Sophie's Success Shortcuts

Hi!

It’s Black Friday. Now, don’t ask me to tell you why it is called Black Friday: I don’t know and I don’t want to know.

What I do know is that today I experienced something that you want to hear, you want to learn from, today, and the rest of the year, black, pink red, blue days… any day.

Ok, a little background information: I normally don’t read my emails. I normally keep myself walled away in blissful ignorance of what’s hot, what I should buy, launches and the like. Not today.

For some reason, maybe because I decided to stay at home, alone, for Thanksgiving, I left myself wide open to the onslaught of marketing messages you probably get every day, including this very day.

I have chosen only two messages to read and follow up, which is not what most people do, and those two messages pushed me into a state that made me intensely curious and made me want to write this blogpost.

I have fallen a “I will never amount to anything” mood. I have fallen into a place, where those marketers have it, and I have nothing. Where all the answers to my problems are out there, with those marketers, and if I don’t get it, or even if I do, I am doomed.

Not a pretty picture, is it? Now, if this had happened a year ago, I would have thought that it is personal. Because a year ago I was coaching a few people, but I wasn’t in the position to see people, over time, 3-4 times a week, with their moods, with their ambitions and trials and tribulations. Now, I am.

And what I am seeing is that this is normal.

The marketing messages are designed this way. The marketing messages want you to think that “they” have the solution that you need, and that without them you are nothing, a hopeless wannabe, better off burying yourself off into some sandy dune…

Is this new? Probably not entirely new. Probably many of my past purchases have come from this same place: I remember when I spent my rent money on Frank Kern’s Mind Control. Or The apprentice program. Or Smarts…

All of them proved to be not so inevitable to my success, in fact they did nothing for me. NOT A THING!

But, of course, this is a lot like gambling: hope is eternal, and you are hoping that this time it will be true, this time it will solve all my problems I didn’t know I had.

And that last sentence is really key: skillful copy writing, skillful mind control, will create problems that you didn’t know you had so that you can buy the exact solution to that problem that doesn’t exist other than in your mind, now that you were told that you have that problem.

Like the “it” factor by Jason Moffat. Like the miracle supplement by Mark Joyner. (These were the two emails I read, uncharacteristically) today.

And, if you buy the solutions (that you won’t have time to digest given that you already have 47 solutions that you don’t have time to read, watch, listen to, implement) you are out of money, and go deeper into the hole and into hopelessness.

If you don’t buy the solution, it gnaws at you until you buy it, or do something to get rid of the “parasite” that attached itself to your gut.

It is not an accident that I am using this parasite analogy: I have two cats that occasionally get a parasite until I rid them off it.

Their behavior is very similar to the behavior these sales practices create in you: craving. Craving something you don’t need, only the parasite needs.

When my cats have the parasites, they eat like machines, they yowl all day for more food… food they don’t need. Only the paraside nudges them to get more food so the parasite can get bigger, fatter, multipy, and eventually destroy its host.

After I spent my rent money repeatedly, I was out of the game for almost two years… had not money, wasn’t in the market to buy every shiny object.

It didn’t quite kill me, but almost. I watched the parasite “almost” entering my system today… I caught it, in just a nick of time.

But the real cost is: seeing the solution outside of myself, I stop generating my own actions, and look for the power outside of myself.

When I look at periods in my life when I was successful, I always generated the solutions from within, instead of wasting time researching, learning, etc.

When I was an architect, I looked at the terrain, I looked at the specs, and designed a winning building.

When I was a magazine publisher, I wrote an article from what I knew, designed an ad for an advertiser from what I knew… and life was working, money was coming in, no time was wasted.

When I was coaching someone, when I listened keenly, the solution was there, in the speaking of the client: I didn’t have to waste time researching.

When I had money making projects in marketing, I just did it… and tweaked it from what was in front of me.

When I wanted to write an article, I wrote an article… no research, no looking for the power outside of myself.

But when I bought products, and courses, and software: I suddenly assigned magical powers to that piece of stuff and guess what I gave up at the same time? Looking for the power from within, that is the key to actual implementation.

Now, of course, it is important to learn. But the rule I learned along the way has been a winning one: you need a little bit of information, and a lot of implementing, if you want to be successful.

Most people reverse this, and never get out of the gate. And savvy operators, marketers, pry on you when you do that.

I got a taste of that today.