The book shown here, Personal Achievement, by Martin Rhodes, is one of those life-changing books that you come across rarely. I found it in a book sale at Lichfield Library, in 1972. I was bumping along the bottom in life, pretty much in shock after finishing five years in the Royal Air Force as a Ground Wireless Technician, having to adjust to Civvy Street again. Anyone who’s done that knows it’s hard, and you can be left floundering, especially if you’re single, which I was.
I ought to point out that this isn’t a book review, and you’ll be very lucky to get hold of a copy because it’s been out of print for a long time. I can find no information on Martin Rhodes, so if you know anything about him, I’d very much like to hear from you.
I saw this book and straightaway I was enthused by what Martin had to say. He had a way of writing that made you want to put the book down and get started on your new life. Note that the sub-title calls it a self-contained course. In the Author’s Note, Martin says:
“I have called this a course – not a book – and divided it into assignments – not chapters – to emphasise that it is a course of instruction intended to lead to action.
You will not gain much benefit from just reading it. I have assumed you will work on each assignment, getting practice at the exercises and other instructions in it, before going on to the next. The whole course should take six months to a year to work through for the first time.”
It didn’t take six months to a year to see the benefits, though. As soon as I started reading it, my life changed. I began making plans. A five-year plan, a one-year plan, monthly, weekly, daily plans. In short, it got my life back on track.
Let me show you the first page of Assignment 1.
Note the Golden Rule: YOU CANNOT BRING ABOUT ANY IMPROVEMENT JUST BY READING. And that’s pretty much universal. You’ll see it written in many different ways, but the simple fact remains, that, however much you learn, nothing changes until you DO something.
Personal Achievement has been a great guide, over the years and whenever things have gone off track, I’ve usually been able to turn to the book to build my enthusiasm back up. But if you can’t go out and buy it, why am I telling you about it? Well, since it’s been so effective for me, over so many years, much of what I say and do has been shaped by Martin’s guidance. Because of that, any way I might help you is likely to have been influenced by this book in some way. See below for a rough scan of the Assignments page, to see what’s in store, if you read the book.
One thing I’ve discovered is that the power to motivate, that we get from self-help or personal development books, diminishes over time. My view on this is that it’s due to the phenomenon in humans and other animals, that we call habituation. This is often illustrated by the fact that, if you touch a slug’s antennae when they’re extended, the slug retracts them instantly. If you continue doing this, eventually, the slug will ignore you. As humans, we can get used to anything that impinges upon our senses, and filter it out, once we realize it’s not life-threatening or dangerous.
The upshot of this is that we need continuous change in stimuli to maintain effectiveness. In marketing, this change could be in the content, or in the methods of putting the message across, via text, audio, video and so on, to keep our audience interested. Novelty is everything.
This is the reason why [my hypothesis] there is a seemingly infinite market for information products. It’s also why persuasive writing – copywriting – isn’t about to die out any time soon. There will always be the need for novel ways of getting the attention of buyers. Once they get used to seeing the same ad, for instance, they ignore it – habituation in action.
This gives you plenty of opportunities to make money, by taking a marketing message or an information product and converting it into other formats. The current vogue is for selling info-products as videos or MP3 audio. If you’ve written a report and sold it or given it away, you could give it a new lease of life by recording an audio or video version. You could put the video on YouTube or on your website. The possibilities are endless. If you don’t want to be seen or heard yourself, then you can outsource this work for very low cost on sites such as www.fiverr.com.
Scan of Assignments Page
The webinar has become highly popular as a marketing tool with gurus cooperating in joint ventures (JV’s) and appearing on live video channels via videoconferencing software. TalkMarketingNow is a great resource where you’ll get to be online with some of the most respected names in the business. The gems of information and the encouragement you get on there from these top people are worth their weight in gold.
Hope this is useful. I’d love to keep in touch, so if you’d like to sign up for my email newsletter, go to the signup form in the sidebar.
See You Soon,
Terry