If, like me, you find time passing by ever more quickly, then I’ve found a solution. Get yourself a rowing machine. I’ve had one for quite some time now, and its effect on the passage of time is quite extraordinary.
Flop into your favourite armchair to watch a TV programme, and half an hour passes before you know it. But set the timer to 30 minutes on the rowing machine, and it’s like time is standing still. If you could somehow re-create that effect across your whole life, you’d live to about 297…or at least it would feel like it.
And it has another strange effect too, because it’s turned me into an obsessive reader of food labels.
You see, the rower has a computer which measures the calories burned during exercise. I know for example, that I burn about 400 calories in half an hour. Remember, this isn’t a regular half-hour. It’s a rowing machine half-hour, which is a lot longer. So when I look at the label on a cream cake, and it tells me there are 425 calories in it, you can bet your life that I’m going to think very carefully about whether I really want it…
Because I know ‘the price’ ~ more than half an hour’s hard labour on that bloody machine.
Now I know a lot of people think this sort of behaviour is a little extreme, but to me it seems perfectly logical. I mean, when you go into a shop, do you not look at the price (what you’ll have to give up) before deciding whether to buy? Do you not compare the prices of different items to see which offers the best value?
Well I do the same thing in Marks and Spencer when I look at the number of calories in two different ready-made sandwiches ~ the tuna mayonnaise costs me 22 minutes while the BLT costs me 47. No contest.
I doubt that you have a great deal of interest in my diet, but I think this idea of knowing the ‘price’ can have wider implications. It can certainly be a very powerful tool of persuasion.
If you’re trying to persuade someone to take or avoid a particular course of action, then spelling out the overt or hidden price of going against what you want, can be very effective. That could be a financial price, an inconvenience price, a hard work price, a health price, a personal freedom price, a status price or something else.
The point is that by not doing what you want, there will be a price. You need to spell out exactly what that price is. Because, like most people when they eat a cream bun, they don’t know what the price is.
This is something that can be effective in all forms of communication: socially, at home, in the workplace, and of course in sales and marketing situations. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling by mail, on line, by telephone or face-to-face. Highlighting the negative consequences ~ the price ~ of not taking the action you want, can pay off in a big way.
And as I’ve found, when you’re selling to yourself (and that’s what you’re doing when you try to forego high calorie foods) it helps if you have a very clear focus on the price of going against your own internal pitch.
Without a clear picture of the price, there’s no means of quantifying and comparing the benefit.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Dear Streetwise Customer,
It didn’t come as a surprise to me when 2 banks intervened and literally blocked their customers from hearing from me, even though everything I was saying is 100% legal.
That’s because I’ve been exposing how the banks constantly take advantage of the little guy.
But now the tables have turned…
I doubled my money by legally intercepting unofficial bank messages.
But the best part is that banks can’t stop us from milking this over and over again!
And now I’m giving you the opportunity to copy me…
Just give me a few minutes of your time.
I’ll explain all of this when you visit:
www.streetwisenews.com/code
Kind Regards,
Jim Hunt