but he was super-quick to narrow down my struggles to the marriage and family area, and he supported and encouraged me to improve on that front. So, his advice was behind the scenes of some relationship developments I wrote above.

Other than that, I also set a few goals for my CAYWB. Again, I failed with most of them, and again this was due to not having interconnected daily disciplines. The only practice I succeeded at was a daily one. I mentioned my idea to attach a spiritual intention to my every action a year or two ago. I kept trying to do this, every single day. I made it a part of my CAYWB, and it greatly solidified since then.

Humbleness

I had also a few minor spiritual enlightenments ‘on my own’ – meaning probably I studied the Bible and read works of saints long enough to finally penetrate my thick skull.

First of all, I realized (also thanks to the COVID and all the struggles from the last year) how weak I really am. The reality is that I cannot even deal with basic things like my own body, mind, or family. The fate of the world? It is way beyond me. I want to change the world, but it’s not my job to figure out how.

Realizing my feebleness and weakness was the necessary step to a true enlightenment – what it means to have a child’s mindset. It means putting my trust in God – “Daddy will take care of it.”

It’s a half of the old adage that you should focus only on the things you can control. The other half is not “and the things I cannot control be damned.” The other half is “and put the rest in the hands of God.” With full trust. This is the only way I know I can have peace, not anxiety, about the things I cannot control, from natural disasters to dumb politicians. This kind of trust is liberating – hardly anything depends on me in the world’s affairs; it is also soothing – I can take care of my business, and be at ease that Someone really competent has all the other businesses in His hands.

Gratitude

The next enlightenment, which I’m almost certain I borrowed from someone else and adopted as my own, is this:

“Exchange expectations with gratitude.”

One of my readers aptly commented on Quora with an equation he got from a book:

Expectations – Reality = Disappointment

My overblown expectations are the source of 98% of my misery. Also, having expectations means I don’t live in the current moment often enough. Expectations are about future. You cannot fully enjoy, or even experience, the present moment and have expectations at the same time.

Fragility

The last spiritual realization of mine was the discovery about how self-protective and judgmental I became in my marriage. I withdrew. That’s why it was so hard for me to repair my relationship with wife. It was the gentle pressure from my spiritual director and my friends, which helped me to notice how hard even the weakest attempt of communication was for me. This led me to inquire why it was so hard and conclude that I sealed up in my own self-righteousness.

As depressing as this realization was, it was also sobering. Yes, it was the final push that allowed me to recognize my own weakness. The one encouraging thought I got from all of this was that it seems to be the right path.

From what I reckon from saints’ works, the path to sainthood is not a path to perfection, but rather a path of admitting your own fragility and still going forward. As Jesus said: “No one is good but God alone.” No one is perfect, but Him alone.

I’m fragile. Trying to be antifragile is going against my nature, and this is what I’ve been trying to achieve for almost my whole life.

It’s pointless. Becoming antifragile has as much chance for success as trying to flap my arms and fly. My expectations about myself were highly unrealistic. Thus, my disappointment with myself was severely painful most of the time.

I cannot become a superhuman. There is no such thing, like there are no human-birds flying by flapping their arms. The only way I can become more is by locking my potential with the potential of others, and with God.

Hopefully, I will keep those lessons in mind in the years to come.

Life Surprises

COVID and the brain fog were hardly expected, but I want to talk here about the pleasant surprises – things I didn’t engineer, but rather prepared for them.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” — Seneca

Audiobook and Ads Fund

Well, it was me who asked my friend for money for the audiobook. But I have been with him in a mastermind since 2017. I built a relationship in advance. And those $500 for ads? He bestowed it on me out of the blue. He saw me struggling and wanted to recuperate my self-confidence.

A Webinar for Phillip Morris Poland

My efforts had something to do with this, but not much. My friend works there. He attended one of their webinars created by HR department about habits and asked me if I could do something like this. I said “sure thing.” He gave my contact info to the HR department, and I didn’t think twice of it.

They contacted me over a year after my friend told them about me. And during that year, I took a presentation skills course and led a soft skills workshops in PwC.

 

So, I didn’t expect them to call me, at all. And when they did, I had this funny moment recalling Jim Rohn who said about a call he once got: “Of course, they called me. Who else would they call? I’m getting the job done!”

Scribd Audio Course

Or audiobook, or whatever you want to call it. Scribd found me on Medium and they offered to create an audio course based on my online content. They paid me several hundred dollars for the rights to my content. I took their offer because I couldn’t even invent a better one. All I needed to do was to point them to some relevant pieces of mine, review the outline they created, provide my content and do the same with the final version.

My engagement was limited, my time investment was minimal. And thanks to them, I could address the audience I’ve never reached before. It was a no-brainer for me.

The only thing I did to engineer such an output was getting back on Medium. Well, this, and creating content for the last nine years they could draw from.

Medium

I had no big hopes for this project, but since I had a VA available, I decided to perform an experiment. Up to 20th of June, it went predictably poor. I had been making about $15-$20 a month with Medium payments.

On the plus side, I repurposed my content from Quora, so it was no writing effort at all.
On the minus side, it took quite some time to format and publish those articles. Time easily worth $2,000 a month. I was ready to ditch the whole experiment after the second quarter of 2021, when one of my articles took off like a rocket ship. Up until now, this puny article got over 14,000 views! Thanks to it, Medium started showing my articles to more people.

I did everything “wrong” with this article – it was short, it was self-promotional, and it was freely available. Supposedly, they were all good reasons why it should NOT be a hit.

[image error]The increased traffic resulted in making over $100 in July (when I published only 16 articles, and only one or two of them were original ones. Oh, and Medium paid me a $100 bonus for “high engagement.”) If I read their info right, it meant I was between 1,501 and 1,001 of the most-read writers on the whole Medium in July.

 

Failures

I had my (un)fair share of failures in the last year. Discovering how withdrawn I was in my marriage was one of the biggest ones, and I feel I already shared a whole bunch of them in the above report. Thus, I’ll describe in details only a couple of my failures.

1. Phillip Morris Webinar.

It was an utter disaster. After the webinar, I had a quick call with my friend. He told me in a very apologetic tone that the webinar sucked big time. He provided a few reasons and I couldn’t agree more.

I talked like a machine gun because I simply put way too much into my presentation. I condensed a 2-hour workshop into 30-minute presentation and added some elements on top on that.

I didn’t have my target audience in mind. I didn’t recognize how burned out their brains were from the remote work done in the last 15 months. One more talking head was the last thing they needed.

And my slides sucked big time. I forgot I’m aesthetically blind. So, I prepared the version for aesthetically blind people, and I was stoked I created such a great presentation.  :/

Lesson #1: Do remember about your weaknesses.

The moment my friend told me my slides were a disaster, I realized he was right. I’m aesthetically impaired. I had similar experiences with book covers which design I supervised. I thought they were OK-ish. People were running away in terror when they saw them.

Lesson #2: All you can do is all you can do.

Considering how much they paid me, and how overwhelmed I was, I prepared the webinar as best I could. Adding even an ounce of effort more wasn’t justified. I lived in June with no margin whatsoever.

And I even showed the whole presentation to Anthony. He was just too diplomatic to tell me it sucked big time. So, it’s not like I totally ignored the preparations and didn’t look for feedback. Sometimes, you can only do so much, and if the stars won’t align, you won’t succeed.

My takeaways:

#1 Charge Way More

I scrambled to make a living, thus I simply couldn’t prepare better. I had no time to spare, no mental bandwidth, and no energy for any additional effort. But if I charged my nominal $100 per hour, and added a few hours for preparations into the plan, I could invest more time and energy into this webinar instead of investing them in other projects.

#2 Never Take a Job If I Need to Do Anything Visual

When I gave a webinar for the Bellevue University, I created the content for the slides, but they made it visually appealing. And that’s my recipe for success – someone else doing the visual part of things.

My participation in the creative process should be minimal. Period. So, either I charge enough to delegate making slides (see #1) or I don’t take a job at all.

#3 Get to Know Your Audience

Partly, this was the fault of the HR department. I got zero guidance from them. Most of it was my fault – I tried to impress them and packed as much as possible (and then some) into my 30 minutes.

I was overwhelmed, hence I didn’t do my homework. But a small effort at the beginning of the process would have spared me at least part of the pain. I should’ve consulted with my friend way before the webinar, not afterwards.

2. Killing Customers’ Books

That was my biggest failure with Resurrecting Books ever. I stumbled about a nonfiction author who was a great marketer. Her books had high ranks, but I was most interested in her book descriptions. They were perfect. They needed no effort to improve. She fit my ideal customer avatar to the letter.

I asked my mentor, Dave Chesson for the introduction and he complied. I had a call with the author and explained to her how my shotgun approach to ads works. She decided to try my service.

And my ads killed her books. At least, the bestselling ones with the ranks below the 10,000 mark. My ads didn’t provide much, like usual, just a few dozen copies of sales a month. But they utterly confused the Amazon’s marketing algorithm. The traffic brought by my ads didn’t convert even remotely as well as the previous traffic sources.

So, Amazon stopped their marketing for my customers’ books. Or severely restricted it. The final results were the same – her organic sales dropped significantly and she lost several thousands of dollars.

She said she hardly could blame me – I told her how my system works- but she was still mad. Who wouldn’t be? We ended our cooperation in a pretty foul mood.

I hoped to make a small fortune on an ideal customer, and I didn’t even recoup my costs. What is more, I strained my mentor’s credit of trust. But the worst thing was that my actions hurt my customer. The whole Resurrecting Books service is based on the paradigm of providing value to my customers. In that case, I did something totally opposite.

Lesson: Question your assumptions.

Never before had my ads hurt any book. Sometimes, they weren’t very effective; sometimes, they were barely breaking even, so there was no business for me; most of the time, they were moderately successful; sometimes, they made hundreds of dollars a month from a single book.

I simply didn’t see the disaster coming because I never expected that my ads can have so devastating an effect on the bestselling books.

My takeaway:

Just one – do not advertise bestselling books with my method!!!

It’s good to analyze your failures and take away something. When David Jenyns inquired about advertising SYSTEMology, I told him right away he shouldn’t use my service. And he hired me as an ad consultant for his team. I made several hundred dollars because I realized what the downsides of my advertising method are.

Summary of My The Slight Edge Report, Year Nine

The last 12 months gave got me a really bumpy ride. That was the most “interesting” year since I started my The Slight Edge journey. The lows were very low, and the highs were high indeed.

This bumpy ride convinced me that my habits saved my sanity. Even when I experienced marital struggles, financial hardship and brain fog at the same time, I kept with my habits. And they put me through those hard times to the other side.

You need good habits before you need them. When life happens, it’s way too late to build them!

Jeff Olson was SO right when he described the way most people operate in The Slight Edge. When we hit the bottom, we feel endangered so we muster heroic strength and we fill a short period of time with a frantic activity. Action always creates results, so we get our nose way above the water. We breathe a sigh of relief. We actually can breathe, because we are not drowning anymore.

And we stop doing what got us to this better situation. So we sink below the surface again, we hit the bottom, and the cycle repeats. The life of most people can be illustrated by a sine wave, not by the upward curve. Ha! Not many people’s lives can be illustrated by a downward curve too, only those truly broken ones. Our survival mechanism kicks in, and we plunge into frantic activity and get above the water… at least for a moment.

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The fragment of The Slight Edge

But you never know what can break you. That’s why you need to cultivate good habits. I personally know at least three instances when a single event put men into an abyss of mental illness. One guy had a car accident and his baby daughter was killed in it. Another guy’s business went bankrupt. Another guy’s brother died in a car accident; he had zero involvement in this situation, yet he turned into a mess nonetheless.

All three of them cannot function anymore. Their minds are in different realms – realms where the tragic events are not their fault – or other wish-worlds. They are not fully with us anymore.

You may be just one catastrophic event away from madness. I had at least two things which could break me in the last twelve months. Why is it that I recovered and the guys I told you about didn’t?

Partly, it’s pure grace, but grace is hard to pinpoint or measure. And as far as I know, grace is based on nature. My good habits may be miniscule, but they created the base for grace.

If you repeatedly refuse to build good habits, you build your life on sand. You know how it may end (Luke 6: 49). One catastrophic event…

Get busy living a better life. Get busy building good habits – the building blocks of a better life. You need to prepare for the unexpected in advance. And I don’t know a better way for that than a way of cultivating daily consistent good habits.

The post The Slight Edge Report Year Nine appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Self-Discovery, Cubed; Your Personal Truth Book Review

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I love books that provoke me to think, and Your Personal Truth was certainly one of them.

Also, I consider myself an expert on the self-discovery subject; I even wrote a book about it. Yet, I still learned a ton from reading Your Personal Truth and found the questions and exercises recommended by the author extremely helpful and insightful. This is a very good book.

But it’s not without some CONS, and traditionally, I’ll start from them.

CONS1. Truth Is Simple and Easy.

The book starts from a few chapters full of the philosophical ruminations about truth and how we perceive it.

I found them confusing. They made me feel uneasy about the author’s intentions. Seriously, if not for the fact I read some books of Issac Robledo before, I would have stopped right there and never finished the book. But I pushed through, and I enjoyed the rest of the book much more.

The uneasy part was how the author repeated that truth is elusive, almost impossible to define, prone to interpretation from different points of views, etc. It smelled like relativism from a mile away. I felt at my gut level it wasn’t true (pun intended). And I was right. The truth is very easy to define. The dictionary definition says it is:

that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.

Truth is reality. Is it difficult to determine if the fire is hot or water wet? Nope. Reality is very easy to verify.

What Issac had in mind was exactly the interpretation of reality, which happens in the human mind. That’s what he refers to as Your Personal Truth. I think the more apt name for the book and the concept would be “your personal belief system.” I call it, after Jim Rohn, a personal philosophy.

Beliefs are very elusive. Mostly because we are so hopeless at detecting and dissecting them. Self-discovery is almost a forgotten art in the Western culture. We tend to accept our beliefs as THE reality, and we don’t question our personal philosophy at all.

For the author’s defense, he admits in those initial chapters he wants readers to explore the concept of truth on their own instead of providing easily digestible definitions.

Yet, toward the end of the book I found this quote, his own words:

“Truth is what is there. Falseness is what is not.”

I think the book could benefit a lot from separating at the very start the question of truth in general and our personal beliefs, which often distort reality (and truth).

2. Rambling and Repetitive.

Issac’s writing style doesn’t suit me well. As much as I’m a fan of repetitions (“Repetition is the mother of learning.”), too much is too much. Some things require to be told just once. And it’s tiring for a reader to go through the multitude of words when just a few would do.

This caused me to speed read through the book to get to the next talking point. I read Your Personal Truth very quickly, and I’m pretty sure I missed a lot of good stuff because of the speed.

3. Weird.

This may be as much a benefit as a CON. My impression from the whole lecture was that this is half the philosophical treatise and half the self-discovery workbook. This is a very unusual composition.

This book, like any philosophical treaty, should have been read slowly. You need to absorb what the author tried to say, and you need to figure out your own position in this discourse. I missed quite a lot of this aspect of the book speed reading through it.

Would it have been better if it was just a philosophical work? I don’t think so. Do the self-help parts get into the way? Nope, I found them very helpful. Should the book be a typical self-help how to? Absolutely not. It would make it shallow.

So, I don’t even know what I’m nitpicking about. 

As I said, Your Personal Truth is an excellent book. The CONS are real (at least in my mind), but the PROS are as real, more numerous and bigger. Let’s go over them.

PROS1. It Made Me Think.

Issac explores the subject of self-discovery from many different angles, and some of them I never thought about. Other points he articulated so aptly that I found myself nodding vigorously.

Here comes a few of the “thinking points”:

Our truths provide meaning.”

It is my belief system, not circumstances, which dictates for me what my purpose is. Some people will experience hardships and abuse, and they will resolve to fight those hardships and abuse in the lives of others to help them raise above those experiences. Others will shape beliefs that life is unfair, the world is a wild, cruel place and will only protect themselves, often for the price of hurting others.

On the personal level, it means that if I don’t follow through with doing something good, there is probably some underlying belief I need to detect and dismantle.

But as humans, we can test our truths. Testing them will not kill us, even if it may feel unpleasant.”

This is right on spot. According to my knowledge, we are the only creatures who can test our personal philosophy, our ‘operating system.’ Yes, it’s very unsettling. My whole ego is based on my belief system. My sanity is based on it. If I challenge too many ‘personal truths,’ who would I become?

On the other hand, what is worth a belief system that holds me sad, depressed, and apathetic for the most of my life? Such personal philosophy cries out loud for testing and changing.

Also, Robledo provided some advice to test my beliefs, which has never crossed my mind:

The second way to test your truth is to assume that you are right and push yourself to live by that truth more fully.”

There are some beliefs, which I fully tested in my life, and that’s why they are the pillars of my personal philosophy. But there are others into which I didn’t put enough resolve. I haven’t tried to live them more fully, so even though I intellectually know they are good, my heart is not there (yet?).

I’ll surely pick some of those and test them.

The only way to know everything about yourself would be to have had every possible experience, which of course, is not possible.”

I cannot ever know myself fully. This is one of the very few impossible things in the universe. The author is so right! The only way to know absolutely everything about myself would be to have every possible experience. Which makes another thought even more impactful:

Don’t be overconfident — there is always more to discover about yourself.”

I fell into this trap. I spend insane amounts of time (comparing to modern standards) on self-discovery. I journal, track my behaviors and activities, and self-reflect for about an hour a day.

I convinced myself that I already know myself. I bought my own lie. I got overconfident.

But there are still many instances when my own emotions and actions puzzle me to no end. Procrastination over important work. Steering away from cultivating relationships. Activating mindless entertainment when I should work. And so on.

Thanks to the author, I can become humble about self-discovery and avoid overconfidence. I can fully embrace the fact that I’ll never know myself to the fullest. I can make it my personal truth.

2. It Is Personal.

This is what I always love in self-publishing done the right way. What I hate are bland traditionally-published books toned down to the political correctness level. Your Personal Truth is not such a book.

Issac shares plenty of personal stories, some of them truly vulnerable, to illustrate his points. Despite his wordy manner of writing, those stories emphasize the lessons and make them memorable.

3. The Most Valuable Part.

Photo by Louis from Pexels

Or rather “parts.” Each chapter ends with a handful of insightful questions and exercises to uncover your beliefs, test them, or double down on them.

This is the part of the book which makes it a workbook. This is the reason you should go back to Your Personal Truth many times after you read it.

Those questions and exercises are so good that I’ll refer readers of my own self-discovery books to Your Personal Truth as the additional resource.

I’m extremely lazy when it goes to updating my old books. Yet, I will go over the hurdle and update a couple of them to include Your Personal Truth in the “Recommended Readings” section. This is how great of a self-discovery book it is.

4. Awesome quotes.

I highlighted six pages of notes from this book! To make a comparison, I have about four pages from “Who Not How” written by Benjamin Hardy, who is a heck of a writer.

Here are some snippets of fragments which were eye-opening or aptly articulating something I already knew.

We can easily find 100 books on virtually any topic, with a bit of research. But there is no book about you.”

While there is very little space for “self” in self-help, self-discovery is a solo act. Your friends or mentors can help, but if you don’t do the heavy lifting, no external resources will do you much good.

The first step toward growth is always to become aware that a problem exists.”

That’s why I’m a big proponent of self-awareness practices. Yet, I never before connected growth with awareness of problems. This is so obvious! If you can’t notice a problem, complacency immediately sets in. And where complacency rules, there is no reason for me to seek growth.

When we don’t know who we are, money is a powerful motivator.”

Of course it is. Money is a universal means of exchange. It contains in itself everything and anything — time, respect, love, recognition, security and everything between. Or rather, money substitutes for all those things. But they are NOT them, so chasing after money will bring you emptiness.

When you figure out Your Personal Truth, you free up brain space to pay more attention to the people around you, and you see what they are going through.”

That has been my experience. When I wasn’t clear about my own mission, values and purpose, I was preoccupied with myself. But when I started pursuing my dreams, I got out of the social shell I created around me. I made many new friendships and connections, and I got more empathetic.

When someone pokes holes in your truth, it feels like they are poking holes in your spirit.”

This is so well said! You most likely noticed this on others — people defend their point of view with fanatic zeal, even if they are totally wrong and you can support the opposite point of few with facts and data. Just look around and recognize how each debate became a political debate. Black Lives Matter. Wearing masks. COVID vaccination. The list is endless.

Poking holes in my spirit? That HURTS! No wonder people react to challenging opinions like hurt animals.

This is just a sample from those pages of highlights. Your Personal Truth is truly thought-provoking.

Summary

I ruminated with myself if I should give Your Personal Truth four or five stars. In the end, I decided to go for four. The CONS of the book are real; however, I think the PROS outweigh them by a huge margin. My main motivation with this rating is to give the book some love. People usually skim over the 5-star reviews and are looking for ‘the holes in the spirit.’

I hope they will be drawn to this review and appreciate how good Your Personal Truth is. I recommend it for everyone seriously interested in self-discovery.

The post Self-Discovery, Cubed; Your Personal Truth Book Review appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fame, Money, and Other Surprising Benefits of Being an Author

[image error]Eight years ago, exactly at the 26th of May 2013, I published my first book.

When I had hit the ‘publish’ button, I secretly hoped for things every first-time writing greenhorn dreams about: fame and money. And maybe a little bit of the writer’s lifestyle – working as much as I wanted, when I wanted, and doing only the things I enjoyed doing.

You know, the type of fame, money, and writer’s lifestyle which is portrayed in dumb Hollywood productions and even dumber TV series: an author is someone who does nothing, all the time, and cashes in checks every month.

The harsh reality is much different. A few years ago, Author Earnings portal made an extensive research and they concluded only about 10,000 authors on Amazon made more than $10,000 a year. It makes an economic sense. Writing is one of the most competitive occupations in the world. I published my first book paying just $5 for a cover. Anybody can write and publish nowadays.

Thus, the payoff is democratized. You need to work your ass off to make a living as a writer. And it’s hard to do, when you already work your ass off in your day job.

However, within eight years as an author I got my share of money, fame and lifestyle. And many other things I didn’t even imagine. Here goes the list of the surprising benefits of being an author.

1. Time Flexibility.

I was able to downsize my day job to 10 hours a week, and my royalties had something to do with that. Also, writing itself is a very flexible occupation.

My first books were written almost entirely during my commute to and from work. The railroad I had been using was in reconstruction, and travelling 30 miles to the capital took me almost two hours. In one direction!

Being self-published contributed immensely to my time flexibility. I was the one who determined the timelines and deadlines. I wrote and published my first booklet in 49 days. It’s a crazy speed for the traditional publishing. When I was overwhelmed, I could slow down. I published only four books since September 2016. When I started my own business, I scaled down my writing from 1,000 to 600 words a day.

2. Business.

Back in 2012, I realized I needed to own a business to achieve the lifestyle I yearned for my family. The problem was, I had no clue what kind of business nor how to operate any business. That’s why I started writing. What a dumb idea – to write for money! (see the statistics above).

In 2019, I officially started a business, and I was providing this service to authors since 2017. I run Amazon ads for self-published authors. I learned advertising in 2016, and it saved my author career. It quadrupled my sales.

Nowadays, the main bulk of my income is writing-related. Royalties provide about 15-20% of my income. Advertising books provides an additional 40% or so. Even the income streams that have very little to do with writing – coaching and speaking gigs – are mostly book-induced. I have a few faithful coaching clients who found me through my books. I got paid by Bellevue University for a webinar because they found my book on Amazon. I get some affiliate income from pimping Publisher Rocket – the best Amazon keyword research tool in the world – to authors.

3. Financial Stability.

I make only about 30% of my original day job salary working quarter-time. And it’s a good thing.

In 2009, I was laid off from my IT day job. It was the only source of income my family had. Overnight, we lost 100% of our income. That was a scary time.

Now, I have a day job (which I keep for my wife’s peace of mind and social security benefits), my business, book royalties, audiobook royalties, three coaching clients are paying me every month. I have multiple tiny income streams, like that affiliate income I mentioned, or royalties from Medium, and numerous 1-time gigs – webinars, consulting, book description writing, translation deals, etc.

I can lose any stream of income and my lifestyle would be only slightly affected. I had never had such security being an employee.

4. Connections.

I haven’t been overly focused on my publishing activities lately. Writing took a back seat in my life. It’s still there, but it consumes only about 10% of my time and brainpower.

Yet, when I published my latest book in December 2020, I sold almost 1,000 copies in the first month. How come? My connections.

A few of my author friends shared my book with their audiences. It was enough to generate over 50% of the sales volume.

Also, my connections helped me to produce the book. My friend made a cover for me and did the formatting.

Right now, I’m in the midst of the next book launch, The Remarkable Power of Consistency. Again, everything was done “in the spare time.” I needed just one phone call and a couple of emails to have a professional cover designed. I contacted my favorite editor and all I needed to do was to accommodate to her schedule. I wrote an email to my previous proofreader and she happily agreed to check out the whole thing. I sent an email broadcast to my list, and dozens of people agreed to become members of my launch team.

But it illustrates only my book-world connections. I built many others. In December, I reached out to my millionaire mentor. He immediately jumped on the call with me.

My former customer introduced me to his friend in March. It turned into a $350 gig, and it’s just the beginning.

The possibilities I have access to now, are vastly greater than at the beginning of my journey.

5. Experience.

I’m a very bad role model of the successful author. I do very little marketing and I do it half-haphazardly. Seriously, it’s not a recipe for success. Yet, I still sold over 2,300 copies on Amazon in the last 90 days; and I gave away another free 1,700 copies.

As the story of publishing The Remarkable Power of Consistency shows, I can get decent results with minimal effort because I leverage my experience.

I know who to contact and what to do. I know all the steps. I know the best promotional and marketing venues. I don’t need to wonder and ponder, I just execute.

6. Fame.

I still got my share of author fame. Millions of people read my stuff online. Over 100,000 people read my books. The online fame is easier to stand than what celebrities experience. I was never recognized on the street. When some troll wants to make me a target, I simply block them out.

The best thing about my modest “fame” is that it increases my reach. I can help more people. At the beginning of 2020, I was interviewed on the biggest Polish podcast. Over 10,000 people watched it on YouTube, and God only knows how many listened to the audio version. I gave away an hour of my time, and I reached thousands of people.

The more I’m ‘out there,’ the more I can help, sometimes in totally unexpected ways. Look at this comment I got on Quora:
[image error]
Isn’t it amazing? I help Steve to get back his hope for life. This is priceless.

7. Money.

Financial stability is one thing. But I also earn about 100% more than eight years ago. As I explained above, a relatively small part of my income comes directly from writing, but about 80% of my income has been created in the last eight years. Book royalties, publishing deals, webinars, coaching, affiliate sales – I earned money from those sources for the first time in my life.

Doubling our household income made some dreams come true. We bought a home! Book royalties from my first bestseller – Master Your Time in 10 Minutes a Day – were instrumental in that purchase. If not for that money, we couldn’t afford our contribution.

I travelled to the States a few times and met folks who I knew only online – friends and mentors. I was a couple of times on vacation with my wife – in Bulgaria and on Crete.

Do you know what else I could do? Hire people. My sons gained some hands-on experience and learned how it is to work for money in their teens. I helped a sister from my church community to pay off some consumer loans which were weighing very heavily on her.
I hired a Virtual Assistant from the Philippines, and the meager $400 I pay her for half-time hours is the only income she has. I was never able to tithe as much as I wanted to, but thanks to my writing and business activities, I could pay thousands of dollars to people in need.

8. The Real Reward.

The truly surprising – and overarching – reward for being an author is exactly this: being. I’ve become a better version of myself. The practice of putting my thoughts on paper every single day for years has a lot to do with my growth.

And indeed, I grew. It’s not just a subjective feeling. The host of the biggest Polish business podcast Mała Wielka Firma (Small Big Company) said during the introduction of my interview: “I got to know his story and thought: Wow, what a man!”

Two weeks ago, I received a phone call from Phillip Morris Poland: “Would you be interested in providing a webinar about productivity for our company?” Last week I received an email from Scribd; they offered to create an audio course from my content.

How come I’m getting such inquiries? I did the work. I grew. Now, I can provide value to others.

Well, I have been doing it for the last eight years for my readers and that’s the real reward. Money is just the byproduct.

Writing is a lonely occupation. You need to fight a lot of dark thoughts born out of isolation. But I collected plenty of proof to remind myself that my work helps others improve their lives. The number of my books’ reviews on Amazon is approaching 1,000. My answers on Quora got over 10 million views, 54,000 upvotes and thousands of comments.

And every so often, I get an especially cherished feedback: “Your writing changed my life!”

That’s priceless.

A manager of my department in PwC during the feedback process got a lot of requests from the team to train their soft skills. The emotional tsunami COVID brought turned a lot of us into a hot mess.
So, she decided to implement a training program within the department instead of waiting for the behemoth company to make decisions and cook up something useful. She approached me and asked: “Michal, would you be interested in leading such a training?”

Bonus: The Lifestyle

I work from home! Well, now, after the Great Lockdown it is not so impressive anymore, huh? But eight years ago it was my huge dream.

I’m liberated from the shackles of day job. I still work 10 hours a week for my employer, but it is much more flexible than any of my “real” jobs. Not only can I work from home, I also have a say in when I work and which projects I take.

I work in my authorpreneur business 30-40 hours a week (and I doubled my income!). I top that with another 20-30 hours of personal development, but it’s a pure pleasure for me.

Time and income flexibility allow me to enjoy luxuries hardly accessible to workers imprisoned in their 9-to-5 jobs.

I don’t think I missed a single singing recital of my daughter in the last few years.

When I scrapped my wife’s car, we had to travel to the location of the scrapping company to sign the papers. There is a lovely 18th century palace there. So, we spent half of the day sightseeing, in the middle of the day. It was a weekday, and we were the only visitors in the whole complex.

I mentioned my travels. I’m not a tourist type, but my wife is. It was nice to go to Crete, Prague, or Bulgaria and enjoy other cultures. It was even nicer we could easily afford this.

I love meeting my online friends. A face to face with Hynek Palatin, Dave Chesson, Aaron Walker, Rebecca Patrick-Howard, and so many others were experiences which I will always cherish in my memory. All those travels and meetings were possible as the result of my new lifestyle; for the first time in my life, I can decide when I work and when I rest.

It doesn’t mean that sometimes moving my author career forward wasn’t a struggle. It was sweat, blood and tears. Long hours. Self-doubts. Disappointments. Failures.

And it’s not “happily ever after.” The struggles continue. New challenges loom on the horizon.

But it was all worth it. Life is good.

The post Fame, Money, and Other Surprising Benefits of Being an Author appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Ninety Seventh Income Report – April 2021 ($3,372.03)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

[image error]April was a good month. I was productive. Cash was flowing in. COVID numbers in Poland rapidly declined, and I was looking forward to some normalcy.

12WY Goals

My accountability partner started his 12WY goals in Q2 of 2021. I decided it was a good idea for me to go back on the goals bandwagon. So I set three goals for Q2:

To publish 100 articles on Medium before the end of June.To work on publishing my own books; including the new book about my The Slight Edge journey, audiobook for the Art of Persistence and a bundle for the Six Simple steps to Success.To create procedures and systems for my business.Execution on the 12WY Goals

As you can see, I wasn’t super specific, only the first goal was truly measurable. And I made the most progress with it. At the end of April, I had 28 articles published on Medium and I earned $14. I published the first article on the 8th of April, so publishing 28 pieces took me only 22 days.

I made quite a lot of progress with The Remarkable Power of Consistency. I finished the editing phase. My proofreader went over the old reports and I corrected them too. I wrote the back cover text, so my cover designer could create a cover. I worked on the marketing message, which resulted in writing the book description. I created the Advance Reading Copy and sent it to my launch team.

While working with my VA on the import of my Quora answers into Medium, we created a procedure for doing that and a checklist, so she could double-check her work before submitting the draft. Once more, it was more work for me. I spent quite a lot of time reviewing and rewriting those documents. We weren’t ready around the end of the month.

Soft Skills Trainings

I continued trainings for PwC juniors in my day job. Actually, I gave the training totally on my own for the first time. And second.  

I enjoyed those meetings thoroughly. We made them hybrid – a few people participated online, and a few were with me in the conference room. The first session was about emotional intelligence, and the second about motivation.

I got quite favorable feedback from my coworkers, and those sessions made the whole day job experience more enjoyable.

Lockdown

The number of the COVID cases in Poland was in a steep decline. Doomsayers predicted that we would have a disaster right after Easter, which plenty of people spent in the family gatherings – a Polish tradition. Then, the same doomsayers predicted the ‘end of the world’ every day. None of that realized.

The health care system was hammered in March. Some days, we were the world leader in the number of deceased per million citizens. But in April, everything turned around. In fact, it turned around at the end of March and I was exasperated with the lockdown. We had just a 2-week break in extreme anti-COVID measures. I was so hungry of going out that I even enjoyed my commute to work.

The weather wasn’t adding much to my mood. It was warm enough for biking only twice in April, including one time when I biked in a jacket and scarf in 14 degrees Celsius [57 Fahrenheit].

Resurrecting Books Projects

In April, I finally made my book, Slicing the Hype, permanently free. It got immediately picked up by some promo site and got a few hundred downloads. Notifying my email list also helped. I shared this on Facebook, and my customer with several business books noticed the post. He inquired about my results and decided to turn six of his books into permafrees. We had not had much success with his book up to that point in time. We were able to generate a dozen or two sales around the break-even point.

Jim is a doer, so he managed to turn three of his books into freebies before the end of the month. And he got quite a number of downloads – 5,442.

We also finished the work on Don’t Buy a Duck, a book of my friend from my ISI mastermind tribe. I remember publishing it at the end of April (Derek gave me the access to his KDP account). It was good to take it off my plate.

Consulting Project

The last 1-time project was consulting for David Jenyns, the author of SYSTEMology. He inquired about my services, but I advised him against using my system. His book had too good bestseller rank; it would rather hurt his sales than help him. But he agreed to pay for my time, so I would help his team work smarter on his ads.

I logged into his AMS account for the first time and I thought: “Hmm, it seems there will not be much work for me.” The campaigns had excellent conversion rates. My client was losing a bit of money, but not that much.

Then, I looked into his campaigns and it appeared I’d have a lot of work. All the campaigns were basically only targeting his book. Which is the exact opposite of what you should do with the AMS ads! Whenever I create ads which can be duplicated, I actually put the author name and the book title in the list of negative targeting. I don’t want people who look for a particular book to see the ad. Amazon will provide them the book in the search results anyway and I will not pay for clicks.

In the first three months of 2021, David paid about $400 for nothing; for showing his ads to people who were already looking for it on Amazon by title and his name.

Later, Soren told me that this was the Google SEO approach to target your own product in the ad. David’s employee copied the way he operated with Google ads into the Amazon ads – with terrible results. The AMS campaigns didn’t show him what are the other books he could target, and he was lullabied into the belief that his ads were doing well because the results were there, on paper. Or rather, in the AMS dashboard.

I quickly recorded a video explaining why this wasn’t a good idea and what to do instead. I also had a coaching call with two people from David’s team, when I taught them how to properly leverage targeting on Amazon.

In a few weeks, SYSTEMology had a totally different set of ads, and David started paying for the actual advertising – showing his book to people who hadn’t heard of him before. In April, his ads sold 44 copies instead of 31 in March (among which about 25 were from people who would have bought his book anyway).

Coaching Revenue

One of my subscribers, who had been on an extended Internet hiatus, saw my offer for accountability coaching at the end of March. She paid me $300 so I would help her be accountable about growing her book business.

My coaching client with whom I started weekly calls in March paid me more than usual. Together with the consultancy fee for David, I made over $1,000 for coaching in April. I think that was my first ever month when I made four figures from non-book and non-business stuff.

I also got one coaching client on Coach.me. He read a couple of my books, tried to sign up, but I turned my coaching off on that platform. So he reached out to me via email. I invited him on the intro call. Faik lives in Azerbaijan and is an awesome dude. He represented his country at the Olympics, and he is doing 6-figure projects. He reached out to me because he was stuck. He knew he should start a new project, but at the same time he had enough money to live comfortably for the next few years. He wasn’t able to force himself to start.

Our conversation lasted about an hour. I remember thinking: “Oh, that was an interesting conversation, but it doesn’t seem anything will come out of that.” It took Faik a couple of days before he signed up. Then, he crushed it. He had a very ambitious goal for someone who was complacent and stuck – to work three hours a day on his project.

Once he started, he didn’t miss a beat.

Overall Profits

I hit my record profit in April 2021. I made about $50 more net than my previous record month, but still, it was more! It felt especially good after several weaker months. I could pay my mastermind fee in May without problems!

I remember sharing this news in my mastermind with a dispassionate voice. For me, it wasn’t a big deal at all. It’s just money! My buddies made fun of me that this is how excitement looks in Poland.

Mother-In-Law

My mother-in-law visited us in April and stayed for 10 days or so. My wife takes always her obligations as a host very seriously, and it showed very strong during that visit. It strained my wife’s sanity. Sometimes I felt at home like on the minefield. I was glad I could ‘escape’ to my day job from time to time.

One day, I “stepped on the mine.” My wife asked about the COVID vaccines the very first day we were allowed to sign up for one. I said something dismissive and she erupted.

Needless to say, the very next day I was signed up for vaccination. She cooled off next day, and we signed her up too. Then, we decided to game the system a bit. The sole reason I wanted to get a vaccine was to be able to travel. Two-dose vaccines could’ve taken us the next three months before we would be allowed to travel. So, I called the info line and inquired about the dates for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. We got one for both of us on the 21st of May.

That meant, we could start traveling in mid-June!

$500 of a Confidence Fund

My mastermind buddy, the same who agreed to invest into my audiobooks, stopped me at the end of one of our weekly calls and told me:

“I’ll give you $500, so you can invest it in your ads. My only condition is that you will document the process. Why? Because I believe in you!”

Gosh! It’s so great to have such guys in my life!

I took the offer and decided to experiment with targeting ads for The Art of Persistence. I turned off all the keyword ads (over 130 of them), and started from a couple of auto-targeting ads.

I used crazy-high bids, about 70 cents or so. I quickly scaled those down, and repeated it a couple of times. The ads were spending money like water and didn’t bring much in return. Well, they sold some copies, but the whole experiment was in red. Finally, I stabilized the bids at 40 cents.

In the next week, I added several ads with my own ideas for targeting. However, auto ads were doing much better than them, especially the ad of the paperback version. One discovery I did in April, thanks to those ads, was that paperback advertising was more effective and cheaper than advertising Kindles.

Amazon Ads Mastermind

In April, I had a first call with Alex Strathdee from Advanced Amazon Ads and Denis Caron from WeekendPublisher.com. After the call we decided to utilize our discussions online.

It was a blast! They were not only like-minded; they both had similar businesses. You have no idea how awesome it felt to chat for an hour with a couple of guys who intimately understood the advertising language I operated with.

April 2020 was exhausting. Training my VA was taxing. I also took a new goal – publishing on Medium – and continued the work of my new book. I was tired. The extended lockdown didn’t help. But the growing revenue certainly made it easier for me to keep going.

The April 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €2,584.38 ($3049.57)
Coach.me fees: $127.55
Audiobooks royalties: $19.99
D2D royalties: $45.15
PWIW personal coaching: $857.7
AMS service remuneration: $2,325.65

Total: $6,471.43

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,362.82 Amazon ads
$839.05, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$500, ISI mastermind
$49.53, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$68.77, web domains
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3,099.4

Net Result: $3,372.03

Previous Income Report: March 2021

The post Ninety Seventh Income Report – April 2021 ($3,372.03) appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

An Ultimate Secret to be in the Top 1%

Plus a rule of thumb to get there

[image error]In January 2021, I checked the Huawei smart band app on my phone. I peeked into ‘Achievements,’ and I saw I was in the top 2% of people using the band. Well, in one category, but I imagine it’s a crucial one for the fit bands users: daily step count.

It’s quite a feat. I did a quick research. I found a number of 5.7 million Huawei smart bands sold. Which means I beat over 5.5 million people. And it took me a meager 10 months to do that. How come?

The “Secret” Behind Success

The answer is simple: consistency. It seems it’s not a secret at all. Successful people were pointing out that persistence is a key to success since the dawn of history. I would say, it’s a prerequisite of success. It doesn’t give any guarantees, but its opposite gives a guarantee of failure. If you give up, you won’t succeed.

So, why is this secret, kept in plain view, still a secret? Why was I in the top 2% of millions of walkers using the Huawei smart band? Why was it so frickin’ easy for me?

This answer is obvious too. Consistency is not flashy. It’s not sexy. You don’t see headlines with the words “perseverance, consistency, persistence, grit” very often.

In fact, for years I’ve been doing a Google experiment: I’m typing two words into the search bar: perseverance and success. And year after year, the results are the same. For every single result for “perseverance,” there are about 20 results for “success.”

So, it’s a widely known fact – persistence is a key to success. But clearly not many are following this common knowledge. It’s still a secret for most.

Back to the Being in the Top 2%

The most mind-blowing thing is that in those 10+ months with the smart band, I was never higher than 76% among all the users in any given month.

Never! Not once!

In fact, I was a few times below 50%. Well, I’m a number freak, so it hit me like a ton of bricks. If you are more of a human and less of a nerd, here is the visualization of my walking achievements:

[image error]

Compare it to the cumulative achievement:
[image error]

Does it hit you now? Does it blow your mind? How come I was moderate to good and I ended up excellent?

Excellence is not an act but a habit.

I was better than 44% of users one month, 75% another month. But it seems those who were better than me were hares. (If you don’t know The Tortoise and the Hare fable, catch up.)

Plenty of people can beat my step count in a given month. Month over month, more than 1,400,000 people walked more than I. But most of the time, they were different people. And they lacked consistency.

They made 400,000 steps one month and quit walking. Or quit it at that level of intensity. So, I was better than them the next month. On the cumulative scale, I beat them very quickly.

So, What Is the Secret to Success?

I already told this on this blog and in my books. Show up.

“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
― Woody Allen

It’s enough to be consistently OK to become excellent. Why? Because the bar is set so low. Those hares have no chances against a steadfast tortoise. They are outclassed by an order of magnitude.

I didn’t track this step-count metric very closely, but I recall noticing after a few months, when my monthly result was around 50% (usually below that), that I’m at the top 20% of users. I beat over 80% of all users just by being consistently in the middle of the pack.

Show up. That’s the secret to success in anything in life.

Why Is It so Easy?

Simple: people don’t show up consistently over time. They may show up once or twice, or for a week, maybe even for a couple of months. Then, their dedication expires and they are gone. Anyone who shows up is better than them.

Our monkey brain is wired for anything new and negative. Some claim this is the evolutionary effect of looking out for dangers. Maybe. But it is a fact no matter what reason is behind this mechanism.

It is especially tempting nowadays to chase those shiny objects. Social media feeds are full of novelty. Media are full of negativity. Your inner monkey has all it needs to run in perpetual circles. And you stuff your life in between, from time to time.

However, if you can quiet down the monkey, and let the human take the driving wheel, biology is your ally.

We naturally excel in everything we regularly do. That’s how our brains are wired. The neural circuits which are frequently used grow and strengthen. Myelin is covering those circuits and it grows thicker too. All neural signals are transmitted faster and stronger thanks to this substance.

Practice makes master. Practice, and whatever you do will become easier the next time around. Practice consistently and this discipline will become seemingly effortless.

Leverage Time

Time is the ultimate club to beat down the competition. It’s a lever. Long enough leverage can move the whole Earth.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

― Archimedes

Show up. Practice. Your lever will increase its length.

Others may be more talented, more intelligent, tougher, stronger, may have better connections. But it means nothing, if they don’t consistently show up. Their lever is not getting longer.

Yours? It gets longer every time you show up. Your victory is just a matter of time.

It Always Works

I shared this story in The Art of Persistence:

I’d been third to last on the list of students admitted in my first year at university. But by the fourth year, I was among the top 25% of students and I got a scholarship. I didn’t really know how I achieved that. I certainly wasn’t among the brightest. I didn’t study the hardest, as I had no time to do so, having two children.

But I showed up. I attended almost every lecture and took notes. This simple discipline allowed me to be better than 75% of my peers. Basic and effective. Nothing more.

 

It works in business. Tony Stubblebine tells a story on how his business survived despite juggernaut, venture-capital funded competition here:

https://medium.com/inside-lift/the-competitive-value-of-time-68341a06961c

It was enough to outlast the competition.

Supposedly, most of the books don’t sell even 500 copies in their lifetime. Each and every book of mine sold more than that.

My last few books sold over 500 copies in their first month since publication date.

How to Be in the Top 1%?

Just keep going. Since I started writing this post, in a few short days I advanced in the Huawei smart band app from 98.03% to 98.17%. I got into the top 1% slowly, but surely, in March 2021.

Don’t give up. Don’t stop. Don’t be inconsistent. Keep going at a decent level. Not the superhuman, top 1% level. It’s enough to be regularly in the top 70% to advance to the top 1%. Day in, day out. Week in, week out. Month in, month out. Year in, year out. This is how you climb to the top 1%.

The Success Rule of Thumb

Be consistently around the middle of the pack. It puts you in the top 20% in the long term.

Be regularly better than 66% of everyone else. It will easily land you among the top 2%.

Show up, add just a little extra (around 75% of the average performance). It makes you the top 1-percenter.

The post An Ultimate Secret to be in the Top 1% appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Ninety Sixth Income Report – March 2021 ($1,985,02)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

[image error]If there was a turnaround month in 2021 for me, it was March. I still struggled a lot. Revenue was nowhere near where I wanted it, and I put too much stress and too many obligations on me.

Yet, I also did some things right, and new opportunities appeared on the horizon. Like with most of my opportunities, I didn’t see them coming in advance nor plan for them.

A Coaching Client

My coaching client who has worked with me for over four years admitted he had big resistance to push forward. In fact, he was sliding back for quite a long time and didn’t tell me.

I offered him to double down on accountability. Online coaching clearly wasn’t for him. He needed to feel that I see him, in the literal sense. He was apprehensive, but he agreed. After four years, we basically started from scratch. However, I still liked this arrangement. I hate the feeling when I don’t see my clients progressing. In March, we started weekly accountability calls.

A Prospect

I got a few prospects in March, including Jim, who had about a dozen business books on Amazon and they were doing nada for him. In a good month, he had been selling five copies.

I charged him just for the ads creation and did plenty of work for him: first, I provided a review of his book pages, then formatted them in HTML and updated on Amazon. I also updated his keyword lists in the KDP dashboard. We managed to do three of his books in March.

LinkedIn

Believe it or not, but I didn’t have a LinkedIn account. At the beginning of March, I was researching for the contact to a Polish publisher I met a few years ago. I found him on LinkedIn, but saw almost nothing since I didn’t have the account. So, I created one.

Once I had it, I decided to make it at least half-decent. I added profile information, links to my books, and so on. I also connected there with men from my mastermind tribe.

Among them, I reconnected with Daniel Bauer who published his book a few years ago. He recalled me talking about Amazon ads, inquired, and at the end of the month we started ads for him.

The Remarkable Power of Consistency

The work on a new book reached the editing phase, which I simply hate. Fortunately, my editor, Erica Ellis is beyond fantastic. I think we made at least two passes through the book in March.

I also contacted my old proofreader. Actually, she replied to my email with a thank you note from 2020. My funds were depleted, so I gave Erica just the new parts of the book, the ones which were never proofread by anyone. The main part of the book are my The Slight Edge annual progress reports, which I published on my blog. All of them, but last, were proofread before publication.

Now, I gave this part for my proofreader to double-check.

At the beginning of March, I surveyed my subscribers and decided for the title: The Remarkable Power of Consistency.

Dan Is Dead

On the 8th of March, I got an email from Archangel Ink that my audiobook narrator died of COVID. Dan managed to record the whole Art of Persistence before his death. He made just three minor mistakes in the recording. I sent those audio files as they were to my audiobook publisher.

You can read my ruminations after Dan’s death here:

Family

My daughter will finish her primary school this year. She had a mockup math test and she did terrible – just 16%. My wife was devastated and she ordered me to “fix this.” So, I started teaching my daughter math almost daily. In two weeks, she made a lot of progress. When I did a mockup test with her, her result was over 50% – more than three times better.

And we reached out the ceiling of her rapid progress. Yet, just a bit of consistency produced amazing results. When I write this report, we are less than two weeks before the real exam, but I’m confident she will get at least 40%.

Lockdown

As quickly as the government started opening us up, they started closing everything again. The number of COVID cases surged rapidly and crippled the Polish feeble health care system.

So, another lockdown was announced from the middle of March. As a COVID convalescent, I didn’t care much (read: none) about the danger. I remember that on the last day before the lockdown I went to a swimming pool and sauna, and for the movie with my sons. It was the same movie I watched in February with my wife, and it was even better the second time. BTW, do you recall the pin-drop moment I mentioned? We were in a different cinema and different audience. The effect was exactly the same. Everybody were mesmerized.

Hardcovers

Being done with the hardcover for Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day, I decided to also produce hardcovers for two other books – Trickle Down Mindset and The Art of Persistence. The first one is 117 pages long, and the other – 134 pages.

All my other books are even thinner, so I decided not to play with them. Anthony Smits modified the paperback covers. This time I had more troubles with Amazon than with covers. They inquired about copyrights, both times. Like they couldn’t have seen I already have the Kindle and paperback formats in their store. Sheesh!

A Driven Life

Speaking of Amazon’s pitfalls – I helped Anthony with his book, A Driven Life. I worked with his co-author on improving the book description and Amazon page. Then, I started ads for the book in the UK, since it was the primary market for this book.

The pitfall? For about 10 days after publishing, the paperback version wasn’t available in the UK, and Amazon gave the information that it was “out of stock.” But the book was in their print-on-demand system! Sheesh!

Anyway, it cost me some time and energy, and in the end the results just weren’t there. Ant and Ray sold maybe a few dozen copies.

Virtual Assistant

Working with my new Philippine VA wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It was a lot of hard work and time. I had to train her for every single task and she didn’t do recurring tasks according to my standards.

Ha! I discovered, I didn’t communicate my standards clearly enough. Communication was a big issue. As well as the time difference. My always-crowded schedule didn’t help either. It was a struggle. It cost me definitely more energy than I was prepared for. And it cost me money I could’ve dedicated to so many other things.

But I persisted and trained her in a few new tasks. Thanks to the help of my accountability partner with the Google sheets, we were able to upload all our customers’ data and finally start the ads optimizing process. It was a couple of months behind the schedule, but it happened.

I trained my VA in importing my Quora content to Medium, so I decided to try my luck with Medium once again.

Book Sales

My sales were slightly better than in February. I mean, about 3% better, if you take the difference of the number of days into account.

In the middle of March, I participated in the cross-promotion with a dozen other authors. I’m always game for them. Art of Persistence sold over 250 copies in a few days, 220 in the two days of the promo. It “cost” me only a couple emails to my list, and I made about $80 in royalties.

My ads got more traction, especially outside the US. I noticed in February that my UK ads are giving the positive ROI, so I doubled down on them. Canada and EU markets did well too.

The March 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,870.56 ($2,263.38)
Coach.me fees: $128.32
Audiobooks royalties: $23.4
D2D royalties: $49.44
PWIW personal coaching: $478.1
AMS service remuneration: $2,124.2

Total: $5,066.84

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,484.55 Amazon ads
$699.74, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$500, ISI mastermind
$49.53, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $3.081.82

Net Result: $1,985,02

Previous Income Report: February 2021

The post Ninety Sixth Income Report – March 2021 ($1,985,02) appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Getting Bored with Habits vs. Living More Spontaneously

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Hi. Meet reality. It looks like this:[image error](The Slight Edge chart)

Only what you do consistently over a long period matters.
The consequences of your spontaneous actions are irrelevant in the long run. Today you spontaneously decide to sit on a couch and binge-watch a series on Netflix. Tomorrow you spontaneously decide to go for a bike ride. In the long run, those one-time actions mean nothing.
But develop a habit of binge-watching on a couch or biking, and you will relatively quickly (in weeks, I suppose) see the difference.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.” ― Gandhi

So, Mr. or Mrs. Bored, the only long-term effect of your spontaneity, in the long run, will be a more spontaneous lifestyle. We always get more of what we practice. BTW, it’s been proved at the neural level, not just the philosophical one. That’s why Gandhi’s quote is true.

You Lie to Yourself

We are habitual creatures TO THE CORE. We share the parts of our brain where habits are formed and stored with reptiles and birds. Habits are as primal as an adrenaline rush or pangs of hunger.
Scientists determined that about 40% of our daily actions are habitual, completely automatic. Whether you decide to be more spontaneous or not, almost half of your actions are automatic. But if you decide to not develop good habits, guess what kind of habits will stick?
The bad ones. They are easier to sneak into your life because they use the immediate reward system of your body. You scroll through the social media feed and your brain is bombarded with dopamine. You inhale cigarette smoke and you immediately feel how your system is soothed.
Thus, you don’t notice you formed a habit before it is solidified and starts weighing you down.
But for 99.9999% of people who choose the ‘spontaneous’ route, end up at the downward curve.

The Game Is Rigged

You cannot change your biophysical structure by the decision you are going to be more spontaneous. Bad habits will glue to you along the way. You will feel free like a bird and spontaneous like a leaf moved by wind. But you will finish at the destination of the downward curve: failure.

[image error]
(The Slight Edge chart – the downward curve)
“More spontaneous” is a nice narration for your lazy brain to not use your willpower and energy.
Another quirk of the subconscious mind is that it always tries to save your energy and BS stories you tell yourself are the cheapest way to avoid any effort.
Be a human. Smartly exercise conscious control over your actions.
Decide what habits you want to have and put your attention, time, and energy into building them.
Without direct access to your bodily reward system, you need to supervise the process with a plan, determination, and giving yourself rewards of your choice.
Or be spontaneous and slide down. Your choice.

The post Getting Bored with Habits vs. Living More Spontaneously appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Ninety Fifth Income Report – February 2021 ($ 2,689.34)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

[image error]I hired a VA from Philippines. I knew from the outset she was not a perfect fit, but I decided to hire her anyway. Partly, out of laziness. I was so overwhelmed that I didn’t bother to look for another candidate. Also, I had no money. I got just a couple of referrals, and only one person followed through. My only alternative was some paid platform.

So, I didn’t really get who I wished for, but someone who I needed. My new VA had been completely clueless about my business, and I needed to train her from scratch. Hence, I created several training videos and some documentation. And we had a call every week going over new stuff and correcting the past mistakes.

Also, it opened my eyes to the challenges of the remote work, especially with someone who never had worked with me before.
In the past, I had plenty of contractors, but each of them was a master of their craft. I didn’t need to tell them how to do their job, it was enough to articulate what I needed. Now, my VA had to use the tools I was using and in the way I used them.

Beware Vanity Publishers!!!

In January, I got a one-time client. I organized a flash sale for an author who has a vanity publisher. What’s that? A publisher who charges you for publishing your book. This client of mine got the worst deal ever- not only he paid for producing and publishing his book, but his publisher holds the rights to his book.

So, David had no control over his book- description, and so on. Luckily, Amazon gives authors some tools they can use. You can use AuthorCentral to modify your book description and Editorial Reviews.

We did just that. It was a long arduous process because David wasn’t tech-savvy at all.

Then, I organized the promotion for him. I submitted his book to about a dozen different promo sites. I spent hours doing that. His publisher had only one responsibility – to drop the price.

They dropped the ball.

They had no clue that if the Kindle is image-heavy, Amazon won’t drop the price to 99 cents. My self-esteem jumped- I knew that for years, so I was wiser than a publisher.

I scrambled to salvage anything from the promo. I contacted the promo sites and notified them about the higher price. Most of them accommodated the change without any problems. In one case (xxx) I had to pay them additionally for the price increase. In another case, we got a refund because that website promotes only 99-cent books (Buck Books).

It was a bloody mess, and I spent more hours on that; hours, for which David was paying. God, protect the authors from such “publishers!”

And bloody Amazon, who initially refused to drop the price at 99 cents, matched it with other stores after a week! Heck! Only one promo site got on that price. And a few of my subscribers. In the end, I doubt David sold more than 30 copies, and he spent several hundred dollars on the promo sites and my fee.

The most off-putting was the arrogance of the publisher. I was on the phone with their representative. We discussed David’s situation. I also alluded that they might have been interested in doing Amazon ads. Her response:

“I don’t think so. We are so successful doing our thing that we are not interested in dedicating our resources to new venues.”

Heck! Of course they are successful! I would been successful. Give me a few grand to publish your book and I will deliver top quality and pocket one or two grand for myself. And who knows? Maybe the book will become a bestseller, so I’ll earn even more?

But their authors aren’t successful!!!

#@$@##%^^@!@$(*#&

Rant over.

Resurrecting Books

I finished another one-time project in February. I helped to publish a book of a Polish author translated into English.

It was good to have this off my plate, since the Resurrecting Books business picked up a bit. I had new prospects to tackle. And I was desperately trying to figure out an idea for optimization of my model and sell more books for my customers.

Book sales weren’t terrible, but they were far from great. I sold 637 copies. However, I got the royalties payment from December at the end of the month, and it was the best I got since July 2020. Also, I knew the January payment was going to be handsome – the highest royalties since April 2020.

Financially, I was still struggling. Actually, despite the better royalty payment, I earned about $120 less than in January, and January was poor enough. If not for the help of my mentor who stopped charging me for the mastermind for three months, starting in February, it would be terrible. Thanks to that help, I felt like things were going better.

Amazon Developments

I was invited to the Amazon hardcopy beta program. I immediately accepted, jumped into my KDP account and created the hardcopy for Change Your Life in 10 Minutes a Day bundle. Surprise, surprise, the paperback cover didn’t fit and needed to be adjusted. I asked Anthony Smits for help once again, and in a few days he figured out how to modify the paperback cover. On 22nd of February, my first ever hardcopy was published. A couple of my mastermind buddies purchased it immediately.

Amazon opened its store in Poland. I was crazy excited. This could bring the self-publishing revolution to Poland! Previously, the publishing landscape in Poland was weird. It was cost-prohibitive to publish on your own. It was hard enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher. There was a plethora of small publishing houses, but the distribution was monopolized by two-three huge entities.

Also, readership in Poland is terrible, and books are relatively expensive. From all of the above reasons, I never even tried to publish anything in Polish. Amazon could change that.

But they didn’t.

 

Excited about the prospects, I checked out my father’s translation of Master Your Time he did a few years ago. It was horrible. He literally translated English idioms which made the final effect comical.

I asked Dad to go over the translation once again, this time thinking in Polish.

Soon, I discovered that eBooks weren’t available in Poland. Amazon redirected users to Amazon.com to buy a Kindle book, and you couldn’t browse them in the Polish store. I couldn’t price my paperbacks separately for the Polish market.

So, there will be no self-publishing revolution.

I stopped my father before he finished this iteration of translation. There was no sense in continuing that. I won’t publish anything in Polish till I can properly sell it in my country. It doesn’t seem it will be anytime soon. Amazon opened in Sweden in November 2020, and Kindle books are still not available there.

Life

Lockdown was slowly alleviated in February. I was able to go to the cinema or swimming pool for the first time in over two months. The choice of movies wasn’t abundant, so we went for a niche Danish movie, “Riders of Justice.” Wow! We didn’t expect to be amazed. This is a psychological drama packaged as an action movie, an unlikely combination, but a very successful one. There was a key scene, which lasted for about two-three minutes; no music, no special effects, no plot twists. Just a couple of guys talking. You could’ve heard a pin drop in the cinema. Everybody was mesmerized.

 

Lent started in February, but before that was a Fat Thursday. It’s a Polish tradition to eat donuts and other sweet stuff in mass at the last Thursday before the Lent starts. My wife baked some traditional Polish sweets.
[image error]
I ate a donut or two and two plates of those. I woke up in the middle of the night with an uneasy stomach. My wife noticed, asked what the fuss is about and gave me some medicine.

Did you notice I have a crazy sweet tooth? It’s been my kryptonite.

With the start of Lent, my church community started a morning breviary prayer. I drove a couple of times to a town at 6 am. It forced me to start my days earlier, which is always good for me.

Frustration

February was full of hustle. I hired a VA with a thought of handing her over the new process of harvesting data from Amazon. We had search terms reports for our customers available, but then we needed to download and process them.

It didn’t pan out that way at all. At the end of the month we were nowhere near collecting the data, not to mention processing them. And processing them was only half-way to creating new campaigns based on those results.

My VA didn’t understand the process. She kept making the same mistakes. And new ones. And sometimes her mistakes were just a result of her tools and environment. I remember spending once over an hour on the video call before I discovered that her protection mechanism in Windows prevents her from saving the files on her hard drive.

I expressed my frustration during my daily accountability calls. On the last Saturday of February, Soren offered his help. We spent two hours on the call. I explained the process and he asked me more probing questions. A few hours later, he prepared a Google sheet template that would automatically aggregate the data from the search reports. It solved my VA’s troubles with processing the data and significantly shortened the time to do this. We were battling with this for about two weeks with little success, and we managed to deal with it within two days with those templates.

The January 2021 Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1,565.88 ($1,894.71)
Coach.me fees: $180.87
Audiobooks royalties: $30.08
D2D royalties: $49.44
PWIW personal coaching: $383
AMS service remuneration: $2,464.76

Total: $4,988.37

Costs:
$23.37, BirdSend fee
$1,215.91 Amazon ads
$197.2, RAs’ remuneration (RAs = Real Assistants; my team)
$30, SiteLock fee
$91.55, royalties split with co-author
$102.55, Advanced Amazon ads
$250.77, Bluehost hosting
$73.2, book promotions
$100, an obligatory monthly fee for LLC
$92, my accountant’s monthly fee
Total: $2,299.03

Net Result: $2,689.34

Previous Income Report: January 2021

The post Ninety Fifth Income Report – February 2021 ($ 2,689.34) appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.