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Pause the Cassette Now

December 26, 2017

The post title is taken from one of the chapter titles in “Iterate and Optimize” by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant with David Wright:

But there were always sections in those audiobooks where the narrator asked me to “pause the cassette now” (yes, cassette) and do something. Like making a list of my strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, or goals. Those parts were annoying. I just wanted to get to the later parts where they told me how to make money.

With the year winding down I’m realizing that I didn’t pause the cassette enough.

Not pause as in meditating or anything like that. (Though I should do that more.) Pausing as in stopping the intake of information and taking action on it.

Earlier this year I spent—okay let’s just say hundreds of dollars—on a course about performance. (Mostly aimed at knowledge workers.) You can figure out which course it was. The content is great. My execution was poor.

That title is from a book I started reading by the creators of The Self-Publishing Podcast. I bought their book “Write. Publish. Repeat.” and bought “Iterate and Optimize”. That’s the 1st and 3rd in their nonfiction series and I’m sure I’ll end up buying the 2nd.

The first book I bought by them was an audiobook called “The One with all the Writing Advice”. It’s about storytelling on the TV show Friends. (Ross and Rachel’s series-length story arc, why Joey stopped cooking bolognese, etc.) That book is just one of the entryways the team has into their funnel. It’s great that the internet has created a culture of transparency. Readers benefit by learning from experts and experts benefit by building a global audience.

“Stop the Cassette Now” is about how Johnny used to listen to self help gurus back when they were on cassette tapes. You still see this in a lot of books where it says you need to pause here and actually go through the activity.

I weighed a lot of options, made pro con lists, and then bit the bullet on that $497 course. That was at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year I bought a similar course on habits without thinking about it much at all.

It’d be great if I could tell you that for $97 I can tell you the secret that got me to be a baller in only 10 months. But that didn’t happen. I got sucked into this vortex of info products.

It wasn’t entirely a waste of money. (Just partially.) I have a couple in mind that I’ll get next year, otherwise I’ll be re-doing some of the courses that I bought this year. This time around I’ll pause the cassette.

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Iterate and Optimize
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