This is a complete and utter rave about a very good friend of mine and a book that you should buy.  Is that straightforward enough for you?

But first a short story …

In about 2009, I needed to integrate wordpress (the softward that this website is built on) with a learning management system.  We advertised on www.elance.com for a developer and had lot’s of applications.  One of them was from this dude called Mick Olinik.

He was a standout then, and remains a standout today.

He and his team completed the project and it was awesome.  I needed to partner up with a reliable wordpress expert, and because Mick and I got along like a house on fire (often talking about everything else but ‘work’ in the early morning hours), he was the guy.

There’s a funny thing about finding magicians – you want to keep them secret – otherwise they can get too busy and you can lose your competitive edge.  So, I carefully guarded the working relationship I had with Mick and he helped me roll out a whole bunch of projects which were very profitable.

And then I introduced him to another mate of mine, James Schramko.  James is an awesome internet marketer – he’s who I really learned my ninja internet marketing chops from.  And wow – what a combination those two turned out to be – and as a result we’ve all grown businesses and made money and forged great friendships.

Now, Mick is one of those shy and retiring types ( and was eventually encouraged to come out into the open and share his wisdom and experience more broadly.  And the result of all this is a brand new book called the Modern Day Printing Press.

Here’s the simple fact folks.  In order to make money online or use a website to promote your business, you need to know the stuff in this book.  It’s like ‘anatomy’ is to ‘medicine’.

(And if you want to see for real who this Mick Olinik bloke is – then go watch his brief video)

Look at this bunch of recent facebook comments to help you understand that this guy has serious mojo:

I’ve been Nic Lucas – saying it like it is.

Cheers

For a long while there – I didn’t like marketing.  Maybe I was brought up that way.  Maybe it’s also just that natural dislike of being “sold”.  I was distrustful of sales people.  “Buyer Beware”.

But what was the real issue here?  I mean, really, I did actually ‘need’ stuff in my life.  And I did ‘want’ stuff in my life.  And I found out about the stuff I needed and wanted because of marketing.

So, this whole dislike of marketing was internally inconsistent.  I had to narrow this down to something that made sense.  And as it turns out, I love being “sold” when the thing that’s being “sold” to me is exactly what I either need or want.  I can’t stand being “sold” something I don’t need or want – and that’s the point of this short post.  Marketing isn’t a problem.  Trying to sell something to someone who doesn’t need or want it is the problem.  Trying to sell something that doesn’t work – that’s a problem.

In her new book, Vanessa Fox talks about the Marketing in the Age of Google.  The tag line on the book is “your online strategy IS your business strategy” [bold mine].  Vanessa used to work for Google in their webmaster division, so that’s why I decided to get this book.  It’s a good read.  There’s only one point I want to take from the book and emphasis here, and it’s this stuff Vanessa quotes from Geoffrey Miller:

“Marketing is not just one of the most important ideas in business. It has become the most dominant force in human culture.”

Miller defines marketing as “[a] systematic attempt to fulfill human desires by producing goods and services that people will buy. It is where the wild frontiers of human nature meet the wild powers of technology.” He goes further to describe the marketing revolution of the 1950s and 60s as a shift to understanding that a “company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince them to buy what the company happens to make.”

I like the new marketing.  I like marketing in the Age of Google.  I love the experience of looking for stuff on the web and finding webpages that are a perfect match for what I was looking for.  It’s what I try and do when I develop my own products and services – and it’s what I now help my clients do as well.  When you are marketed to in this way, it’s a pleasure.  And it sure makes that ‘other’ type of marketing look and feel even worse.

One of the ‘talked-about’ books of last year was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Here’s my take on it.

Gladwell is well-known for popularizing the research of others – you could say he is a marketer of facts that would otherwise stay hidden in scientific or psychological papers.  The focus of Outliers is that small group of people who ‘lie outside’ the norm – the norm being where the majority of the population lies.  So, an outlier is someone who is different – markedly different – from the rest; and the more different they are, the more of an outlier they are.

• A world champion = outlier
• A billionaire = outlier

You get the picture.

The book starts well, and makes some interesting observations about the ‘luck’ that sets outliers up to become outliers.  Gladwell suggests that most people think that ‘outliers’ become ‘outliers’ because they are inherently more talented than the rest of the group, whereas it would seem that other factors are at play beside pure talent.  When I read this, I thought, “no kidding, of course there are more factors at play – we live in a multi-causal world with multiple variables affecting every situation, and to try and pin-point one thing as the reason for a person’s success is too simplistic”.

This is captured by the concept of ‘nature’ versus ‘nurture’, with nature being all of the characteristics of an individual and nurture being the opportunities provided (or not provided) to that individual throughout his or her life.  The simple fact is that some opportunities we are presented with are random events – the ‘luck’ factor.  But Gladwell describes something more than luck – he also describes the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ factor.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

If a parent thinks that their child is especially talented at a particular activity (an outlier) they may choose to provide their child with additional training in that activity.  They may also focus additional time at home on the activity, talk more about that activity over meals, read more about that activity and so on.  As a result, the child is exposed to more information, knowledge, training and practice and therefore becomes highly skilled – not necessarily because they were inherently more talented than others, but because of all the extra training and attention they gave to the activity – which becomes the self fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, if the child isn’t interested or is lacking in physical aptitude for the activity, they’re unlikely to become an outlier – but – if they are interested and they do have the physical attributes, then armed with all the extra training and attention, they’re more likely to become an outlier.

So, it’s not just their raw talent (nature) but it’s also their environment (nurture) – but this old news.

10,000 Hours of Practice

Lot’s of research has gone into focusing on how to become successful – and when you think about it, you can only optimize what you’re born with in your environment.  You can train your body to become stronger or faster.  You can train your brain to think in a certain way.

Gladwell cites the research of a psychologist who has found that about 10,000 hours of critically reflective practice is what it takes to become a world expert – or in Gladwell’s words, an outlier.  It has been found that it is not ‘natural talent’ at the beginning of someone’s career that predicts their final level of expertise, but the amount of practice and the type of practice.

All of this can be summed up in the idea that practice makes perfect, which is an age-old saying that I remember my grandmother telling me.

So, it would seem that success is made of a bit of pure luck, a pinch of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ and a heap of critically reflective practice – which to me is summed up in another saying, “it’s not just the hand of cards you’re dealt, but how you play the game”.

Cultural Conditioning

The last major focus of the book is on cultural conditioning – where your cultural environment has an impact on your success.  Perhaps your upbringing and social environment places limitations on you that are false, but that nevertheless prevent you from attaining an outliers level of success.  Or, alternatively, perhaps your upbringing and cultural environment creates an opportunity for extreme success – and this would be summed up in the concept of success breeds success.  Examples of cultural conditioning might be the Australian stereotype of the “typical Aussie battler”, or the expectation that “Asians are good at mathematics”.

Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at MIT, discusses this in detail in his book Predictably Irrational.

Summary

When I think about all this, it obviously leads me to consider my own life and that of my children – and I take away three major ‘action points’ for you to consider:

1. You and I need to create the opportunity for ‘opportunity’ to arise
2. You and I need to put in the hours and practice the very thing we want to develop expertise in – and our practice should be critically reflective and we should actively seek constructive criticism rather than shy away from it
3. You and I need to think carefully about the assumptions we make about our capabilities – are there any false limitations placed upon us by our cultural upbringing and that we are allowing ourselves to be subjected to?  If so, this would be a real shame.

Despite re-articulating what I would think is common sense, Outliers is a great book to read because it challenges us to think about these things.  I understand enough about human behavior to know that it can be:

1. difficult to break free from cultural conditioning
2. difficult to receive criticism, to develop disciplined practice habits and work hard
3. difficult to create opportunities

and anything that inspires us to do these three things is worth reading.  Order your copy from Amazon.

In early 2008 I began to write a book about anxiety.  I mapped it all out on a large white board that I could add ideas to whenever they popped into my head.  It was a big task.  The map got quite out of hand.

And then I did what I always do with a new project.  I created a word document and named it with the project title.  I then created a new page for every chapter and then created a table of contents.  I have found that by doing this, the project comes to life and all that remains is to populate the pages with content.

So, this is what I did next.  Content.  The book was written to serve three purposes.  The first was to provide people with an explanation of what anxiety disorder is, including what’s going on in the brain of someone with anxiety disorder.  The second was to tell my story – the story of how I developed and then completely recovered from anxiety disorder.  The third was to review the best available scientific literature on the best treatment for anxiety disorder – and this was the more technical part of the book.  It required me to undertake extensive research and I ended up reading and reviewing over 100 scientific papers for this book.

People often ask me how I fit all this stuff into my life.  Well, the book was literally squeezed into all the spare moments that I had – either sitting on a bus or sitting in a cafe.  Then there were the many late nights.  I wrote this book the traditional way – and it took the traditional time to write it – about 12 months.

And then – I let it sit there.  And it’s been sitting there finished for a couple of months now.  I’ve set up a website at which you can purchase the book – but I haven’t done much promotion as yet.  And from talking to many authors, this is a classic tale.  As an author, you exert yourself to complete the project and then heave a sigh of relief that it’s complete.  But then you realize that writing the book is only just the beginning – because next comes the marketing.

A book that isn’t marketed is a book that doesn’t really exist.  And so now I have some time available again, I’m gearing up for the marketing phase of this project.

I decided early on that I would self-publish this book.  I also decided that i would make it available primarily online.  That’s because as a health professional, I had consulted many patients with anxiety disorder who would never buy a book about anxiety at a book store – because that would be a public admission that they’ve got anxiety.  Often, these people hadn’t told anyone that they had anxiety disorder and I was the first person they’d told.  I decided to make a book available online – because that’s where people were searching for information.

Why did they tell me?  I mean, I’m not a psychologist or counselor.  Well, because I’d had anxiety and recovered, and because I’m not embarrassed and can talk quite freely about it, then patients would open up and feel safe to tell me.  We’d often end up having a bit of a laugh about anxiety disorder (you’re allowed to laugh about it once you’ve officially had it).

So, Anxious But Happy is about to get some serious marketing.  You can check the site out at Anxious But Happy or you can purchase the book right here:

Yes please Nic, I’d like to get hold of this book right now.