Episode 21: Why Books Frustrate Us

Hey, everyone, this is Julie. Hope you're doing amazing. I had this big aha moment the other night as I was giving William a bath. Any of you parents out there know after giving children baths? I have four children. I've been sitting by the bathtub for basically years of my life. You know, and all the child rearing books tell you that you have to, like, watch your kid because they could die in three inches of water. So you end up sitting by the bath way longer than you need to. Now that I'm an entrepreneur and I sit at bath time, this is where some of my greatest ideas and epiphanies come from. So I'm grateful for the boring nightly ritual. Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs, and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. So you guys want to know my Aha. Was. I notice that people get really frustrated after they read books, because what happens is you read a book, it blows your mind open, right? And you get super excited, motivated. Ideas are flowing. It's like fire. But then in the actual, like, execution of the idea or of whatever the book was about, it's a lot harder. And obviously, some of that is just normal, right? That's just humanity. We. We love ideation and creativity, and we, you know, are just intrinsically lazy and don't like hard work. So, you know, that's part of it. But. But I realized that especially in the markets of personal development, marketing, entrepreneurship, the way people write books isn't the way they do it. And what I mean by that is when you write a book, it's usually after years and years of experience, right? So not only have you had the experience, but you have, like, layers of understanding, right? You understand something at one level, then you understand it at a deeper level, then you understand it at an even deeper level. But the way that you actually learned it is very different than the way that you're writing about it now to your audience. Because if you're a genius mathematician, let's say, and you're writing a book on math, you see all of the patterns and the nuances and the layers that most beginners don't see. And so when you sit down to write a book, you're writing it with all of that experience. It's like you can't unsee it. And so sometimes the way you write something, even though it gives people an amazing view of the whole thing when they go to actually execute it, the book isn't designed to be like a daily sequential workbook of execution, because that's not how the mathematician learned it in the first place. As a teacher, as an instructor, I'm having this enormous aha because I'm reading books and I'm getting super inspired and I'm seeing things at a new level, at like, a higher level, bird's eye view. And it's inspiring to, like, make connections and see how all these things work together. But then in the actual execution of it, I find myself frustrated because it doesn't always happen quite the way it's written about in the book in hindsight, because everything in book writing is hindsight. So what does this have to do with marketing and entrepreneurship? Well, I think a couple things that I want to draw out of this. Aha is number one, if you get frustrated after reading a book and you find yourself having difficulty executing what the book talked about, you may be trying to execute a plan that's too complicated because you're basically reading what took somebody a decade to learn. And I guarantee you they didn't learn it in the way that they're. That they're writing it back to you. So it's not totally your fault. Right. The second thing is it makes it really fun to actually follow gurus who are publishing as they try things. I know Steven Larsen. He is like the science of selling online. He does this a lot where he'll actually document as he goes. It makes it really easy to follow because you can just do it too. I do a lot of this with my Facebook ad boot and things like this where I literally document as I'm working, because then you can follow along. So if you find gurus who you read their books and you love their stuff, see if they do any, like, documenting type publishing either in their podcast, YouTube, because you may have an easier time learning that way. And then the thing is, like, just remember that books are designed to give you that decade in a day type experience where you're trying to basically absorb a decade of knowledge and in the day that it takes you to read the book and it took the person who wrote it a decade to learn It. So it's unrealistic to think that you're going to actually be able to, like, walk out and execute exactly in the same order. And I think what happens to us personally is we, Especially if we're perfectionists and we read this book and we see the plan as a big, huge plan, and then we go try to execute it, and we can't, or it doesn't quite work the way we think, or things aren't perfect, we can get really down on ourselves, and then we decide not to keep going, and it's so counterproductive. So here's my call to action. I have a call to action for those of you who are reading books, and then I have a call to action for those of you who are writing books. So for those of you who read books a lot, my thought is, take one specific thing out of the book that you want to implement. Okay, so like, if we. I want to talk about, like, Expert Secrets, for example. So Russell Brunson wrote Expert Secrets. That book is amazing. There's so much wisdom and knowledge. But if you try to, like, go through expert secrets and use each chapter and go in sequential order, most likely you're going to get bottlenecked because Russell discovered this after a decade of trial and error. So just pick one thing in the book that you want to implement. One thing. Maybe you want to create a manifesto, or maybe you want to work on your webinar or whatever it happens to be. Pick that one thing and practice that one skill, even if it feels kind of out of order or in isolation, because you're more to make progress if you do that than if you try to use a book that took a decade to learn as a roadmap for how to build your business in the next 30 days. It doesn't work. In fact, Russell and I were having this very discussion the other day because we're trying to teach all of this stuff. And you may have heard him on his podcast, the Marketing Secrets Podcast, he talks about hook, story, offer, and how important it is that every time you sell something online, you have a good hook and a good story and then a good offer. And so he teaches it in that order. Like, have a good hook, which is like that pattern interrupt. Then have a great story that matches that pattern interrupt, and then have a great offer that you can sell. The reality is that most people don't actually think in that order, right? So if you try to do it in that order, sometimes you can get tripped up. Most people think of an offer first. They think of something they want to sell and then they go looking for the hook and then they find a story to match. Right? Like that's really how most brains work. And the order in which you actually execute things versus the way you teach things might be different. So try not to take, you know, I was thinking of like Tony Robbins book money master the game. Like that took him a long time to learn. If I tried to execute all of that like in order of chapter, I would get so frustrated. So that's the first thing. If you are writing a book, if you are an entrepreneur, you're thinking about doing courses, writing books, things like that, Number one, consider publishing. Consider documenting. In fact, I am considering creating a project, a community where I document the writing of my book so that I'm writing it, doing it with people, so that I'm sure that when I publish the book, the book actually works in the real world. So that's the first thing. But the second thing is if you already have a book written, consider that you may need a workbook or a course or something that goes along that actually takes people sequentially in the natural way that they would learn that thing in the first place. Because just a book as like a roadmap can sometimes just be completely overwhelming because of how many years of experiencing experience it's consolidating. So that's my advice. Also, if you're listening to this, I'm sure it's going to be published sometime in the next day or two. We're right in the middle of the 30 day summit with Russell Brunson. It's a big, huge Summit. He's invited 30 people who joined the 2 comma club to talk about what they would do if they lost everything and only had 30 days to get it back. This is actually a book where you could follow chapter by chapter and, and actually produce something. So this is one of those books that actually would be a great teaching tool for you if you're considering, you know, starting a business or if you've started a business and crashed and burned or you're not getting anywhere. So if you have not registered for that summit, you should totally do that. It's@30days.com, Julie. If you go under my link, I've got some extra cool bonuses I'm going to be giving away. So make sure you email me your receipt. If you decide to buy the book or the summit through my affiliate link, email it to me@Juliereatyourlaptoplife.com and I will give you some super sweet bonuses. So that was my aha on the side of the bathtub the other night. That don't be too hard on yourself if you read a book and get super excited and then find it's difficult to execute because you're trying to execute in whatever two weeks or 30 days what took someone a decade to learn, and that writing a book is often not necessarily the way that you actually execute it on real life. So let's kick perfectionism to the curb. Have a great day everybody, and I'll talk to you again soon. If you're ready to create, grow, scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today. Sam.