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Overcoming Mental Barriers

Lesson 2 from: FAST CLASS: How to Make Money

Ramit Sethi

Overcoming Mental Barriers

Lesson 2 from: FAST CLASS: How to Make Money

Ramit Sethi

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Lesson Info

2. Overcoming Mental Barriers

Lesson Info

Overcoming Mental Barriers

number one barrier. I'm not an expert. Now I want to hear This is the barrier. But I want to hear the actual words you've used to define. Not being an expert. Let's go to the web in a minute. But I'm not an expert. What do you say? If I were to come to you and say, Hey, I want you to shoot my wedding or what? Or whatever. What would you say if you're not a wedding photographer? I don't have the lighting and a second shooter. Good, Good. I don't have the equipment. Very good. Right now. Forget the wedding example. What are other ways that you've said? I'm not an expert to some. Very good. I'm not as good as X. Good, Drew. What? You usually do this, but you know, I don't usually shoot weddings, but I'll do it like I'm not gonna be the best, but I'll still do it. Okay, I actually like that. That's a nice way of overcoming that mental barrier. I'm not usually X, but I'm going to do it. We'll talk about that. It's very good. What else? Sitting with No, like. We'll talk about that later. Yea...

h, Uh, I know you want to jump ahead. You're You're the advanced student. Okay? What else? I don't know enough about. Yeah, How about I needed I would like to do that, but I need a couple more years before I get there. Right. Interesting. So what else? I mean, clearly, there are other phrases we say. Everyone just nodded that every chimed up. What? I have enough experience. Uh huh. I'm too young, 22 years old, in a city with all of these sort of writers in their thirties, and they're not gonna take me seriously. And, uh, see, the language is so important. If I sit here and just give these slides and say I'm not an expert, people like, OK, that sounds fine. Check the box, move on. But when we talk in the actual words we use, everybody's nodding their head. Did you notice that? Did you notice how when I put the slide of everyone, just like and then when I said I don't have enough experience or I'm only 22 I was like, Oh, my God, what we got on the web? Ryan is saying I'm still learning really good. Okay, What else tag, streak text. Rick and Jet says, I'm afraid that by doing something I love, it will turn into just another job. That's good. That's not I'm I'm not an expert, but that's definitely a mental barrier. What Susan is saying, I can't guarantee that I will be as good as somebody else. I can't guarantee. Like, what can you guarantee? Okay. Very good. Uh, tree Hollis says I've never been paid to do this before. I love it. Okay. Thes air so good, these air so good, Because we're getting way beneath the surface of the strategy or the mental barrier, and we're actually understanding what the words we say again. I'm doing this because I want you to understand the importance of language, right? You could go to a client, and you could say I'm easy, fast and secure. And what would they say? Get out of my office. I don't even know what you're talking. However, if you say, Listen, I understand that, you know, You know, I have my own three kids and I know how to take how difficult it is to take photos of them. They don't want to smile. Sometimes they're irritable. Last week I took a photo of someone who was vomiting all over the store, but I actually have my own. I've developed my own way of reaching out to these kids, specifically kids between the ages of two and four and let me show you some photos I've taken. This little boy was crying for two hours. Then I did X Y Z Look at the photos we got. Oh my God, that mom just started to cry. She feels every fear handled. See that? All right, let's get moving on. By the way, if I could really quick, just an interesting one, Grubbs says. I have dreadlocks down to my butt and people don't take my appearance seriously. So that kind of is along that same line. I don't look like people think an expert look very good. Very good. I mean, that's actually true for me. When I started off, people like, Who is this guy talking about money who's 23 years old? You know, back in the day and they wanted me to change the name of my sight because I will teach you a rich. Frankly, you know, to a lot of people, sounds like a scam, and, uh, that's very true. And how do you kind of get around? We'll talk about that. Okay. Oh, look at this. I feel weird charging people for something I enjoy doing anyway. Or in other words, if I were to charge for this, I worry that I would hate it. Anybody here ever heard somebody say that? Or maybe said it yourself? It's super common. Why should we pay you right? Well, that's that's a whole nother thing about freeloaders. We'll talk about that. I love freeloaders. I love show you how to deal with them. Um, yeah, Drew. I mean, I was just gonna say that That could be also an excuse for you know, I'm not gonna charge you, because if it's not good enough, then I'm gonna look like an idiot. And nobody's ever gonna get very good. Very good. A lot of fear. Creatives air struck and paralyzed by fear that they're not good enough, etcetera, etcetera and, ironically, there simply focusing on this area, never understanding the game that's being played around the game of the client. Not even really understanding caring about you being at this outer end of the concentric circle of you being world class. Technically, they actually they probably not saying for everyone, but probably they'd be happy if you're here. Good. Not amazing. Good. But you also understood their hopes, fears and dreams which we're gonna get into deeply. Lululemon could have understand my hopes, fears and dreams. Addressed it by putting up a sign that said men and I would be a customer, probably for a long time, but they didn't. A video crew could have understood my concerns by saying, you know, by not even talking about cameras in front of because I don't know or care and saying we meet, I understand that you're on a tight timeline. One thing we can commit to in writing is that we will always turn around our videos in 24 hours. And if we don't, I want you to charge us $300 a day in late fees. Boom. Charge me anything you want signed. But instead, people want to focus on getting to the outer end of the concentric circles as if that is gonna make them incredible. Anyone here know and absolutely amazing. Creative World's Best rider, World's best photographer, whatever. Who can't make a dime. Yeah, because they don't know any of this other stuff stuff we're talking about today. Okay, So I love this barrier because it's so weird. All these barriers air so weird, but yet so true. And what do we do? What? We actually staying here? I feel weird. Charging what we're saying is exactly what your online friends said, Which is, uh, I'm worried about succeeding because then I'll have all these problems. For example, if if I if I actually do all the things, we meet the saying I'm gonna be way too busy. And I don't know how to do it. Like I don't want that because I don't have enough time as it is. Really? Could you potentially raise your rates so you could actually make triple the revenue in 1/3 of the time? Yeah, once you you know what, it's a good problem to have. That's something every creative needs to remember. You want to have good problems. Good problems are like too many clients because you could raise your rates and cut those out. Good problems I have are too many options. It's etcetera. So let's not preoccupy ourselves with things that might happen down the road, which are gonna be good. All right, let's let's stay in the present and deal with that when it comes. Okay. Next barrier. This is a big one. I hate selling myself. Let's hear the words that people have used to describe this. I feel like a car sales. Yep. Don't look like you have one. We're talking about people Toughness before it just feels so dirty. And to be honest, good, good. What else? Talk to me about it. Megan, I say that phrase like I say, I'm no good at selling myself. You know, I'm not. And I've had people actually offer me money. And I'm like, No. Yeah, very common. Very good. All right. I like that. Good. Calfee, um, this happens a lot where people would be like, Oh, I want this thing and kind of similar. I'm like, Oh, I'm I just signed. Kind of freeze, OK? Anything from the weapons? Did we do that? We see Guthrie is saying I feel creepy, huh? And Ryan says I hate being sold to, so I don't want to do that to other people. Good effects. Three is saying I was brought up not to brag about myself. Yeah, me too. That didn't work out, right? Totally selling out. This is the weird. This is again, one of the weird pathologies of of creatives, which is you're selling out. And I want to tell you a story about this because I went through this myself, and it was actually very emotionally gut wrenching. So on my site, I will teach you to be rich dot com. I started it when I was in college, and it was a free site. I never monetized it for years and years, I believe, was three or four years. My friends, a lot of them went to work at Google this back in like before. They were like, hey, put ads on your site, you could make a lot of money. And my thing was like Why? I don't want to do that. First of all, is it gonna make enough to cover my rent? That's I mean, if not, why do I care? Second, I'm going to spend all my time worrying about thes monetization things and all this stuff, and not even worry about what I'm really good at, which is writing and changing people's behavior. So three years I didn't monetize it all, actually paid out of my own pocket. And I was fine with that because it wasn't designed to make money. It was just I needed to get this out to the world. Well, finally, I had a lot of readers. I had maybe like 100,000 monthly readers at that point or something. And I said, You know what? I'm gonna try something. I'm gonna create an e book. I created an e book, and it was like, maybe 30 pages and I charged $4.95 which is so laughable because one of my most recent courses was $12,000. Okay, $4.95 and I was petrified. In fact, if you want to read what being petrified looks like Google Ra meets 82,007 guide to Kicking Ass. That's what it was called. I was I was a juvenile young man, and and you can see it in that sales copy. I'm afraid I'm nervous. I literally said, why am I charging for this week? And I actually went on to explain it like let me defend myself from you Internet weirdos as And guess what happens. People are like huge. This site jumped the shark. You're just Oh, I see. I will teach you the rich means I will teach me how to be rich. I could find this for free on Google all this crap and it was like my worst fear coming true. But people were ordering like 1000 people ordered it. So I was like, What? Like all these chatterers who are telling me your your sleazy for selling some for selling a $5 e book After writing free stuff for three years, I felt like so unappreciated. And yet there are all these people buying it. It was very emotionally taxing type. There have been two big emotional taxing parts in my business. The first was for the first year and 1/2 of my business. It wasn't a blogger, it was me teaching informal classes at Stanford and everybody said they would come and then nobody came and it was really tough to go through that. So I started the block. The second emotion taxing part was this. And, um, it took me another two years to really get my head around selling. If you look at my new material, right? Anyone here from the Web? Let's just hear if anyone here is an earn one K student or a dream job student or a no stress negotiation student. These courses are hundreds or even thousands of times what I charge for my e book. And guess what I feel way more comfortable charging for them. I never defend my price, I tell you. Look, this is it. In fact, I don't want half for you to buy this. If this this course like a $3000 course, I'm like you have credit card debt you're not allowed to buy. And the tenor and the dynamic has changed so much because I've mentally gone along that road of being comfortable with selling. By the way, my revenues are way higher, okay and ice and it's great. No more emotionally taxed Rem eat because I'm not even dealing with those clients, you understand. I have been super clear about who I serve and super clear about who I don't when we say things like I hate selling myself. It's just like the person yesterday who said Ra, meet this automation thing Sounds great, but it sounds like you're gambling. And remember my response. My response was that's coming from a place of fear. It's not that this person has rationally calmly read three books and evaluated the differences in asset classes there. Just like I don't understand this. So I'm scared like here. For all the people that have said, I hate selling myself selling a sleazy, slimy scam. Me, I feel dirty. Have they ever taken one class on sales? Have they ever studied marketing? No. What we do is we go to we immediately jump psychologically to the worst thing we can imagine. Some dude with really sleazy, slimy hair coming up to you at some party like, Hey, here's my business card and I think we should talk. We should not. You should buy this and were like, I don't wanna be that guy, But that's not riel sales. That's not really marketing again. My students. My courses are quite expensive, and my students love to pay it. When I do consulting, which I almost never do, I charge an extraordinary rate. They're happy to pay it because I was ableto listen, connect, understand what value they wanted an over deliver

Class Materials

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3 Negotiation Scripts
5 Negotiation Case Studies
5 Resumes That Win
Freelance Email Proposals
Freelance Income Roadmap
List of Freelancing Ideas
Ramit Sethi Interview
VIP Email Teardown

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