Lesson 9 How to Automatically Capture Your Thinking Into Your 5-Notes System

Email Machine Week 5: Lessons 9 How to Automatically Capture Your Thinking Into Your 5-Notes System

->PDF Version of this Page (download here)<-

1. Important: for everything important, it helps to print and put it in an old-school 3-ring binder. Research shows that learning happens faster and deeper in 3-D (book, pencil, pen, paper) instead of just 2-D (screen).

Objectives

1. Inspire, instruct, and profit from your reading.
2. Bring more patients who want from you what you want to give.

Video

Buttons Used

1. Add a page
2. Add an email
3. Add a video
4. Publish

Skills Learned

1. How to use email and videos to motivate you to learn and to clarify your thoughts.
2. How to organize your emails and videos into courses, books, and memberships that will change the lives of your patients.
3. Daily, weekly, and monthly practices to facilitate and direct your efforts.

Do List

1. Read C.S. Lewis’s book, C.S. Lewis on Writing and Writers^[1]. Keep it handy on your desk to refer to occasionally for inspiration and instruction.
2. Read Wake Up and Live, Dorthea Brande^[2].
   Re-read it once a year. Every rereading will be more than a review; you will see more (and not just in the book).

Other Links and Tips

1. This link shows me adding a book reference to Zotero<=
2. This video shows me adding a reference to a Word document using Zotero<=
3. Camtasia
4. Rev.com
5. If you need a free Ontraport account, here is where to get one. Wait to cancel anything else you are doing (other software). Run them parallel for a while; you can use one to build the other.
6. If you want more cash procedures to add to your practice, you can find options here<-

Transcript

Welcome to our fifth week with our class. This class will be about using everything you’ve done so far. There is nothing new except how to reassemble what you’ve already learned into emails that automatically become products, how to do it, why you should do it, and what sort of outcomes can happen on the money side as well as the patient side.

I think you’ll see that you’ll be able to better inspire and instruct yourself, not just other people, and, of course, bring more patients to your office who want to do what you want to give them.

Part of the way we thought about creating your perfect day is to start off with what your perfect day looks like. Then, we start talking about that (in emails, videos, and web pages). By talking about that online, people start to show up wanting what you know how to do.

Quick review

 Your page is where you present it, and your video and images help clarify what you’re presenting. The email takes them there.

The webpage has words on it.

There’s a video or a picture that helps explain it, before and after pictures. As you guys know, pictures and videos say much more than words, and then the email brings them there.

Really, those three things.

Then, living on that page is a button where they can either book an appointment or give you money as an acceptance of your offer to help them, or a form which collects their contact information again when they’re ready to accept your offer to help them.

That offer is made by combining those five things. The button and the form live on the webpage to help them accept the offer, either with information, an appointment, or money. The webpage presents words, videos, and emails that bring them there. That’s the whole five things.

The 12 buttons, which you’ve already seen, add an automation, which can have timing by waiting between emails sent by the automation. The emails can bring them there. Those are the first three buttons.

You can add a page with… It’s another button.

Then on the page, really all you need to know is how to add an extra block.

Then, there are templates where you can add text from your Word document or transcriptions of your videos.

You add a video or a picture, and then the form and the buttons have settings so that if they buy something, it delivers the product or makes the appointment or a form that collects information and puts them on the automation.

Then you learn how to push a button and publish the webpage to the internet, adding tags and then rules that tell your staff what to do, call someone, or it can tell the software what to do. They click this button, put them on an automation, and take them to this webpage. Really the buttons can do all sorts of things, including telling your staff what to do to make a phone call, to send a letter. Anything you would tell your staff can become a message that is either texted or emailed to your staff delivering.

For example, if someone buys one of our workshops, a rule tells someone on my staff to call them to thank them and make sure they have good travel information. That rule is just delivering a message or swapping an automation.

Those are the 12 buttons and the five keys.

Those buttons are just rearranging, giving you ways to implement the form, the pay button, the email, the webpage, and the video. What we’ve covered so far is the mechanics of it.

Today, there are no more mechanics to learn. It’s how to now take those components of your system and turn them into books, courses, and more people who are coming for what you want. We’ll get to the process of turning the 12 buttons and the five notes into those things, but I’d like to start with more ideas about why you want to do this and how it might work.

Emerson

It’s helpful to remember what Emerson said, which is that he wanted to be a perfectly clean pipe. In his mind, the pipe is connected; one end is connected to something, and then another end is connected to something else, and there’s a flow between the two ends.

He would’ve said that he’s the transcriptionist, not the writer. He’s transcribing. One end would be connected to his muse, God, or what he was learning or observing if he were a scientist. One end is connected to the source, which is not inside of him. It’s coming from another place, passing through him, and then being put out in his writing for his readers to collect what’s flowing through the pipe.

Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan

Willie Nelson surprisingly said the same thing if you read his book about writing songs. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson said, “I don’t know where those songs came from.” They both said they were transcribing.

 

Marty Robbins

My dad used to sing a cowboy song called “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso,” in which the guy falls in love with a Mexican girl. You’ll have to listen to Marty Robbins. El Paso, I think, is the name of the song. Marty Robbins wrote that song while flying over El Paso in an airplane. He thought some cowboy dictated it to him, and it was one of his best hits ever.

C.S. Lewis

CS Lewis. Let’s cover the way he thought about writing. I wanted to go into more depth about how CS Lewis did his stuff. Let me back up one and a half a step.

AI is not as smart as you

We covered how you could go online and, basically, using AI, make a website about the thing you want to do. It could be labiaplasty, or it could be botulinum toxin for frown lines. I showed you how to use AI to go online, gather data so that you could teach an eighth grader to do it, and, without much editing at all, wind up with a webpage on which you can then post a video. It could be your picture; now you have something people can look at.

An email could be as simple as how I think about botulinum toxin. But now I’m to where I think the people on this call are more likely to want to be, which is I want to use my brain and think of something that AI doesn’t know yet. Remember we talked about how Elon Musk thought that AI writes from what is known better than anyone who’s ever been around except maybe Shakespeare, but it really can’t think up much. When I ask it to think, even think about the research and gather research, it’s not so good at it. It’s very good at summarizing the research I give to it. As far as going out on the internet and finding research and then somehow integrating it and thinking about it, it’s not so good.

It’s awful at it. I’m not certain about the I in AI as far as it being actually being intelligent, as far as coming up with new ideas or even synthesizing current ideas reliably in a way that matches the way you’re thinking as a physician.

It must be checked.

Software is a Weed Eater

What we’re doing today, which I think is the more exciting part, is now having suffered through all the buttons, which is, believe me, it is the least fun part for me just because I’ve found over the course of a couple of decades, some software that works for me and some buttons that can be simplified into accomplishing the job does not mean that I like it.

I’ve spent many, many hours cursing at my laptop. I have thrown fax machines into the garbage can. I have an ongoing dislike of the software. To me, the software is like a weed eater. It’s nice. I remember sling blades before we had weed eaters, and a weed eater is certainly a lot more efficient, and I sweat a lot less using a weed eater instead of a sling blade. When I talk to people the age of my children, most of them don’t know what a sling blade is, but those of you who are over 50 know what that’s like to be in the hot sun possibly and slinging a blade, a sickle of sorts, to cut down weeds that happen to be on an area that’s too inclined to get a lawnmower.

It’s not fun.

 A weed eater saves you so much time, but that doesn’t mean that I want to take it out and play with it. It still isn’t fun, but it’s a lot more time-efficient than a sling blade. That’s the way I look at the software. I don’t pretend to think any of us like the software or that any of us are learning. Oh, there’s a button that does that. I will show you more software today that I think is simple to use and can help with our work. I don’t think that you will like it. I don’t like it either.

Now that we’ve suffered through it, we can enjoy using it like Emerson never could.

If you think about this, now I can sit in my three-red-light town, and the closest library to me with books in it, other than in my home, is a community college, where I would be unlikely to find most of what I might need to read whenever I’m diving deep into a subject.

Many of you know my story. As a research chemist, Southern Research Institute, when I was there in the 80s, had a massive, unbelievable scientific library filled with journals of every type of chemistry and biochemistry and molecular biology, math, and physics.

It was just orgasmic to walk into the place.

But remember how time-consuming that was?

You want to dive something, you have to physically find the journal, maybe copy it or take notes from it by hand, probably run some Xerox copies so you can take it home because you don’t have time to read all the stuff you want to read and you needed to live close to something like that or you couldn’t do that sort of research.

As you know, you can go online. I don’t have to finish that sentence, but not only can you search documents like crazy, but if there’s something out of print, you can go to eBay or other websites and find it.

It’s amazing. We have this way of diving deep into the literature, which can be part of your pipe if you use the note-taking system we discussed.

What is your attitude while you’re doing that?

 What exactly are you trying to do that creates that perfect day for you?

This is where I think CS Lewis can help us, and then we’ll get to the buttons and the math here shortly. Lewis was a big letter writer. Even though he wrote one of the most popular children’s books ever and wrote about religion and he wrote poetry, he was prolific with almost 40 books and game-changing books, but he still spent a lot of time writing letters.

There are three volumes of his letters, and someone edited those or curated some of his letters about writing.

.All right, right there where it says, “Read CS Lewis’s Book, CS Lewis on Writing and Writers.”

 

Now, I made a video for you right here showing you how I put in that superscript and the footnote at the bottom of the page right there, Louis Downing is the editor who just read all of his letters, pulled out his best stuff on writing and put it in this.

This is a condensation-curated version of three volumes of letters written by CS Lewis, pulling out when he has something to say about writing.

Right there, I’ve talked about using Zotero and how it embeds into a Word document. Right there, I show you how to add a book or add a book to Zotero. You can do this by scanning the code on the back of the book or by entering the ISPN number.

If you’re writing scholarly scientific work, you don’t want to have to format it by hand in Chicago style or AMA style. You want the software to do it for you, and this does it faster than anything. Then you can literally click and drag, and it makes this footnote, and it creates a reference at the end like that, that’s alphabetical. Every time you add another reference, it rearranges things, including the writing on your page, and adds it in the correct place for it to be alphabetical.

These videos are literally a minute or two long.

This one shows you, and you’ll get this; I haven’t given it to you yet, but this one will show you how to add a book to Zotero. You can literally do this with your iPhone by scanning the back code, the same one that the cash register scans when you buy it at Books-A-Million, or you can manually put in the ISBN number, and now it’s in your Zotero.

Then, you can click and drag, and it’ll be formatted properly. This video shows you how.

The first video shows you adding a book to Zotero. The second video shows you taking that reference and sliding it into a Word document, and I show you doing that with these two books.

I included Dorothea Brand’s Wake Up and Live. She is the person who led to Nightingale-Conant and many of the business/positive thinking books that are out there. She was early to recognize the power of autosuggestion and self-hypnosis and how to live a creative, productive life.

If you were swimming upstream to drink the clearest water possible, you would probably swim all the way up to Moses.

If you want to go back down a bit and catch some practical ideas about how to make things, I have referenced her book on how to be a writer, but this one came after that book when she was on the lecture circuit when people had more questions. “Well, how exactly do you live your life in such a way that you’re creative?”

I show you how I add that reference to this document in those two videos.

Then I put a link to the software where I’m showing you how to do that. The important reason is that when you are making your videos, you could be talking about before and after pictures and looking at PowerPoint slides. When you’re creating your courses to make a video that lives on a webpage,

 

Camtasia is something that I use. Anything that you would show someone looking at your screen, other software does that like Loom, but this is my favorite to show as if a patient or another doctor were looking over my shoulder.

That’s how I do it.

Then, of course, I’ve shown you guys Rev.com is where I get transcribed. I’ll show you the whole process shortly. Let’s go again back to what CS Lewis had to say about writing because I think it’s the best advice for creating courses that both make money and bring patients that want what you have and create street cred, both courses that live online and books that live on Amazon. You’ll know how to make a book on Amazon by the time you finish what we’ll talk about today.

Back to CS Lewis.

These are tips. He was writing to a young person, like a schoolgirl, who asked him about writing. He was not too proud to answer a letter. I wish he were still around. I think I was two when he died. I’d give a lot of money to be able to spend time with CS Lewis. First, turn off the radio. These days, of course, you can imagine everything he would ask you to turn off. I may take it a bit too much to the extreme, and to show you something, they laugh at this, but it works, I think. All right, let me show a different screen.

It’s called a Kitchen Safe, and I’ll put the link here in the chat box. When I was teaching people how to lose weight as part of my practice, one of the best tips I ever heard or practiced was to make it where you don’t have to use willpower. You create a clean environment; no willpower is needed.

Make an Environment that allows you to go deep

We called it skill power instead of willpower.

You can’t eat cookies if there are none in your house. This guy tried a different strategy and let me put the link in the chat box.

What he did was he would put his cookies in. He calls it a Kitchen Safe, but I think it’s much better than just for the kitchen. He puts his cookies in here and sets a timer for them. Once you set the timer, which can be, as you can see, from a few seconds to days, the only way to get your thing out of that is to break the box. My goal is for my cell phone to be in that box for four hours every morning. When I was an internist, I had people in the ICU. I could not have done that. But now that I don’t have people in the ICU, no one could call me that would need me to answer within moments.

I don’t know. When you do this when someone is taking your call at the hospital, some of you can do it now, but you’ll see that when there’s no possibility of touching your iPhone, your brain will go to a different space. You’ll think, “Oh, I need to call that person, or I need to text that person, or I need to buy that thing on Amazon.”

If you’re like me, you’ll be shocked at how many times you have the impulse to pick up your phone, but it won’t be available.

I know you can get around it. You can go on your laptop or desktop and do all the things you have the urge to do with your phone, but I think you’ll see a difference if you just lock it up. This could be the 30 minutes in the morning when you’re doing your thinking, but something puts it out of reach. The apps that somehow make it where you’re not supposed to use it don’t work. You will get around it.

Read all the books you can

C.S. Lewis also says to read all the books you can and avoid nearly all magazines. He was not even too hip on modern novels. He talks about most modern novels, he reads them in one gulp and then he thinks you should get rid of them as fast as you can, preferably in the fire. He was more into reading something that had stood the test of time, swimming upstream to where the clear water is.

It’s important. As doctors, we tend to read mostly science. You can make me look stupid by asking me anything about history. I’m not going to know much about it or geography. But I do think it’s useful to read, just like William Osler said, literature and the Bible and scriptures, whether it’s the Gita or if you read the Judeo-Christian Bible, but you swim upstream, and you read, and then even though as Osler put it, you may not read it as your fathers read it. But, still, you’ll bathe your mind in a different type of thinking.

When you come out of that and you go back to writing your emails, there will be something there that people will notice that just makes it more for me.

For me, these are just a few moments in the evening. It might be listening to a book when I’m walking on Audible, but especially on my day off, that’s when I want to pick up a novel or a book of poetry by Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson or spend extra time in the scriptures.

Then it feels like my brain works better when I go back to the science.

Always write and read with your ear, not the eye.

Edit if it does not sound nice. I don’t think we can do that because when we pick up a scientific article, I know we always scan it like mad, which means we aren’t reading with the ear to get to the place. To me, it’s like speed shopping. When my children and I go to the grocery store, we don’t stop and look at things. We just up and down the aisles with the buggy to grab what we need.

I think most doctors usually do that when they go to the medical literature.

You read the conclusion, maybe the whole abstract, to figure out if this is useful or not, if you think it’s bull. Then, you decide how far deep you want to go. Eventually, you might read the methods and even the multiple references. But first, you are not reading with your ear; you’re reading with your eyes to find what is useful and what will waste your time.

The way to read 100,000 words in 30 seconds is to pick up a 100,000-word book, read the Table of Contents, and decide that it’s of no value to you, and then you put it back on the shelf or in the garbage can. This idea that you have to read every word of a book before you buy another one or every word of an article before you read the next one is a ball and chain.

Lewis thought you should revisit two books you’ve previously read before you read the next one, or that’s the ratio.

It should be for every book you read; you’ve revisited two books.

There are many books in my house that I’ve read, I’ve lost track of the times, and others that I looked at for five seconds and said, “Okay, this will sit here until I need it as a reference. There’s no need for me to plow through every page right now.”

Once you get to the place where you’re writing, for sure, you read what you write with your ear, and when you have that book that you’re rereading and rereading, that you read with your ear and all the literature you read with your ear.

Be clear.

I don’t always agree with this one. You may not need to be clear if you are writing some things. We shouldn’t be obligated if you’re writing your autobiography or telling a story. You must be clear if you’re giving instructions on how to do something or writing science.

When you give up, don’t throw it away. I have a lot of half-done things here.

When I do the process I’m about to show you, I’ll get somewhere along the way on a project and say, “Oh, well, this has become less important because I have now seen that,” and then I’ll work on B.

Then, sometimes I’m halfway or almost done with B, and I realize, “Oh, I’ve now seen C, and C is better than either A or B,” but I still may loop back around to A.

Sometimes 10, 15, 20 years later, it’s still sitting in that three-ring binder waiting for me to return to it.

The longest I’ve worked on something has been 20 plus years with a document where I read through the entire King James Bible and note where I find lessons that might be helpful with health because I think it’s a good health book, too, but the eternal lessons. These things will never change versus what will change when the next research article is published.

I don’t know whether I’ll finish, but I don’t feel obligated to drop everything in my life until that thing is done. I go back to it when I have space or notice something I want to note.

My house and office are littered with three-ring binders on shelves.

Start with Pen and Paper

You write first with a pen and paper. He thought the sound of a typewriter would destroy your sense of rhythm. The same applies to a laptop, but this is where we discussed the note-taking system.

If you’re reading the literature, make notes either in a bound moleskin or a clipboard with college rule notebook paper, an index card, or a four-by-six card that eventually goes in a file. If you haven’t read it yet, I cannot stress how important the books I’ve recommended are; if I were going to pick the top three as far as doing what we’re talking about here, I think the Smart Notes book would be in the top three. The method that man used is a book about the process another person used, not the book’s author.

People were making whole science about how that German sociologist was as prolific as any author or fiction author. It’s a lot harder to sit down and write 2,000 words a minute in the science arena because if you’re a Stephen King and you’re writing The Stand, which has about half a million words in it, as does War and Peace, both of those books have a little over 500,000 words in them. Well, you can knock out… Stephen King shoots for 2,000 words before he gets up from his seat every morning, and you can do 2,000 words out of your imagination.

But if you’re writing 2,000 words and you’re doing science, you must read, do research, and make notes. You can’t just pull it out of your brain. It’s a process of note-taking followed by taking from your temporary notes and making permanent notes. Things become pregnant from those permanent notes, which get built into something we’re about to discuss.

 Those temporary notes can become emails and videos. You don’t have to wait until the book is done.

That’s the beauty of what I’m about to show you.

The process of creating the content is also the process for creating your next book or your next research paper or your next idea that you haven’t even thought of yet. It evolves or erupts out of that. Know the meaning of every word you use.

Remember what Faraday said?

Even though he was a mathematician, he said writing is the way to understand what you’re thinking. Even though, as a mathematician, he stressed that you must understand the precise meaning of every word you use.

CS Lewis said it; he was a professor of medieval studies. He was a literature professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. It makes sense for him to say it, but for Faraday, a physicist, to say it, I think, reemphasizes the idea that words matter.

Even the mathematician thought his education as a mathematician depended on him learning how to say things with words.

A reporter visited Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winner in physics, and asked him to show him where he came up with his ideas. He pointed to a shelf of notebooks.

The reporter said, “No, that’s your notes about what you thought of. How did you think of it?”

Feynman then pointed back to the shelf and said, “That’s where I thought of it. In those pages of those notebooks.”

He re-derived all of Einstein’s ideas.

He wanted to rethink them through himself so that he could understand them as his ideas. The subatomic particles that he visualized came out of his notebooks.

This may seem unrelated, but it is the key.

Without it, you’ll be back to sending emails that say 10% off because it’s Valentine’s Day.

CS Lewis said, “I don’t know what I mean until I see what I have said.”

Writing was his thinking. Taking your notes and turning them into a simple email is your thinking.

Of course, because you’re thinking about what interests you, you then bring people who want what you want to do.

We’re almost done with this philosophy. We’ll get to the math and some practical stuff here shortly, but this is critical.

Without this part of it, I’m certain I would still be making rounds until 10:00 at night at the hospital, begging Blue Cross Blue Shield to pay me 30 cents on the dollar for me to give 10% of that to my billing company and half of what’s left over to the tax man.

This is the key.

All right, and this part reiterates what we said last time about making emails.

It is NOT “Creation,” it is Making

It’s not writing.

This is worth making a poster.

CS Lewis said, “Creation,” and he used quotation marks, “As applied to human authorship seems to me an entirely misleading term we make.”

 Then, he used a Greek phrase that meant picking up what’s before you and said, “We rearrange elements that He has provided.”

Even in his Chronicles of Narnia, when he is writing children’s science fiction, even if you’re trying to imagine a creature, he says that it is fictional, and you still have to think of what you already know. It’s the nose of a cat and the tale of an elephant.

We don’t create anything.

He thought that we just rearrange elements.

Exactly like in the Smart Notes book, you take notes of what you’re thinking. They become written out in your throwaway notes, whether in the napkin at Burger King, the three-by-five card, or the piece of college notebook paper.

Then, that gets transferred into four by six permanent notes that are filed in some order and eventually build out into something that gets written, published, or turns into a new procedure, a new patent, or something else.

But in the beginning, you’re just curating, and I say just curating because that’s the step because there is nothing new.

Let me stop for a minute because this is even more important. Louis said that because we don’t always fully understand what we are curating when we put it together, we may not fully understand what we have made.

You can be as clear as you can, but sometimes you don’t know what you’ve done.

People often legitimately see meaning in writings that the authors did not even see, both in fiction and in science. For example, I read an article written ten years ago by surgeons about how we should be more aware of the autonomic nerves when a mid-urethral sling is surgically placed for stress urinary incontinence.

They talked about the possible interference with sexual function if that idea is not considered. They reviewed several methods for putting in a mid-urethral sling, but I did not understand them.

I don’t think when they wrote that they realized that the reverse could be applied and that you’re telling us how not to attenuate the response by damaging nerves. The last I read in nature, it’s minimal. With about 10% of those who get a mid-urethral sling, it either fails or leaves them with sexual dysfunction, but nine out of 10 are happy with it.

They were talking about how to make that number smaller and have fewer people who have secondary problems with their sex after a mid-urethral sling.

I don’t think they realized that some guy was going to read it a decade later and think, “Oh, well that’s a good stepping point to the idea that maybe we should figure out how not only to not damage those autonomic nerves that lead to the inferior hypogastric plexus that lead to the midbrain where arousal takes place, maybe we should think about some way to activate those nerves.”

So, they were saying more than they realized they were saying, and I could go on and on about studies where that is the case.

I’ll give you one more example: Andrew Goldstein published a study about lichen sclerosus. It was beautifully done; he is a brilliant man. His conclusion was that no benefit was seen, but the placebo arm had a 50% response rate on biopsy. In other words, 50% of those who had saline infiltrated into their lichen sclerosus showed improvement on biopsy. Yeah, the treatment arm was not much better than that, and it was not enough to count it as statistical.

I’ve never seen a study of lichen sclerosus with a 50% placebo response on biopsy. These were high-end dermatopathologists at George Washington University Medical School. That doesn’t happen. Even if you look at multiple studies of sexual function, with the Female Sexual Function Index, the placebo response with improvement in the Total Female Sexual Function Index score is only 3.5%, not 50%.

To have a biopsy change by 50%, the conclusion was not that PRP didn’t work. The conclusion was (to me) that hydro dissection seemed to have an effect, and PRP might improve the results.

He was a brilliant man, saying more than he even realized he was saying. Every one of you will do the same, but you can’t edit it or find more in something until it’s published.

Until you put it out there, it’s masturbating, as in it isn’t giving offspring to other people, but it’s still important.

I saved this for last because, to me, this is the most important thing that you will find in that book, which is a curated collection of CS Lewis’s writing about writing and writers.

Forget Applause and Criticism

He said the very first thing to get over is acknowledgment, and until one reaches the place where you’re curating for yourself, you’re collecting information because you want to know, you’re making notes because you want to know even if it never gets published, which is a very hard thing to do, he said when you get to the point to where you’re ready to quit writing because you’re trying to seek acknowledgment and then you quit, but then you can’t stop because you want to write more to help yourself understand, that’s when it happens.

That’s when suddenly you realize you’ve curated something that might help someone other than yourself.

I’ve seen that discussed elsewhere. If you go back to Bob Dylan, whom we mentioned earlier, at one point, he just got sick of it all and said, “I’m not doing any more songs.”

He thought people were making too big of a deal out of it, trying to make him into a guru. He literally got on his Harley and just went, trying not to be found.

Then, while trying to be in seclusion, deciding never to write another song, he wrote some of his best stuff.

As you know, he’s the only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

When they interviewed him for that prize, he said, “I do not know where those songs came from.”

But in his interview, he didn’t really want to go to the party, and you have to give an acceptance speech to get the prize, so he filmed it. You should go on YouTube and find it.

He mentions reading stuff like Moby Dick and mythology, and there was stuff inside of him from having studied literature. I’ll say that again: to do this process, you’ll put it out in the emails, the webpages, and the videos, but your best stuff will come when you decide that it doesn’t matter if anyone else finds it useful or not. You’re writing for your understanding, hoping and praying that someday someone will be helped as a side effect.

I’m going to show you the buttons in the next session.

To me, though, this is the most important part. Well, it gives direction and support for the rest of it. I will show you how to create a book, put it on Amazon, create online courses, and create courses just from your emails by pushing buttons. I want to give you a quick example of how things worked for me that may help you see how it happens.

I’ll give you a diagram of how this process I described worked in my life. Then we’ll come back, and we’ll talk about how to use the buttons you already know to create the courses, the process of taking notes, and how it happened with me.

An example: The path of my interests

The software I’m using right now is V4K, which is the name of the software/device. I’ll put a link in the handout that comes to you that shows you. It’s like an overhead projector for a piece of paper.

But first, I’m doing this research as a chemist. While doing that, I did some night classes in biomedical engineering, but my interest was studying Paul Bragg, who wrote and inspired Jack LaLanne. Paul Bragg wrote a book called The Miracle of Fasting when he was 86 years old. Jack LaLanne, who celebrated his 70th birthday by pulling 70 boats and swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco, 70 (a seven with a zero), attributed his health to Paul Bragg.

I was a skinny, nerdy guy in high school. I was studying how to get well. I wasn’t sick. I was running a lot, but I wanted vigor. I wanted to be more of an athlete, so I studied these guys, which led to reading a book called Health and Happiness, considered sacred among some in the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Then I wind up in medical school and I’m reading this and taking notes, and while I’m a resident, I go stay at a place called Uchee Pines.

While I was there, I saw a way to treat diabetes that I did not know existed. By this time, I’m almost through with an internal medicine residency, and their way of treating type two diabetes is that you come in and you stop all your diabetes medicine, and you don’t eat—zero calories.

You have water and herbal teas with no calories until your blood sugar is normal. Then, you eat once a day, a vegetarian meal, and go home without your medicines and with normal blood sugars.

I thought I didn’t know that was possible.

I started reading more about insulin receptors, like a madman, and hyperinsulinemia and the fact that until the latter stages, type two diabetes is hyperinsulinemia, and it’s a paucity of insulin receptors. I’m reading about that and I decide I want to make a place like Uchee Pines.

That becomes my goal: to have this place. I go to work in the ER, and I am saving money to build a place, and while I’m there, I read about insulin receptors, diet, and exercise and how they might be used to control diabetes, thinking I’m going to make a place like this.

I bought a 15-acre pecan orchard and decided I was going to open this up.

Then I finally open up my internal medicine practice and I start reading more about diabetes and weight loss and how I could possibly do this as an outpatient, not having to put people in something like Uchee Pines and which led to reading more about weight loss and diabetes and eventually getting hooked into some studies, some growth hormone studies, which of course growth hormone improves Somatomedin C or IGF one, which is incorporated into the insulin receptor.

Then while I’m doing that, a woman tells me she doesn’t want to lose any more weight because her face is looking skinny and makes it look older, so I learned how to do fillers.

We didn’t have Juvederm then. We just had Restylane.

I travel to Toronto to the top Allergan account in the world (Dr. Mark Bailey), where I learn how to do Restylane and Botox, and then Juvederm comes out. While I’m doing that, I get to do it pretty well, and I read like a madman about it.

Then someone comes in and says, “Hey, use PRP because it works just like fillers.” In the meantime, also while I’m in the ER, I ran a wound care center at Spring Hill Hospital in Mobile, Alabama. I’m studying wounds and I’m studying hormones, and now I’ve been told about PRP, which I said increases volume and blood flow with neovascularization with no side effects. I start reading everything I can. At that time, there were only 5,000 papers on PubMed about PRP. Now it’s close to 20,000. I didn’t read all 5,000, but I read a truckload of them.

In the meantime also, I have done a book on female ejaculation and I’ve read everything I can find on that and I’m following Matlock’s work, although I never did that because I didn’t want to break something I can’t fix. As you guys know, a brilliant idea, a brilliant man, but one of the side effects is granuloma. I’m studying that and taking notes and wrote an email course about it. That’s what I’m about to show you.

I wrote an email course about how to teach a woman to ejaculate, and that was out there. I’m taking notes on all this, but not on all of internal medicine. Mostly just reading internal medicine, but you can see where my interests are connecting from the weight loss to the diabetes, to the insulin receptors, to the growth one research, to the wound care, to the PRP. Then because of the PRP idea, increasing volume, I try it, but it doesn’t work so well to sculpt with so I’ll come up with a way to combine it with fillers using PRP plus Juvederm.

In the meantime, I’m reading everything I can about ED, even though I already put out a book called Anytime for as Long as You Want for Men to Help the Men That Can’t Keep up with the Women After They Get More Hormones, which was done the way I’m about to show you. I’m writing emails and the emails are fueling my interest. [inaudible 00:46:07] this is a very narrow scope. Matlock was just how to inject filler to make female sexual arousal go up. I can never find where he ever published a paper about. It was still a great idea, but you can read everything written about injecting for stress urinary incontinence, at least back then you could, in a week.

I read all of that and all this together led to me studying like crazy about what can you inject to help stress urinary incontinence. I’m reading everything about that. At the same time, I’m trying to roll out PRP for erectile dysfunction and I decide, wow, this works better for females so let me talk about that. Now I’m building websites and writing emails about that, which eventually leads to the O-Shot.

Then I’m doing workshops and I start reading everything I can about botulinum neurotoxin for migraines as part of making that book, which I’m about to show you, which led to me finding research about Priapus Toxin or what I eventually named Priapus Toxin, a protocol for helping ED, which led to Clitoxin, a protocol for women, which had never been published before. Best I can tell to this present day, there have only been two papers about injecting the clitoris with anything. Both of them authored by me and with co-authors, my wife and other people.

That in spite of the fact that there are multiple FDA approved drugs for injecting the penis with Caverject. Why is it that… You go read that research. Again, nothing about this is brilliant. It’s just me plugging along, pursuing, and I’ve left a lot of it out, but it’s plugging along, pursuing my interests, writing emails, making websites about what I’m thinking, which would bring to me then the people who wanted this sort of stuff. My practices rebuilt twice, filled up until eventually now I’m helping fill the offices with this same little process of just falling my interest and reading about that, filling the offices of 2,000 or 3,000 doctors depending on how you want to count.

To me, it’s the beauty of being just interested in whatever interests you, and then feeling free to take notes and write about it and not needing to wait for New England Journal or Harper or whatever book publisher to agree that what you have is worth publishing. I was honored when Brett Allen saw… His book is amazing, co-authored and co-edited, but his, I have one chapter in that amazing book, which I was honored to be, and I have a chapter in a few other books, which I’m very honored by, but I never waited for that.

We have quite a few famous authors who live in our town. The guy who wrote Forrest Gump recently passed away, Winston Groom. Also, Bragg, who has won multiple awards for his books.

Anyway, a famous author here told me, “Don’t even think about looking for a publisher until somebody offers you 200 or 300 grand.”

Could I go out and find somebody to do that?

Maybe.

But I don’t want to slow down long enough even to ask. I just put out stuff, and the people who relate to it will find it, and the others can read something else.

Let’s take five or 10 minutes and come back.

That’s the process, and I’m still on this journey.

 I hope it never stops. I saw an interview with the guy who invented that old video game Pong or Ping or whatever it was where he just had two dashes that went back and forth and a ball that went back and forth, and he’s still inventing things.

He said, “I’m an inventor. Why would I stop?”

Edison was still looking for a way to make rubber from the excretions of a plant when he was in his 80s.

Paul Bragg wrote one of his best books when he was 86.

I would do something else if I didn’t like what I was doing.

I don’t intend to stop following threads of interest and then let people know what I’m noticing and decide if it’s useful as I do so.

Last quote, Andy Warhol said, “Make art, and while everyone else is trying to figure out if it’s good or bad, make more art.”

I would say the same thing: “Curate what you think is interesting in medicine; then put it out in your emails, videos, and web pages.”

While other people are deciding if your curating is worthwhile, if what you said had a comma in the right place, or if you misspelled a word, while they’re worrying about that stuff, read the next article that interests you and write about that.

The next day, do it again.

Remember, if you go strictly by William Osler, you’re doing that four to five hours a day.

The other part I left out is that I was just crazy enough to say the heck with it.

When my life didn’t look like I wanted it to, I gave a house almost paid for back to the bank and slept on the floor of my office for a few years until the income started coming again.

But I did not quit doing the reading, and I knew if I had people interested in what I was noticing, it could be rebuilt. I’m not recommending you return your house to the bank and sleep on the floor, but it might be worth getting up at least 30 minutes early and spending time daily, not just weekly, thinking about that one thing you want to think about.

As you come across other stuff, if you read the Smart Notes book, you’ll see you still make notes about it. It goes in your file whenever you get around to it, but you have that one thing you’re thinking about.

For me, it’s just asking if I can really teach this.

For over a decade, I’ve tried to show doctors the power and the value of curating and writing emails and putting them into auto-responders, and not letting other people do all that stuff for you. They can help you with it, but the real stuff must come from the process we’re discussing.

We’re finally through the buttons part, and hopefully, you’ve seen that the buttons are easy enough that once you get the hang of them, it’s not much different from running a Word document.

I’ve never been able to teach this idea of stacking it up successfully. I’m not sure that I’m now. I hope so because this really can change your life by using the current tools to gather things. You no longer need that big library with physical books and journal articles, curating it, thinking about it, putting it back out, and then doing it again the next day to just see what evolves. Take five minutes.

When we return, I’ll show you the button part, which will be easy this time because you’ve already been using it. I’ll show you what order and how to structure it so you can put this all into courses.

You’ll be shocked at what value that brings money-wise, not just the patients you want to see, but money.

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Review

The 5 Keys

1. Button
2. Form
3. Email
4. Web page
5. Video

The 12 Buttons (see lesson 5 for more detail)

1. Add an automation (I)

1. Wait/end (II)
2. Add an email (III)

2. Add a page (IV)

1. Add a block (V)
2. Add an image/video (VI)
3. Add a form (VII)

1. Settings (VIII)

4. Add a button (IX)

3. Publish (X)
4. Add a tag (XI)
5. Add a rule (XII)

More ABOUT WHERE “IT” COMES FROM (THE TWO ENDS OF YOUR PIPE)

• Emerson and his pipe.
• Willie Nelson.
• Bob Dillan
• C.S. Lewis

1. Turn off the radio
2. Read all the good books you can and avoid nearly all the magazines.
3. Always write and read with the ear, not the eye; edit if it does not sound nice.
4. Be clear.
5. When you give up, do not throw it away; it may be useful later
6. Write first with pen and paper (the sound of the machine will destroy your sense of rhythm).
7. Know the meaning of every word you use.

• CS Lewis, “I don’t know what I mean until I see what I’ve said.”
• CS Lewis, “’Creation’ as applied to human authorship…seems to me an entirely misleading term. We make, we rearrange elements He has provided.”  He thought we may not even know the full meaning of what we have written since we may not understand all the elements we have arranged.
• CS Lewis, “…after one has ‘got over’ the desire for acknowledgment.”
• A story of a path

References

Brande, Dorothea. Wake up and Live!, 2014.

Lewis, C. S., and David C. Downing. On Writing (and Writers): A Miscellany of Advice and Opinions. First edition. New York, NY: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2022.

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