| Any idea what
it is?
I'm not talking
about the compulsive impulse buyer here, who goes out and buys all the
latest books, ebooks, audios, etc. and then never reads them or listens
to them (and that includes a fairly significant percentage).
I'm talking
about those who sincerely make the effort to acquire the knowledge they
need and still fail to achieve the same level of results as someone else
who read the identical ebook.
What's going
wrong here?
Basically,
people rely on their already overcrowded minds to remember everything
they just read or heard. And that's the biggest problem with acquiring
new knowledge and information - most people never really remember it.
So...you've
just bought the latest book by some spiritual guru or some internet "superstar"
or some celebrity relationship counselor. You print it out and actually
read it all the way through. You finish it and then file it for future
reference.
What major
mistake
did you just make that successful people don't make?
You didn't make it your
own
|
you didn't
translate the information into a format
you
completely understand.
We all view
the world in a uniquely different way because of the experiences we've
had up until this moment. Those experiences all act together as a filter
that sits in front of everything we view. As a result, every book you read,
every tape you listen to... is just somebody else's opinion...their
own personal view of marketing...or relationships...or spirituality. And
they
(and they alone) are the only ones who know EXACTLY what they meant.
So, in order
for us to make use of their knowledge, we need to translate the information
into our own "language", we need to "personalize" it. That requires some
work.
-
Make notes in
the margins
-
Highlight important
ideas with a marker
-
Draw a schematic
or a mindmap to show how things relate to each other
-
Perhaps grab some
physical objects to represent the key points and build a crude model ...
(thoughts and concepts are not terribly concrete things, but objects are).
-
And finally, get
a notebook and go through the key passages again and write them out
IN
YOUR OWN WORDS.
The fact of the
matter is that if you want to be successful, you have to write you own
book...no one else can do it for you. You might want to title it something
like "My Success Manual".
Before you
blow this off as "too much work", keep one simple fact in mind -
Successful
people do this...unsuccessful people don't
In fact, many
of the best selling titles you see started out just this way, as personal
working tools for their authors.
"This
manual actually started out just as a personal resource
to use whenever
I sat down to write copy for a client or my
own company.
In fact, I really wasn’t planning on making
this available
until a fellow marketer pleaded,
'I gotta have
a copy!' "
Yanik Silver
on his book "Ultimate Sales Letter Tool Box"
|
I don't know
how many of you will actually take this advice to heart, but this much
I do know - if you do this with every book, every article you read or tape
you listen to, then in I guarantee that in a few months time, you'll have
left the majority of people in the dust.
Start that
personal "Success Manual" today...
don't underestimate
the importance of this
note to
authors: Acrobat 7.0 allows highlighting, adding notes and bookmarks,
but this far I've only seen 1 author enable these. I understand the desire
to protect material from copy & paste bandits, but perhaps a PLR version
at a higher price would allow using these features and I'm sure they'd
be a great asset to readers. Food for thought. |
