25 Words Or Less

I was at dinner Saturday night with my friend Eli, whom I had not seen in a while. After ordering some wine and making a “Nice to see you“ toast, Eli asked “So…what’s new?” So often my answer to that question is just the usual “Not much”, or “Same s***, different day” - the usual glib response - but that night, I actually had something new to say. “I published a book a few weeks ago,” I proudly proclaimed, and my partner, sitting next to me, dutifully pulled up the Amazon page and showed off the book, The MOST Approach. 

“Congratulations!” replied Eli, and then he asked “In 25 words or less, what is it about?” 

“Well -  you know” I said, “it’s about what I do - helping people achieve their goals using their brain and mind.”  To that I kind of got a blank stare. 

“How long did it take?” Eli asked.  “Well, not that long, and a long time,” I answered.  “I used the research from my PhD, which took a long time to nail down, but writing the book only took about a year.”  Eli then suggested I work on my 25 words or less pitch, because I really needed to be able to explain it better than I did. I needed an elevator pitch. 

Marketing a book is very different from writing it. With marketing, you have to know your keywords and categories. Amazon works that way. Bookstores work that way. Podcasts work that way. How do you grab someone's attention - or hook them - into buying your book? How hard can this be, I thought, so I sat down this Monday morning to easily jot down and memorize my 25 words or less (why 25?)

With my head buzzing about the concepts in the book, and keywords and categories and subcategories and brevity, and my own terms of art that needed to be in there, my first attempt yielded: 

“I think of the mind as separate from the brain, and the book is about how to use your mind to develop your vision for the future, that I call your MAP, and then using some neurotransformational techniques to change the way your brain operates, so that you can set goals, motivate and put yourself on the road to achieving that vision.” 

Writing that elevator pitch was difficult to do, because it left out certain important things in my theory, such as consciousness, quantum processes such as superposition, Mindwork, and the importance of a regimen.  Not to mention that all the points in that explanation needed much more explanation to make any sense, such as mind, vision, map, neurotransformation, brain, etc..  And there really wasn’t much of a hook - I wouldn’t buy the book based on that pitch. But the real glaring problem, of course, was that it was about 50 words.  Not 25 words or less.  I tried again: 

“How to rewire your brain from the current path you’re on, onto the path you really want to be on, to get the results in [life/work/love/ etc.] that you really want.”

Not quite 25 words, but much closer to Eli’s point I think.  The only problem with this (second guessing myself), is that it includes a bit of an arrogant presumption that I am telling everyone I say it to, that their life is a mess. It doesn’t allow me to explain that it is not about your life being a mess, but about how the noise of the world gets in the way of being who we want to be and are capable of becoming. Modern life does everything it can to prevent us from considering who we can become, and pushes us to become what others want us to be. 

The current regression of consciousness does not allow us the time to reflect, to use our mind, unless we purposely take the time and make the space to do so. That is really what The MOST Approach is about.  We have reached a time in the evolution of our consciousness where we really have immense power to understand and grasp the quantum processes around us to change the way our brain operates, and thus the way we exist in the world. But we have to do it, to make it work.  We have to intervene in the way our brain operates. That is what the book is about.