NOT A Review Of ‘Diary Of A CEO’

Full Transcription

I'm Nicola Cairncross. Welcome to my podcast. This is where we talk about entrepreneurship, digital marketing, being a digital nomad and much, much more. I really hope you enjoy the show. Welcome back everyone.

I'll be honest, I've lost my way a bit with this channel, so, as is my want, when I've lost my way on anything, I start to read.

While I've been wallowing in a 'ball of confusion' I have still been doing stuff. I've released a book called the Foodies Guide to the Marni, and that is the part of Greece that I love so much and I spent a lot of time in after Steve died, and basically it's selling very well. It's selling better than any of my business books, I can tell you, and that's for two reasons. One is because it's a business to consume a book, so the audience is bigger, even though it's a very specific part of Greece. And the other thing is because I spent the last 10 years building up a group of people who go to this particular resort area, and so I've got about 4,800 people in the group, and if each of them bought a book, I would be able to retire, and it's a bit slower going than that, but it's selling steadily. I'm selling at least one copy a day and in the first two weeks, as I said, I sold loads.

But that's not telling you about this channel and how I got myself back on track. What I'm doing is I'm writing my memoir, not called memoirs, apparently, it's memoir and it's called Become a Better Entrepreneur, or A Better Entrepreneur for short. That's the debate name I've got anyway. So as I've been writing it, I've been thinking about the lessons. I've structured it like the hero's journey in structure in terms of telling my life story, and I'm covering a particular point of my life, which is from when I received a revelation in my front room in London. Some of you have heard that story a revelation about me not being useless and flawed fatally flawed, but just I didn't know stuff that I needed to know. And boy do I know some stuff now, and it's going to go up to the time when I come back from Greece, just before you know what happened, anyway.

So I was halfway through this memoir and I had to take a bit of a break because I got to a bit of an emotional bit and I thought what can I do? As I take breaks, sometimes I go and watch some of my favourite people on YouTube because I'm a very visual person. I like to watch videos and one of my favourite people is Emma of Emma's Allotment Diaries. Now, I don't have an allotment I've got a balcony which I grew tomatoes on but I do enjoy watching Emma. She's very entertaining. So go and check her out if you like allotments or you're thinking of having an allotment, as I was for a while. And she was talking about how she had released her allotment diary and how you can put content on Amazon that you've created yourself. That is not necessarily a book. It can be a planner or a diary or a colouring book or all sorts of things anyway. So she was showing us her Emma's Allotment Diary, which is full of lovely little drawings and spaces and some of the pages have agreed, so you can plan out your allotment.

I thought, oh, that's interesting. I thought what if I could take my book that I use for everything, and basically it's a moleskin, and I open it up to the first double page spread and I turn that into a planner for the week. It's a week planner and I have certain sections that I put in and every week I have things like new habits I'm trying to start Anyway. So it's a nice small book. It fits in anyone's handbag or could fit in a pocket. I suppose I thought, what if I could turn that into something online on Amazon that anyone could buy and use? And I thought it's probably going to have quite a small audience. It might be just the people who watch my channel and who want to use the same time management and diary system as I use. And then I thought, oh well, let's just get it up there anyway. So I got it up there and now there are three a better entrepreneur because it's branded for the new book coming. You see. A full year 'Week Planners' and you've got a choice of colours. And, lo and behold, they've started selling to people who I don't know, which is just amazing.

So in the book let's just show you inside, it's got a few quotes just to get you going, and then it's got what worked this year. So you get a little chance to review your year. And then you get a chance also to journal, so there's journaling pages there and then you get a chance to do that every week. And then after that you get let's just have a look if I can show you the same layout that I use in my mould skin, except I'm not going to be using a mould skin when I get to the end of this one, I'm going to be using one of my own books, which is rather marvellous. I might use the pink one, anyway. 

So which one's? The one's getting most clicks is the pink one. It's just a rather lovely shade of pink, and the one that's selling the most is the black one. So that's interesting, isn't it? Most clicks doesn't necessarily equal most sales, and the reason I wanted to tell you about this was, obviously, you can go and buy one if you want to, but and it will last you a whole year, by the way, there's 52 plus four weeks in here. So I've given you a chance. If you screw up a week and you decide it's far too untidy and you can't stand it, you can go over to an extra one.

And then the reason I'm showing you this is because I suddenly realised that that's what this Steve Bartlett diary was - the one I got and the one that brings lots of traffic to my channel. He brought out 'The Diary' first, and only now is the book 'The Diary Of A CEO' coming out.

Still the most popular video on my channel is the unboxing of my Steve Bartlett diary, which I do still use, but I mainly use for journaling rather than actually week planning, because it doesn't have the sections I want in it. So then I realised that the book I'd been reading most often this week, while I've been having my little what's the word? Crisis of confidence, not quite. More a crisis of identity... the book I've been most reading is Steve Bartlett's Dario of a CEO, and I really like Steve Bartlett, as you know, but he does annoy me sometimes because he willfully is ignoring what's going on in the world. Just watched a fantastic interview with him in Rich Roll's Podcast, about Steve Bartlett's obsession. Go and check that one out. I really enjoyed that.

Until they started talking about Elon Musk and his...Anyway, they you go and listen to it for yourself because they were talking about Elon in a way that really means that they don't know what's going on in the world at all and why Elon's doing some of the things he's doing. May just be to mix things up a bit, Loki style, or it may just be because he wants to save free speech who knows? We'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. But in this book, annoying as Steve can be on occasions, I really like the way he thinks, and he especially thinks very well about being an entrepreneur.

So when I was sitting down to think about the two laws that affected me most out of this book, the first one was focus, but now I come back to the index. I can't find that one. I can't find a law called Focus, so obviously it's buried within one of the other laws. But literally the minute I sat down to read the book, when I was feeling all discombobulated, like I didn't know what to do next, that was the chapter that I opened it on and that was what I was meant to read. So I think that you can say that anything like this, any book like this, is not going to read the same each time you read it. I think you're going to get the most out of it if you sit down and just think I'm going to find out what I most need to know right now.

And for me, that was focus. To get back to focusing on just one thing in my marketing, because what I was doing was trying to spread myself too thin, trying to take away from the personality marketing that I've been doing, where basically it's whether you like me or not, whether you think that I can help you or not. I was trying to get away from that and I was trying to make an offer around, around the execution part of my business, and I was trying to take it away from being about me, but at the end of the day, it's much easier for me to do marketing that is centered around me, because it's 25 plus years of experience that's enabled me to get where I am today. It has to be about the things I've learned, the lessons I've learned, the skills I've picked up and how I can put those to use for you, and I have to do that in the way that's most authentic to me, and that is by talking to you directly, like this. So when you come to read this book and I'll tell you later on how you can actually win a copy for free because I've got two then you will come at it with a different need. He's written it in a really good way, so you can dip in and out of it, but I would strongly suggest you read it all the way through first, and then you will know, like me, what hidden gems are in each chapter.

I've been struggling to do certain things that I have decided are necessary to promote my business, and I can't understand why I'm struggling to do them, because if I want to promote my business, I need to do the things that I need to do, and the things that only I can do ideally.

One of which is talking to camera like this, because I'm talking to you, I'm not talking to a camera, I'm talking to you, and that's how I feel. When I'm talking, I actually feel like I'm talking to one person and that's you. But he does have a really interesting discipline equation and the idea is he's still developing the concept and I'm going to give him the feedback right now. It's a really good concept and its discipline equals how much you want to do it minus how much the friction is on doing it, divided into your big Why. So first of all you need a big Why on why you want to do the thing, then you need to have how much you enjoy the process ie no friction and then you've got to also have hang on. I've completely lost that. So you might say, nicola, everybody talks about the big Why, simon Sinek talks about it. He wrote a book about it. But the thing is it's not quite enough. The big why is not quite enough because if you can say you've got a big why for something and then you say not only have I got a really good reason for doing this, but the ways to do it, the process to do it is enjoyable and the friction to do it isn't so bad. And Steven uses the example of he really wants to become a DJ. He really wants to practice every day for a year, which will make him a better DJ. But the friction of getting the equipment out, setting it up and then actually starting to do it was too great for him. So he talked to his girlfriend and left his DJ equipment up on the kitchen table so that he could just walk into the kitchen, turn the power on and start practicing to DJ. So that's the friction. He eliminated the friction.

I was thinking how can I eliminate the friction on the things I want to do to promote my business?

How can I do the marketing and promotion once and then it leads people to the three ways I can help them?

And it brought me back to this YouTube channel, because the OTHER things I was doing to promote my business were there was a lot of friction for me and I wasn't enjoying it at all. I don't mind friction, I push through that. I don't mind sitting doing tedious things over and over again. I don't mind doing difficult things. I don't mind doing things that most people consider scary, like going out and speaking in public. I don't mind any of that stuff.

But I was really struggling to push through the friction of doing what I had decided was the thing to do. And the reason I realised that there was a lot of friction was because I have split off everything into its disparate parts again. There's NicolaCairnX.com, for consutancy, there's Clicksandleads.acadamy for training & mentoring, there's WPExpertUKcom for the execution, which means WordPress services.  I just can't do the marketing on all of the different things, even though I've identified what the marketing should be on those things, and I can't do it because there's a lot of friction and I don't enjoy it. So the enjoyment factor wasn't there for me. And then I started to think okay, what's the one thing I really enjoy in my own marketing? And it's being on YouTube. It's making YouTube videos, it's talking to you guys and getting your comments back.

So please comment and like the video if you are enjoying it. So yeah.

So I thought, well, how can I go back to just doing YouTube videos again and just talking about the things I care about, because that's the stuff I enjoy? And the friction is? Well, the friction was today that Zoom isn't working. I can't use my new bloomin' logic. I can't use my new webcam with Zoom. I don't know why. I might try turning the computer off and turn it back on again. That usually seems to work and it showed me how long it is, since I've done it Using my camera on my phone, because there's actually a cobweb on my stand.

That's bad, isn't it? So it isn't that I haven't used the stand. I haven't made a video for a very long time. It's that I haven't used the stand to make a video for a very long time, but that cobweb is quite damning, isn't it?

Here's some books you might enjoy. If you like Greece, you'll love this. I told tell the story of how we came to find the Marni and Peninsula in Greece, how we traveled around it the first time and the Tavernas we encountered along the way that are still there now, and I update with reviews of the taverners I love the most. So that's good for you. If you love Greece, or if you know anyone who loves Greece, then it's not just it's not a recipe book, it's a. It's a tavern, a review book with a love story woven in a love story of how I fell in love with Greece and fell in love with my who was to be my husband. And Then it's also telling you to go and get yourself a copy of this. In fact, I tell you what I've got an extra copy of this. I somehow managed to order two in my excitement and when it finally came, they both arrived together, so I've got an extra copy.

So when I'm going to think up, my next video is going to be a video telling you how you can win the copy of a Diary of a CEO Book that I've got sitting down on my bookshelf.

That might be fun, might know, but for now I'm going to knock it on the head, I'm going to go to the dentist, which is where I should be, and I hope you've enjoyed this video a little bit, and it's given you some pause for thought about how you can be more disciplined by Picking processes that you enjoy and eliminating the friction on them to actually achieve the goal, which is driven by your big why, and I'd love you to tell me about all of that in your business down below. See you later.