Finding Your Passion & Making It Your Career Feat. Neil Strauss

The secret to writing a best selling book or just an awesome newsletter or email that really engages your audience is to do this one thing that I always do before I sit down to write, which is I assume that nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit about me. They don't care about my problems. They don't care about my ideas. They don't care about my world, my emotions, my family, or anything I have to say. And how can I, from that first word, make them interested? The only purpose of the first sentence is to get people to transport them to the second sentence. The only purpose of the first chapter in a book is to make them want to read the next chapter. So to me, the cardinal rule of writing is to be interesting. The cardinal sin is to be boring.

Who's coming up next is my good friend, Neil Strauss. Anyone ever read any Neil Strauss books? Seven New York Times bestsellers now. Yep, seven New York Times bestsellers. Expert in the real laws of attraction, he wrote a book called the Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Fabulous book. And he's mastered the art of seduction, as evidenced by his enormously successful. He has a thing called Style Life Academy. He has a very high level group called the Society. There's a couple people in the Society that are here, correct? Yeah. Yep, Sam. And anyway, Neil is truly one of the greatest writers I've ever met, I've ever read. His books are fascinating. He writes on all kinds of crazy subjects. And.

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I remember a conversation with Neil a while back where he said, you know, marketers have to figure out how to write to keep someone, you know, reading a 10 page, a 20 page, a 30 page letter. How do you write in order to keep someone to read 500 pages? And so I want to introduce you to also, I always have to mention this. He's interviewed more rock stars than anyone alive. He writes for Rolling Stone. You can see, if you want to Google him, you can find him on Howard Stern. I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff. So give it up for my good friend Neil Strauss.

He's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, guys. I've always felt like being friends with a marketer is like thinking a prostitute loves you. But then I met Joe, and I always think, like, what's the catch? What's the catch? But what proved to me what kind of person Joe is, and everyone comes up here and says this stuff, and there's a lot I could say about him. But the one thing I noticed is Joe liked these Forbes ads. Did you guys see the ads that he took out in Forbes there's one amazing thing. So he spends hundreds of however much he said he spent 100,000 or however much he spends on these ads. And there's not a single picture of himself in that ad. Just the people who are speaking who would spend that much money on an ad and not want to put their own face in Forbes magazine, which shows you that it truly is. He has given me much more than I could ever hope to give Joe. So thank you, Joe. So originally I was going to talk about, I prepared this whole talk about connecting with high level people and how to make them enjoy being your mentors. But I was sitting at my table, table number one. Yay, table number one. And so yes, the rowdy table in the back. So everyone was talking about writing and they were getting into that. So I prepared this morning like 15. And also a lot of people up here have been talking about marketing. No one's been talking about the creation part. So I put together this morning 15 tips on writing. We'll probably get to five of them. That's cool. And next I'll do five each year or something like that. And I'm just out of curiosity just to see how many people just write newsletters or marketing emails or something like that. Cool. So most of you and how many people have written a book. Wow. Almost just as many people. How many people would like to write, have not written a book, but would like to. So we're all writers. Okay, cool. All right, awesome. So I want to make sure this applies. So These are the 15 tips that I wrote down for writing and I'm not going to rush through them. I'm going to take my time with them and we'll get to what we get to. So number one, the secret to like writing a best selling book or just an awesome newsletter or email that really engages your audience is to do this one thing that I always do before I sit down to write, which is I assume that nobody cares. Nobody gives a shit about me. They don't care about my problems. They don't care about my ideas. They don't care about my world, my emotions, my family, or anything I have to say. And how can I, from that first word, make them interested? The only purpose of the first sentence is to get people to transport them to the second sentence. The only purpose of the first chapter in a book is to make them want to read the next chapter. So to me, like, the cardinal rule of writing is to be interesting. The cardinal sin is to be boring. So that leads me to the second point, which Again, like when I first started meeting marketers, they were all about, it's 80% about the marketing and 20% about the product or the idea. I still believe it's. I still believe and only because I wrote for the New York Times, I covered bands and I did not pay attention. I mean, usually it was just. I believe that talent and greatness gets recognized if someone's not a self saboteur. So I believe you just got to write about something you care about or you're passionate about. You have to write about something that matters to you. Everything matters to you. People make the mistake. Two big mistakes people make is they try to be really general and vague so they can just appeal to everybody. That doesn't work. Carl Rogers said the personal is the universal. So the more important it is to you, you got to assume that. Why was Renee's speech so powerful? Because she talked about a truth to her and we sat at the table and we talked about our truths that we kind of locked up and no one had that exact experience, but that enabled us to kind of open up and to share. What Renee did was so powerful because it was personal, because it was true, because it was something she was passionate about. So. And a lot of the books, when you see these books that seem like these great, huge, best selling books that seem like that guy, they were genius marketing. Knowing most of these people and most of these authors, all that packaging and marketing that seems perfect happens after the book is done. Just go write that great book, write that thing that's meaningful and figure out the rest of that stuff. Afterward you can figure out the perfect title, the perfect way to brand it, the perfect cover that comes afterward.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

Also, even if you're here because you're trying to, you know, you want to do a book just to, you know, to help your brand or to give yourself a platform, your clients and customers, they're still gonna read that book, hopefully, right? And you want them to be more engaged with you. And if they like that book, they'll pass it on to their friends. And that book could end up generating a lot more than just being good for your rep. So write about something you care about. The other thing is a lot of people say to quiz your audience, grill your audience to see what they want from you. I say, don't do that at all. All your audience or your following, and everyone here has their own little. Everyone in the world right now has their own mini following. All they know, all your audience or your clients, your customers, your following knows or your readers know. All they know is what you've done before. So all they want is what you've done before. They don't know what you're going to do next or what you're capable of. So don't ask them. Go where you're going and have them follow you. So next point I'm going to make this one really quick is don't hold anything back. I talk to a lot of people doing a book and they're like, you know, I'm going to do this book, but I'm not going to put this in this book. It's so good. I want to do a second book about it. Write each book as if you're never going to write another book again. Put everything in there, because if it's not good, you actually won't write another book again. And the other thing is that between the time it takes for that book and for that book to come out, you're going to generate a whole new set of ideas and thoughts and principles, and that's going to be your next book. So put everything in there. Next thing really important. You need a sacred space. You need a space to write or create. This goes for anything that you're creating. Even if your creation is business models. You need a sacred space where you do not know maybe what time it is. You don't know what's going on in the world. It can be outside or indoors, but that you are not. It's not possible for you to be disturbed in a sacred space. Not by a person, not by a device, not by the Internet. So. And it's really hard to do these days. I'm going to give you a couple tips on how to do that. Know that every time you're interrupted, it takes 20 minutes to get back into that flow. You were one interruption, 20 minutes. So it'll take all day to get to that state of flow that you want to get into when you're creating anything. And it doesn't matter what you do. You're all creators here. So a couple things that I use. How many people and I talked about this last, last time, but how many people use the program Freedom? Okay, guys, we're making freedom. A lot of money. Freedom. There's a program called Freedom. It is the greatest. I don't want to advocate. I mean, we advocate what we love. Like Joe said, freedom will block your. It says, how many minutes of freedom do you want? You type in that amount of minutes, 120 minutes. You cannot get on the Internet no matter what for 120 minutes. So every time my ritual before I go to write down is I hand my phone to somebody else. To my assistant or someone else, I say, do not give this to me until 5 o'. Clock. If you don't have that. If you have a phone with a battery, take the battery out and give it to someone. Otherwise, just put your phone somewhere else. As far as possible from waiting your house in a drawer off. Tell anyone they can't disturb you. Put on freedom and get to work. Some phones have privacy apps. The iPhone doesn't really at least put in do not disturb. Just you cannot be disturbed. Couple other things. Yeah, so the other thing is the hardest part of writing is starting. So once you do this ritual, you're also forced to start because you've got nothing else to do. So always, always write down your ideas. I don't know how many people do this, but if you don't write down your idea, you lose it. The short term memory can only hold seven pieces of information. I personally use my phone and have a little sort of file on my phone for thoughts and ideas for each book. I used to walk around before phones with literally a necklace, with one of those little spiral bound notebooks, a teeny one just around my neck. Do not lose your ideas or always write them down as soon as you have them because the best ideas you have will not be when you're trying to focus, think, but when you stop thinking. Maybe you're exercising or you're driving or you're in the shower, literally. I have a mnemonic system. Maybe I'll teach it next time. With which I remember ideas when I'm out surfing or something. I'm going to give you two more quick things. If I think I can get to them, one more is right straight through to the end. Don't be a perfect preparer. Don't try to make each part perfect. Dan said that he goes for 80%, I go for 25%. I literally my first draft, it's going to be 25% of the book that I know it can be and I'll accept 25%. So just get it through to the end because then you know where you're going and then you're going to go back now that you know the end and how you're going to kind of shape it all once you just get all your ideas down. Your first draft, when your first draft. My only goal of the first draft is to get every thought that will be in the book into this file or this stack of pages. Then I know somewhere in this mess of words is my book. It's there. It's out of here now and it's there. The power of tk. The next point is the power of tk. Two little letters tk. They come from old time copywriting. TK meant to come. So when I'm just writing and I'm in flow and I don't know, something like a fact or a date or I just can't find the right word, I just put in the letter TK and keep writing and I'll fill in the TK's later. I'll do it when I'm writing newsletters as well because then I can just get that first draft done with. I'm going to give you one other point, I guess. Let's see. There's so many things, so many good things. Ok, so the last thing that I'll tell you is it ties into the stuff that the art of writing is not writing. We were sitting with Tim Paulson. He was saying, I love writing, but my writing is horrible. Just about everybody's writing is horrible. Mine is the first draft is unreadable. The art of writing is in the revising. Here's a formula about how I think about how long it takes to write a book. And we're out of time, ladies and gentlemen. I told Dean Jackson I was just going to go straight through and stop exactly on time. But my email isjust Neil straussmail.com if you just want one of my books, if you're here or you have any questions, just email Neil straussmail.com. i don't actually check it, but it will go to me. That's my direct email. I have a system. Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Neil.

Awesome. Okay.

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