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Part of philosophy is breaking down situations into separate parts and looking to see if the statement flow is logical. In the abstract that looks like:

If A
And if B
Then C must be true

A more concrete example is: If I’m a man, and I have brown hair, then I am a man with brown hair. At the same time, we can check if a statement is false by using the same framework. If the conclusion is I am a man with blonde hair but statement B says I’m a man with brown hair, then this conclusion is false.

Philosophy is a way to break statements down in order to arrive at the truth. Even if both the abstract and the more concrete examples don’t make much sense, don’t worry. Philosophy is kind of hard to make sense of, but today I had a practical example.

Client Assertions Aren’t Always True

Today I had a client email their assessment of a particular situation that went something like this:

I’m having trouble with this software. It’s because of the version I’m using, right?

In a moment of high-speed responses I looked at the way the question was posed, and my understanding of the software, and agreed with the client’s conclusion. Upon further inspection I realized the client had led me astray, I fell into a logical fallacy trap.

Basically, the client said:

If A
Then B

Looking at it quickly, I said, “Yes, you’re right.”

But the client wasn’t right because A and B weren’t even related. Instead, the issue was a little more complicated and required doing a little bit of research. By following a logical fallacy that I had assumed was correct, I was led to making a mistake. I remedied the situation in a timely manner, but learned an even more valuable lesson: Don’t always trust the client to follow logical steps correctly.

Fixing the issue required thinking through the steps, surveying the possible solutions, and doing the task myself. In the future, I know to trust my ability to guide myself through logical steps, even if the answer seems to be apparent. After all, the client’s not always right…

This winter I have spent quite a few days on the slopes, seven so far and probably more to come. At the beginning of the season, I was timid, scared of wiping out and only looking to go down only the easy slopes. As the season’s progressed, so too have my abilities. I can now manage more difficult blues, and make my way down black diamonds, but it didn’t come out of luck. Although I’ve had instructions, most of my improvement has been self-taught and a good portion of it comes from asking questions.

Falling and Being Out of Control

We all know the number one fear of skiing is wiping out and a) making a fool out of ourselves or b) having a serious injury. My biggest fear of falling is the fear that it happens because I lose control. If I’m not in control of myself jetting down a mountain who knows where I might end up. The first thing I taught myself was how to stay under control, and how to regain control when I lose it.

With not losing control my top priority, I started questioning every turn. Was that right? If it was, what did it feel like? When did I start my next turn? When I’d lose control, I’d ask what could I have done differently? Everything was a question of what am I doing right/wrong, and what can I do to make myself better.

Asking these questions have been valuable in my improvement on the slopes, but also is something I do regularly in day-to-day life.

Ask Yourself Questions Daily

Teaching yourself valuable lessons requires asking yourself questions at all times. No matter what’s going on with your life, questions will always bring improvement. Maybe it’s not improving an ability like skiing, but no matter what you want to improve, questions will help lead you to success.

The Lottery Mentality in a nutshell: “One day, when I win the lottery, I’m going to buy a nice car, live in a mansion, and marry a beautiful spouse.”

Some people seem to believe they’ll find fulfillment in their lives if only something happens that allows for it, like winning the lottery. They forget to see the fallacy in their logic, but still, believe that happiness will come from a lucky set of circumstances. After following many entrepreneurs, reading a multitude of business books, and seeing how successful businesses are run, that mentality couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Create-My-World Mentality

Instead of having a lottery mentality, all successful people have a mentality that they’ll create the world they want to live in. If they perceive success will come from starting a business in a certain field, they start a business in that field. If they see infinite riches in their future, much like the winnings from a lottery, they’ll go about finding ways to make it happen. They don’t cross their fingers and hope the balls fall in their favor, they create the world they want to live.

Life Isn’t About Getting Lucky

A lot of people seem to have a belief that one day their dreams will come true. They don’t have a plan of action or steps to take to get there, they simply believe their ideal future will eventually come true. That is The Lottery Mentality.

The life you want doesn’t come from a lucky break, it comes from hard work, dedication, and creating that life for yourself. Dreams don’t have to be overly ambitious, but they do need to be solidified by a plan to get there. You’ll never achieve dreams by believing they’ll “just” come true, you’ll achieve your dreams by taking steps forward every day towards your ideal future.

If you want your life to look a certain way, stop thinking you’ll win the lottery and start putting the odds in your favor through meaningful actions.

Dream!

A “Gut” Decision

Ever get that gut feeling that something’s right or something’s terribly wrong? Well, that feeling isn’t coming from your gut, it’s coming from your limbic brain.

We don’t make decisions based on our what our stomach feels. We make decisions on what our oldest piece of the brain believes. It’s the best at making fight or flight decisions and knowing when something “feels” right or wrong. What so many of us believe to be a feeling is merely our evolved brain coming to a split second decision.

Sales Requires Pitching to the Limbic Brain

In Pitch Anything, Oren Klaff refers to the limbic brain as a “croc” brain. Basically, he’s claiming we make decisions with the brain that evolved from prehistoric times. The croc brain is the most important piece to the puzzle when trying to sell something to a potential buyer. Although you may be able to pitch WHAT the product is, or HOW it’ll benefit their lives, the croc brain only listens to the WHY.

Selling is important to everyone which makes the limbic brain important to everyone. We don’t make decisions on hard data or all facts, we make decisions based on the limbic brain’s desires. Everything we want in life, and everything others want in life, is based on their feelings.

When Making Decisions, Listen to Your Limbic Brain

Next time you’re trying to get someone to make a decision or make a decision yourself, rely on your “gut” decision. Although you might want to believe that’s your gut speaking, it’s really the oldest brain you possess. The evolutionary wisdom within your brain is far greater than the facts and data you might fill it with.

Don’t Do Stuff You Hate, Start with WHY. Lessons from Isaac Morehouse and Simon Sinek.

Don’t Do Stuff You Hate

This isn’t a lesson in don’t do stuff. This is a lesson of giving lots of things a try and finding out if you like it or not. It’s also not a lesson in don’t do stuff that’s hard. Usually, the hardest stuff is the most rewarding. Don’t do stuff you hate is a lesson in finding your passion by eliminating the stuff that isn’t getting you there. The lesson: Instead of struggling with the routine nature of life, start tossing things out that aren’t meaningful. By becoming a minimalist in habits and lifestyles, you allow yourself time to grow the things you’re most passionate about.

Without avoiding things because you might hate them, try lots of new things and reflect on their capabilities to make you feel fulfilled. As soon as you learn it doesn’t make you come alive or doesn’t have the potential to make you come alive, chuck it out and continue searching. Eventually, throwing out the stuff you hate will light up your passions so bright that they’re impossible to ignore.

Start With WHY

Part of the path is learning what you hate, stop doing that stuff, and start pursuing your passion. The other part of the path is to start asking yourself WHY. Both asking yourself WHY you’re passionate about something and WHY you do what you do. By starting your exploration with WHY, you are sure to figure out what makes you come alive and start with a true-bearing north. When you get stuck, or the going gets tough, you’ll know the direction to travel. Without knowing your WHY, your passion is wasted. Instead, make sure you couple them together because WHY is what will get you through the toughest times.

When you’re doing stuff you don’t love, but know you need to do, WHY will be your most important motivator.

A question I have been grappling with for quite some time is why people get praise/admiration for working long hours. One reason I believe is because it’s easy to quantify hard work. “I’ve worked 12-hour days since I can remember,” is basically saying “I hustle 100% of the time.” But scientists have found that working non-stop is bad for us, and we’re really only capable of a maximum of 45 hours of productivity a week. So why then do people continue to “work hard.”

Working Smart Isn’t as Rewarding

When I have my best workdays, Pareto efficient, I knock a ton of stuff off the to-do list. I also find my best days are when I work eight hours or less, but cram a ton into the day. A lot of times, at the end of the day, I might knock a lot off my to-do list, but a nagging feeling of “I could’ve done more” remains.

I believe part of that is we’ve been trained to believe hours quantify success. It’s believed the person who puts in the most hours is the person most passionate about what they’re doing, and thus, eventually, they’ll lead a path to success. At the end of the day, the person burning the midnight oil to achieve their goal can quantify how much time they spent producing their outputs.

Conversely, when we spend time working smart, it’s much harder to quantify work. A lot of my working smart projects take time, they’re long-term projects, and the bearer of success on these projects is far off (a month, three months, even a year or two away). This means when I work smart I (a) don’t know if my work will lead to success, and (b) what quantifies as rewarding. I  try to make the quantifier on how good I feel, but it’s far more ambiguous than “I worked 12 hours today.”

Work Smart, Feel Accomplished, Live for Tomorrow

Although it’s counterintuitive to the daily “hustlers,” I have a mindset to work smart, feel accomplished, and live for tomorrow. Each day is both a fight for the best outcome for today, but also striving for a better, energized tomorrow. There isn’t a quantifier that I can reference to know if I’m going in the right direction beyond “this feels right,” but that’s all I can go off of.

If I don’t keep the work smart, feel accomplished, and live for tomorrow mindset, then I fall into the trap of working “hard” for the sake of working hard. For me, I want an accomplished life, but I refuse to make the quantifier the hours I work. Instead, I try to quantify my life in the way that I feel, as hard as that is to judge.

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit.

We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed. Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. This second we can turn the tables on Resistance.

This second, we can sit down and do our work.

-Steve Pressfield, The War of Art

Although I haven’t read the book, I have seen the idea of “resisting resistance” from a great many of people lately. I too believe in resisting resistance.

When I first started blogging full-time, in August 2016, I challenged myself to 30-days straight. That quickly snowballed into 90 consecutive days of blog posts. Since then I have played around with when I write and how often, but my current format is to take weekends off and blog on weekdays.

Changing it up like this has been really difficult. Each week is a challenge against resistance. Each week I have to make sure I don’t fall into the procrastination trap, and I MUST blog again. I challenge myself to get back into writing each, and every, Monday. The reasoning behind it is simple: I want to put myself into a place where I can fail, and then make sure I don’t.

Another Monday, another blog post. So far, so good.

The greatest part of reading, at least for me, is being able to explore other people’s ideas. With regular reading, I find that most of my ideas have been floating in the abyss and the thoughts of others helps to connect the dots. Without the ability to develop an understanding of ideas from others, I would not have ideas of my own.

Ideas don’t come from locking yourself within your own brain, but exploring the inner workings of other people’s brains.

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Content writing is hard.

Not only do you have to get a point across, but you also have to captivate the audience.

You have to be able to teach your audience, with an authentic, authoritative voice, and make them want to continue reading.

You can do that in a few simple ways. Bullet points are great, but they also have to follow a prescribed method.

• Bullet points need to be uniform in appearance
• Bullet points should be the same sentence length
• Bullet points need to be concise, but again, get your point across
• Bullet points should make it easier on the reader

There you have it. If this were content writing on bullet points it’s pretty simple. But this isn’t about bullet points, it’s about content. In addition to teaching you about bullets, we also need to teach you about forming sentences and having interesting, impactful content.

So, what are the keys to impactful content?

Well, that’s easy. Look at my writing. No paragraph is more than four lines. Everything is in basic vocabulary. And I make sure there are a lot of transition words, no difficult sentence structures.

Designing writing to be read, and be insightful, is beneficial when writing copy. This allows the reader to pick up the important parts without needing to understand the writer’s “style.”

By writing in a way a ten-year-old would understand, the reader doesn’t have to spend time figuring out the writer’s unique way of getting the point across. Instead, the reader can concentrate on the product being sold. The focus should be on the product, not the writer.

Now, you know how to write bullet points, and to keep writing simple, but how do you get better at writing?

Well, that’s easy too. Write. A lot. You need to start developing the thoughts in your brain into words on a page. Without that ability, you’ll never be able to write well. It takes time, and practice, but eventually the words will flow.

Content writing is a little different. Although it may be easy to let the words flow, it gets a little harder when you want to drive one point home, say selling an online course. Since you have to keep the reader’s attention while providing information about the online course, you really need to think about the message you’re putting across.

So, how do you get better at getting your message across?

My vote is writing, then editing, then re-arranging, and then writing some more. Get your ideas down on paper, read through your ideas with the intent of getting the best content to the reader, edit and re-arrange, and then finish by writing more. After the first go around, do it again. Rinse, lather, repeat.

It’s not natural to write content as a copywriter. That’s why the greats can make $50,000 in a one-hour session.

The only way to get better is to keep writing and keep experimenting.

One way I suggest to keep writing is daily blogging. Although you might not be writing about a product you’re trying to sell, it teaches you how to turn thoughts into words and concrete ideas.

My other suggestion is to start experimenting. Get on a freelance website, like Upwork, and try to pitch a service to an interested party. You don’t have to be an expert on the subject, but you’ll at least learn to speak to the buyer. This will help frame your content.

Overall, copywriting isn’t an easy thing to master. If it was everyone would be amazing at it. But with hard work, dedication, and an appetite to keep learning, eventually, it’ll become another tool in your toolbelt.