Episode 21: Why Books Frustrate Us

Sep 8, 2018

Have you ever read a book, been super inspired, and then struggled to execute on it? I had an aha! about why this is.

Subscribe On:

Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Google Play Subscribe on Stitcher

Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Julie, I hope you’re doing amazing. I had this big a-ha 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 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 bathtime, this is where some of my greatest ideas and epiphanies come from. So I’m grateful for the boring, nightly ritual.



So you guys want to know what my a-ha 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 execution of the idea or whatever the book was about, it’s a lot harder and obviously, some of that is just normal, right? That’s just humanity. 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 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 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 are 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 a-ha because I’m reading books and I’m getting super inspired and I’m seeing things at a new level, like a higher level bird’s eye view and it’s inspiring to 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 his hindsight.

So when does this have to do with marketing and entrepreneurship? Well, I think a couple things that I want to draw out of this a-ha is number one, if you get frustrated after reading a book and you find yourself having difficulty executing with the book, talked about, you may be trying to execute a plan that’s too complicated because you are basically reading what took somebody a decade to learn and I guarantee you they didn’t learn it in the way 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 camps 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 documenting type publishing either in their podcasts, YouTube, because you may have an easier time learning that way. And then the thing is, 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 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 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. 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’s Expert Secrets book is amazing. There’s so much wisdom and knowledge, but if you try to 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 likely to make progress if you do that. Then 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 that pattern interrupt. And 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 Tony Robbins’ book, Money Master The Game. That took them a long time to learn. If I tried to execute all of that, 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 and 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.

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 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 Two 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 actually produce something, so this is one those books that actually would be a great teaching tool for you if you’re considering 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 at 30Days.com. (NOTE: Not an affiliate link. The affiliate bonuses mentioned in the podcast are no longer available.)

So that was my a-ha 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 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 in 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.

Julie Chenell initials

PinterestTwitterEmailShare
Get in touch! I teach strategic business growth tacticss for everyday people.

1 Comment

  1. Mike Maitland

    This is exactly how I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve felt that all the great things entrepreneurs are teaching to get the results they get are only a small piece of how to actually get those results.

    I’m in my 2nd year of study of direct response marketing and I can already feel a deeper understanding. It gives me hope that in a few more years I’ll I finally ‘get it’ and be able to do something great. But I understand that total immersion is needed, as well as testing, to achieve success.

    Loved how you explained that.

Submit a Comment

Free stuff heading your way if you drop your email...

Thanks, my best, free stuff will be headed your inbox!