Building A Passive Income Kindle Empire with Stefan Pylarinos – TCE 018

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Stefan Pylarinos

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Passive income was a term I used to think was only reserved for people that had enough money to buy real estate…

Boy was I wrong.

Today my buddy Stefan Pylarinos from Project Life Mastery comes on to the show to share how he’s created a passive income machine by publishing over 100 Amazon Kindle books in the past year.

Now you might be thinking “that’s cool, but I suck at writing.”

Guess what? He built a system that outsources the entire writing process so literally anyone can do this.

After Stefan teaches us all about the massive opportunity on Amazon and how to take advantage of it, we dive into some meaty personal development topics. We’ll talk about reaching a peak state and how you can architect a routine that ensures you’re feeling like you were shot out of a cannon every single day.

Enjoy : )

 

Stefan Pylarinos

Soundbyte Stefan: “Writers do not make money, marketers make money” – Frank Kern (tweet this)

What You’ll Learn By Listening

  • The system Stefan has used to publish over 100+ books on Kindle
  • Where to find people you can outsource the book writing process
  • How to find profitable niches
  • The way Amazon rankings work and how to get your book ranked high
  • What operating in a peak state is all about
  • How Stefan reaches peak state on a daily basis
  • Some fundamentals of developing an empowering morning routine

Listen to the episode here:

Subscribe on Itunes for more interviews or Listen on Stitcher

Thank Stefan for dropping knowledge on us (tweet Stefan here)

Mindshare segment at the end:

Some personal jingles I have found to be helpful to keep me in a peak state and ward off bad thoughts. Yes, I’m a bit of a weirdo.

Links & Resources Mentioned:

For more on Stefan check him out at: Project Life Mastery and on Twitter @StefanPylarinos

Other resources mentioned:

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*You’ll find a full searchable transcript below

Music Credit: Carousel Games & Stay Awake

Searchable Transcript of This Stefan Pylarinos Interview:

Scott: Okay Stefan, what’s up man?

Stefan Pylarinos:  Not much man, looking forward to this.

Scott:  Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, I have to tell you dude, you really inspired me to get my butt off the couch and publish my Kindle book. When I came to your website Project Life Mastery and saw how well you were doing with your income reports as well as with all the personal development stuff, I got so excited and remember thinking that this guy speaks my language.

Stefan Pylarinos:         Awesome man, it’s my pleasure, that’s what I live for, I love to inspire people and I just try to live my life at the highest level possible and share with people what I’m doing and hopefully that can have an impact on other people that get to take action as well.

Scott:  Absolutely. So, today I thought we could talk about two areas that I know that our listeners love and that’s business and mindset. And I want to focus on how you’ve managed to generate an awesome passive income business on Amazon as well as your famous morning routine which I found out a little bit about today. Does that sound good?

Stefan Pylarinos: Sounds great.

Scott:  Cool man, so I couldn’t help but see in your March progress report that you share how you’re doing your business and developing all the different parts of your life. You made over $50,000 in March and a lot of that was made passively through the Amazon Kindle store as well as a course that you teach on selling products like Kindles. Can you take a minute and explain exactly how you make money on Amazon?

Stefan Pylarinos:  Yeah sure, so I mean that 50,000 is from multiple streams of income but I have — I do blogging, I do Kindle publishing, I have kind of developed a unique method to publishing different Kindle books that will each make me reoccurring passive income month after month and then I also have a course that I teach people step-by-step how to do that. I do do coaching which isn’t passive at all in fact. I also affiliate marketing as well but when it comes to Amazon and Kindle, the way that I came across that was, first I’ve been doing online marketing for a few years now and I actually first started selling my own e-books on Click Bank and there were different e-books that would help people treat different skin conditions like chicken pox, and psoriasis and eczema and everything and I had a lot of success with that.

And about two-and-a-half to three years ago, when this whole Kindle thing was really exploding, I decided to try a little experiment and publish the e-books that I already had written and created and publish them on Amazon as Kindle books just to see how good they would sell just by ranking then in the Amazon search engine because I discovered Amazon is a search engine just like Google. In fact is in many ways more powerful than Google because Amazon is a paid search engine. People go there to buy stuff, they already have their credit card on file and everything, Amazon I think has over 300 million credit cards in their system and so when someone wants to buy something, they just press a button, it’s a one-click buy, they don’t have to enter their credit card information.

And so I was always ranking before when I was on Google but I decided that I’ll take advantage of Amazon and try that out as well. And just by publishing these books, I think I had 12 books that I published and I published them all at different price-points; I was immediately able to rank them really fast. The Amazon search engine is a lot more simple and straightforward than Google is. If anyone has done SEO and tried to rank something on Google, knows that Google is always making updates and changes and I’ve been affected by the Google Penguin and Panda and all these different things whereas with Amazon it’s a fairly simple and easy process and is not as competitive either to be able to rank something.

So once I put up these books, I immediately started making money fairly fast; couple of hundred bucks a month without even really having to do much at all. And then from there I got the idea of why don’t I take content that I have already created because I had a — as you know, a self-development blog and I’ve written a lot of my own content. I also have a lot of videos too so I had the idea of why not take the content that I have already created, have it re-written or transcribed in some way and then upload them to Kindle and they publish them as these little short books and sell these books, that might be 20 pages or 30 pages but sell them for 2.99.

I ended up doing that I published a whole rack of books based on different keywords that people are searching for on Amazon and I was blown away to see my income went from a couple of hundred bucks a month to a couple of thousand bucks a month pretty fast. And from there I just — I scaled it up, it really got my attention, I started learning more about Kindle and Amazon and how it works and I realized that — I kind of developed a strategy of outsourcing my books. And so I kind of view myself more as a publisher-publishing company where I find different writers that can write books on different topics for me and really inexpensively.

And I’ll be able to get covers done inexpensively for my books and basically just publish these books that all add value; that help people — they are short books but they only selling for about 2.99 and I also discovered that what really sells well on Kindle is actually selling a series of books. So instead of having one book that’s like 200 pages, and selling for $10, instead, break that 200-page book down to five 30-page books or something like that and then sell them each for 2.99 and have them each kind of cross-promote each other and funnel into each other. So that’s in a nutshell I guess my method and what I have been doing. I have been having some incredible success with it, I’ve been able to help so many people do this as well, it’s been pretty remarkable and I’m always blown away just by the testimonial success stories with it.

To give you an idea, everyone in my family does this now, my sister does who is a stay-at-home mom and doesn’t know anything about the internet. She’s been having a lot of great success. My brother who is doing this as well is really successful. He actually has a renovations business here in Vancouver and makes millions of dollars and he’s actually one of my mentors financially but he doesn’t have any freedom. He doesn’t have any passive income and so he got into this to be able to create that freedom and passive income for himself and he’s been doing well. My mom who is in her 60s and approaching retirement, I got her onboard with this. My cousins, my friends, it’s pretty remarkable.

Scott: Do you guys just get together at family reunions and just share your Kindle profit earnings and sit around [Laughter] —

Stefan Pylarinos:  Yeah, well, that’s really funny because Easter was last week and I went over for a family thing and I have all my family members surrounding me and talking to me and asking questions and more and more people want to get involved in it and everything and so it’s pretty funny. So it’s just a great way to start making money online because the learning curve is pretty easy compared to a lot of the other ways to make money online. I know for me, when I was doing the Click Bank stuff, man there was so much to it; I had to create the product, I had to create the sales page, I had to write a blog, I had to drive traffic, I had to deal with customer support, I had to set up the affiliate marketing side of things.

I didn’t know copy-writing so that email sales funnels and there was so much to it and then it took me years to actually be able to make money online doing that whereas the Kindle, Amazon does everything for you. You just got to have a book and a cover and just select the right niche market and be able to rank it, which is pretty easy and then they do everything else for you. You’re leveraging their traffic, their customers and they are going to promote and sell your products for you. So I find this a great way to get started and it’s probably the easiest and fastest way that I have found to make money online.

Scott:  Yeah I love that man and I love that you pointed out that anybody can do this because the first questions that come to mind are A- what if I suck at writing and B- what if I’m not an expert, can you talk a little bit about those?

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, so first you absolutely do not have to be a writer; in fact, I remember my mentor [Inaudible 0:08:09], taught a long time ago that you do not want to be a writer. He says that writers do not make money, it’s marketers that make money and writing, for the most part, is something that you can leverage or outsource. Now, I have personally written some of my own books and I’ve enjoyed that and — I’ve enjoyed the process, I have put my name behind those and there are things that I am proud of but the amount of time that will take me to write my own book, I can actually outsource ten books and hire different writers to do that for me and be able to make more money from those ten books in the amount of time that it’s going to take me to write one.

And so, you do not have to be a writer by any means, I’ve been able to outsource 5000-word books for as low as $50 and they are great quality books that do help people. And because they are non-fiction too, they just have to be very factual books whereas if you go into the fiction realm, generally the book will have to be high-quality because people want to be more engaged, they want to be entertained by the book and everything. But when it comes to non-fiction, the main thing people care about is that does this book solve my problem. If you get a book on binge eating and how to overcome it, people just want a book; they are going to pay money for it as long as it helps them overcome their binge eating problem or whatever the challenge might be. So I just view these books as something that is going to solve people’s problems at a profit.

So, you absolutely don’t have to write your own books, you can outsource them and I actually have a client who is dyslexic, he can’t even write his book descriptions and he outsources that too. So, I have seen some pretty extreme examples of people like that and sorry — what was the second part of your question.

Scott:                     What if you are not an expert? So even if you have somebody else writing on a topic, like if I don’t know about binge eating or whatever it is, or I have seen opportunity; does that mean that I shouldn’t publish a book?

 

Stefan Pylarinos Interview:         Yeah, that’s a good question. You also do not have to be an expert on it either. In fact, the company and the writers that I use, they do all the research for me on the topic and so they are basically going to do all the research on — let’s say on the binge eating problem or whatever, they are going to find different resources on the internet and basically take all the best information and put it together into one resource which is going to be your book. So you don’t have to be an expert, you can leverage the expertise and the knowledge from other people.

 

I have even gone as far as founding — [Inaudible 0:10:35] course or to rate video on YouTube or other great resources and provided them the information and said, I want you to put this — take some of the information from this, some of the concepts from this, some of the lessons and some of the strategies from this and incorporate it into a book. And so I view a book as something that provides value and you don’t have to claim — I don’t recommend people to even claim that you are an expert. You know, after doing a book on health, don’t say that you are a doctor or anything like that; just basically in your marketing just say that this is a book that has all the best stuff that I have discovered on how to overcome binge eating.

 

Some of the best stuff that I have found on the internet, all these different resources and yeah, you can spend your time and energy to try to find all the information for free, or just buy this book for 2.99 and just kind of have the best of the best all in one place. So that’s kind of the approach that I take with it.

 

Scott:                     Love it. If people want to figure out where they can use some of these outsourced resources, where do you recommend they go?

 

Stefan Pylarinos Interview:         Yeah so there is a few different options, one a popular website where you can find freelancers is a website like oDesk dot com or Elance dot com and basically if you went over to these websites, you can basically post a job saying, ‘hey I am looking for somebody that can write a 5000-word book on this subject, here’s the title of the book, this is what I want it to cover’. You put up a job like that and there are people all over the world that are going to apply for that. And when it comes to hiring someone for that, you obviously want to make sure you interview them, you want to make sure you look over their portfolio or any previous writing that they have done, their feedback rating on oDesk and everything and so you can see what other people have said about them.

 

You can even filter the results and look at what their English level is as well because people on oDesk, they have to take an English test. So if you want to make sure you get somebody who has — because a lot of these people who are going to apply are from like Philippines or India all these different countries which is a great way to hire these people because you can get rates that are so much cheaper than hiring someone in North America. So that’s what really gives you the ability by hiring offshore and you can find a lot of these native English-speaking writers that can write quality books for you and they might even — basically be able to show you work that they have done and other books that they have done and published and everything.

 

And so that’s one way and there’s also a few companies and few other resources that you can go to; I like to use a forum called [Inaudible 0:13:05] forum dot com; you go in there and you can find a lot of different writers there, in the ‘voyeur for hire’ section and there are some other companies that I use where if I need to get a bulk, because sometimes I’ll order 20-30 books at a time from a company and I’ll publish all those books within a month or so. And so there are some companies as well where you — they have multiple writers that can write a lot of books for you in a short period of time.

 

Scott:                     I mean this all sounds awesome and interesting and the fact that you can outsource and you don’t even have to be a writer or an expert is amazing. I’m curious what you think the most complicated part of this whole process is.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, the most complicated and the important part of this whole process is doing the research, finding the best niche or the best market and making sure that there’s a high enough demand for it while not being too much competition. And so the way that Amazon works is that people type in specific key words. So they, just like any other search engine, they type in keyword and when they search for that keyword, they are going to get a certain number of results that show up. And they’re going to see all these books that are in binge eating — well they are not going to scroll down until all the multiple pages and look at all the books; they are generally going to look at the first few results that show up for that and decide from there based on the cover, the title which is the headline, the reviews and the price whether or not they are going to buy this book or not.

 

So the most important part of the process is discovering those niches as markets and those keywords that people are searching for and making sure that you can rank your books for that keyword and be successful in it. So there are some inches that there would be a big demand in market for and so for example, real-estate, but challenge in that market or weight-loss is that it’s just way too competitive. It’s going to be very challenging for you to outrank some of these books that might have hundreds of reviews and more established authors and everything. Whereas if you can find these smaller little niches and smaller little categories, so instead of weight-loss maybe target the Paleo-Diet or the gluten-free diet or the low-carb diet or something that is a little bit narrow niche that is less competitive but still has a big enough demand in the market that you can make money from.

 

Scott:                     And how do you do this niche selection?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         I have a process that I go through, where first and foremost I just do a brainstorm session so I’ll think of many different niches, topics and ideas that I can think of; sometimes I might go to different websites like EzineArticles dot com and just kind of look at the different categories, look at the different articles people are publishing articles on and everything and just kind of take a journal and write some of that stuff down. So for example, there is a category to have some health, and they had everything from acme and autism and — I mean back-pain and all these different health things that all of a sudden just give me these ideas or potential markets that I can create books on.

 

I’ll do that I’ll see if you can go to Amazon dot com and just kind of browse around there and kind of look at other people’s books and looking at different categories and — I mean there’s just so many markets and niches out there and once I have my list, I’ll try to narrow it down to about ten ideas that I have and try to figure out what is the biggest or the –what is the keyword that people are searching for on Amazon for this topic. And so in the case of binge eating, what I do is, I discover people who typed in the keyword ‘binge eating’ or ‘binge eating disorder’ or they might type in ’emotional eating’ or ‘over eating’ or ‘sugar addiction’ there are all these different angles and keywords that people would search for and then what I would do from there is I would search for those keywords and what I like to do is I try to find a book in Amazon that’s ranking as similar to a book that I would create.

 

So usually a book that is selling at 2.99 and that has maybe ten reviews or something and I like to look and see how much money that book is making and how well it is doing. And one of the ways you can do that is on the book page, for every book or product on Amazon, they have something called the Amazon Bestseller Ranking and what I have discovered is that a book that is selling at 2.99, it has an Amazon bestseller ranking of 100,000 or better will be making $5,200 a month passive income. And so when I basically do my search for binge eating, I want to see if there are other books out there that are similar to what I am doing and I want to see that they are making money and how much money they are making and then from there, it kind of validates to me that there is a market for this and that I can make money from it too.

 

And also even kind of asses that the top six results that usually show up and look to see if I can maybe create a book that can stand out in some way; I look to see the strengths of those books and how many reviews they have so that I can swoop in there and get my book ranked up there with them. And then from there once I kind of look at few of these indicators and everything and I feel pretty confident and certain that there’s a market there for this and I can be pretty well with it, that’s when I move on to the next step of basically coming up with a title for my book and outsourcing the book and the cover.

 

Scott:                     Got it and just to provide transparency for people that haven’t launched a book on Amazon, how do they do the rankings again?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         So the way that the rankings work with Amazon, well, first it’s kind of a closely guarded secret; we are really just trying to reverse-engineer and think of how it is but I have pretty much, just from my experience of ranking over — because I’ve actually published over 150 books now and so I’m quite a bit experienced ranking books and making money from them. So one is, first of all, you have to make sure that your — whatever keyword that you want to rank for, that that keyword is in the title of your book.

 

Preferably, the sooner that that keyword can be in the title, then the higher the Amazon is going to rank you for that keyword. So an example of the kind of books that I have is called the ‘Binge Eating Cure’ and so by having the keyword binge eating in there, it’s going to basically — Amazon or when people search for that, it’s going to determine that my books are relevant to that keyword and it’s going to rank it higher as opposed to books that don’t have that keyword optimized like that. So having the keyword in the title is important and also you can all your keyword to a keyword section when you publish your book.

 

Amazon allows up to seven keywords that you can insert for your book and the other factors that play a role is how many sales your book gets or how many downloads your book gets. So sales are basically when your book is on a paid status, so if you are selling it from 99cents or 2.99 or whatever it is, the more sales that your book gets, the higher that Amazon Bestseller Ranking number is going to be and the higher that is and the higher your book is going to rank for the keywords. Another thing that plays a role is downloads; so Amazon gives you the ability to offer a free promotion on your book every 90 days and you can offer a five-day free promotion and basically the main purpose for that — that I use it for is just to get as many downloads as I can during those five days which will help give my book that boost in ranking.

 

So I have had some books that have gone several thousand downloads in five days and when I first published them, they were nowhere to be found ranking for my keyword but after getting thousands of downloads, then all of a sudden, it just shoots up in the ranking for the search and it gets ranked up higher there. Another thing that plays a role too is reviews and so there’s two different types of reviews; there are verified reviews and unverified reviews. Unverified review is when somebody posts a review for a book without even purchasing it or buying it or downloading it in anyway. Verified means that someone actually brought the book or downloaded it and then posted a review for it.

 

So, generally verified reviews have more weight and will help you rank better and help all — you’ll get more sales to your book than unverified but for the most part, those are the main things that play a role in your book’s ranking.

 

Scott:                     Got it, and I’m thinking in my head here, I’m like okay, there’s probably a lot of niches out there that are untapped but I don’t want to have anything to do with it like [Inaudible 0:21:44] mastery or whatever things that people are doing and I know that you can do a pen name but my question is, like I just released a book and I put it out to my audience on Facebook, Twitter and my friends and I ask for reviews all that good stuff; when you have a book that is under a pen name that is — you don’t necessarily feel comfortable asking all of your family and friends and people to help you out, how do you go about marketing and ranking that book?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, it’s a great question so yeah, just to clarify, you can use pen names, you don’t have to have your name behind these books, I have a lot of different books where I just use a pen name and it’s a pretty common in the publishing industry. Mark twain is a pen name, a lot of these erotica niches and novels are all pen names. So I use pen names on books that I didn’t personally write myself just because I don’t want to have my name behind them, I only want to have my name behind books that I have personally written. So in the case of that, there’s a few ways that you can market your book.

 

I usually, to be honest with you, don’t really go to my friends and family for reviews or help with that simply because I have so many books but what I do is depending on the topic or the niche that I am in, I’ll try to find groups or find a word that the market or demographic is. So if it is binge eating, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to join all the Facebook groups that are related to binge eating or even the forums or message boards all that sort of stuff and I’m going to basically post in them and offer to give away my book for free. And so just by doing that, hey guys, I’ got a book that’s free, I can either gift it to you, you can actually buy your own book and gift it to someone or when you set up the free promotion, you can give it away that way as well.

 

But basically all these people that have this challenge, they are going to happily receive your book in which case you can follow up with them after that and ask them if they are willing to post a review for you. So that’s one way of doing it and it’s great because you’re getting targeted buyers and targeted reviews that people that are actually interested in that subject. Another way you can do it as well is find other publishers or authors and you can review each other’s books — these are actually called review exchanges. Now Amazon doesn’t really like this kind of stuff but there’s still so many people that do it.

 

So basically, Scott we know each other and if I have a book, I’d say, ‘hey Scott, can you take a look at this book and if you feel this book has any value or could help people, would you be willing to post a review for it?’ And because you’re my friend and because I know you, I’m sure you’ll do that and you know, you’ll probably ask me for one of your books or something like that as well and for the most part I think everyone that is in business, every author does this. If you buy a Tony Robbins book and you look in the back of the book, you see these testimonials on it from Ken Blanchard and Brian Tracy and all this stuff, these endorsements; those are endorsements just from his friends.

 

He is basically just reaching out to them and asking them for a testimonial and asking for an endorsement. So that’s a fairly common thing that you can do as well, there’s a lot of Facebook groups, I have my own Facebook group as well of all the members of my course where they help– it’s kind of like a community where we all help each other, we all promote each other’s books. Of course you want to make sure that your reviews are honest and ethical, you don’t want to review something that is crap or doesn’t have any value but as long as you are making sure that you are being honest about it, and you can find that these communities where everybody will help each other out. So it’s pretty cool.

 

Scott:                     Love it man, tell me and for everybody listening, what’s the first thing they should do if they listen to this interview and they say, okay, I’m ready to start making money on line, I’m going to do it on Kindle, what do I do?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         To be honest, and I’m not saying this to really promote myself or anything but the best step to really achieve anything or make money with anything is to find a proven method, product, course, a coach or a mentor, somebody that can basically give you the steps and the path of doing it and that’s what I have done to make money on Kindle, to make money with anything that I have done is I have always found mentors, courses, products, something that already has paved the way for me and then I just follow those steps exactly. You could do these things on your own, I mean if you search around on the forums and piece together all the information yourself and try to dig around on how to do everything, you could do that and honestly it’s going to save you a lot of time and money just by investing in a quality course.

 

Doesn’t have to be my course, I’m not saying that for this reason but find someone that you trust, someone that is an expert on this, someone that is credible and has results of success and invest in that and do exactly what it says and the more that you are learning about this and you’re investing yourself to get better and better, the more success you are going to have with it too. And I have seen people — and for me, I was one of the people I think where I was very stubborn to invest in anything. I always thought I can do things on my own and the truth was that if I could have done things on my own, then I would have already done it by then.

 

So, it wasn’t until I opened myself up and was willing to actually invest in myself and find someone that can help guide me, just take me there. That’s really the best advice that I can give anyone.

 

Scott:                     I’m so glad you finished up talking about investing in yourself because it’s just — it needs to be seen as that. It needs to be seen not as I’m buying a course, I’m buying a lesson, I’m buying an audio CD, whatever it is, like you’re investing in your success in the future and a lot of people that — my friends are like, I can’t believe you sell courses, I can’t believe people buy them and I’m like dude, the reason that — and the reason that I am able to do the things that I am able to do is because I spend a ton of money like — tens of thousands of dollars on educating myself from the top, online business people.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Totally, I’m huge in that that and that’s the main reason in fact why I am where I am today. Since I was 17 years old, I was reading books, I was listening to Tony Robbins and all that sort of stuff and eventually I started going to seminars and I’ve been to — Tony Robbins has a seminar called Unleash the Power Within, I’ve been to it five times. I’m going actually for the sixth time this year and I’m going to bring my family with me. I’ve spent $4,000 on seminars; I just brought a course recently that’s $4000.

 

I have no problem with that because it’s an investment in myself to become better and better and that’s what’s going to allow me — I did 50 grand last month what’s going to allow me in the next few years to make a 100 grand a month and beyond that. So the people that aren’t willing to invest in themselves and have that mentality unfortunately are the ones that don’t really get anywhere and kind of struggle because they take the hardest path to get there which is try to do things on their own. So, for me, it’s the best investment that you really can make.

 

Scott:                     Absolutely. Me and my roommates talk about this all the time where it’s like, all right if I had unlimited amount of money, like what’s the first thing I would buy and my answer is so simple; it’s I would buy the best coaches for every single part of my life that I wanted to improve.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Totally.

 

Scott:                     So I’m really glad that you dropped the T-word and by the T-word I mean Tony Robbins because I know we’ve talked about this before; the guy has changed my life, I know he’s changed yours; one of the concepts that is really powerful that Tony teaches and that I know that you place a lot of value and especially in your morning routine, is this concept of state and basically operating at a peak state; can you tell everybody listening what that really means?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, sure, the state that you are in really determines your behavior. I don’t know about you but for me when I’m tired or I’m depressed or I’m in a bad state or when I’m just feeling down or frustrated or angry, usually I don’t really feel like taking — being very productive or taking action or even doing anything. So, I have learnt that in order to get myself to be productive and perform at the highest level or to get myself to do certain things, then I need to condition, put myself in the best state possible and so Tony Robbins has — he talks about these three ways of changing your state and the first thing it affects how you feel your state is your physiology, meaning how your use your body; your body language will affect how you feel.

 

He says “Emotion is created by motion.” And so, if you are kind of slumped over and you are breathing shallow and there’s tension in your body and your head’s down or your shoulder is down, you’re not really moving very much, they you’re probably going to feel pretty bad and when you are in that bad state, you’re really going to be motivated to take action or do anything in your business. And so, the opposite of that is if you put yourself in the state and change your body to standing up straight, smiling, having your head back, your shoulders up, breathing fully, shaking up your body, using your hands or movements, your gestures and everything, using your facial expressions, just by making those little shifts alone, it biochemically changes how you feel.

 

And so how you use your physiology is one of the most important things that you can do of just radically changing how you feel and if you put yourself in that state, if I think about how would I stand right now if I was totally confident, I would put that posture in my body and I just change the way I am moving and breathing to as if I was totally confident and unstoppable. It starts to put me in that confident state which is what is going to allow me to take action and have more success or do whatever it is that I want to do. So, how you use the body is important and the next thing is what you focus on and whatever you focus on, you feel. So if you are focused on why things aren’t going to work out for you, if you focus on things not working, if you focus on you not being good enough, focus on the past failures, the past experiences, then of course it is going to incur a lot of uncertainty in yourself and you start to feel those negative emotions as well; doubts, frustrations, that you can’t do this and as long as you focus on that, you are not going to take action.

 

Whereas if you start to focus on times in your life when you did feel confident, you start to focus on thins working out and going well and you start to focus on the successes that you have had in your life, all the little wins and everything and you use those and you start to focus on and start seeing things how you want to see it and how you want things to be, that’ll will put you in a totally different state that will create certainty and allow you to take action to follow through. The third thing is your language and the words that you use, so the words we use also affect how we feel.

 

So if you start saying things to yourself like, ‘I can’t do this’ or ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘this isn’t going to work’, then of course by saying those words and those phrases, it’s going to put you in a negative state. And so the little trick that I have is just saying the opposite and so if I start saying to myself, ‘I can’t do this’, I’ll start to say, ‘I can do this’. If I say, ‘this doesn’t work’, I’ll start saying, ‘this does work, I’ll make this work’ and if I can’t find a way, I’ll make a way. And so just by having a [Inaudible 0:32:51] the opposite and start to condition those new thoughts, they all start to change how you feel as well and so really, ultimately that’s what determines our state and how we feel but the challenge is we all have habitual — almost like a default way of being because we have these patterns within us that we naturally talk a certain way or move a certain way or breathe a certain way and these words that we say again and again or these phrases that we have just been saying our entire lives.

 

And so I believe that you have to begin to condition yourself over a period of time with these three things to change the default way of being from wherever you are right now to performing at your best consistently.

 

Scott:                     Yeah, and it really comes down to whatever you protract either in your head or physically, that’s what ends up being reality and so many people just think like, oh, this is just the way I am, this is my personality or this is whatever it is and it’s like no, the way that you are inhabiting the world is just the pattern that you decided to go with. You can change anything, you can change your personality, you can change who you are because all of these things, even the way that we converse with others is just a habit that we have created.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, well you know, for me the reason why this really changed my life in so many ways is that I used to be very shy and introverted, back when I was in high school, I was addicted to my video games and watching TV and I skipped school a lot and I was a shy quiet kid, very quiet voice, I was depressed, never had any confidence to talk to a girl or had a girlfriend or anything like that. So once I started learning this, the biggest thing I learnt was that I had conditioned myself like that my entire life to be that way that my shyness wasn’t really who I was.

 

That wasn’t my identity, because within myself I had the ability to be confident and certain in who I wanted to be but I had conditioned myself to this patterns of my way of breathing and standing and my body language and my — what I was focusing on and everything and my language to basically be and have the behavior of being shy. And so once I realized that I was doing this and I was creating this myself and the same thing goes with being depressed and everything, that I was focusing on certain things that are making me feel depressed and I was using my body a certain way that was making me feel depressed, I was able to break myself out of that by starting to condition the way I wanted to use my body and my focus and just be to be confident.

 

And I actually started to apply this first and foremost with dating in my social life. I remember I used to go out and I was terrified of the idea of just approaching a random, attractive woman, I think that gives a lot of guys a lot of anxiety but I forced myself to do it and the only way I was able to get myself to do it is by putting myself in a peak state where I was in that state a certain confidence and that would first allow me to actually have the courage so you can go up to a woman and go talk to her. But what would create that attraction within her and actually make her interested in me was the confidence and the state that I would be in because there may be some times I might have to approach someone or talk to someone or you can give a speech or a presentation or coach someone where I am not in a great state and I have [Inaudible 0:36:13] and other people can feel it.

 

Whereas, if I put myself it that peak state of confidence and certainty and I’m on fire and I’m feeling good, then that — it’s almost contagious, it’s infectious to other people around you. Other people feel that. If you look at a professional athlete, what determines their performance on a regular basis generally isn’t even their skill set because LeBron James or Sidney Crosby or whatever professional athlete out there, they can have bad games and it’s usually not their skill but it’s the state that they are in. It’s the confidence that they have that allows them to really perform at the best. So I think the state is one of the most powerful important things that anybody can really change and focus on, that can really affect everything in your life from relationships to business to anything.

 

Scott:                     Absolutely and one way to think about state, if you’re still kind of wrestling with this concept — if you’ve ever like been at a party and there’s just — everything you say is just hitting. Like people are laughing and you have a total freedom of words and freedom of body and relaxed and you just feel unstoppable and you feel on fire and what most people think is that getting to that place where you are uninhibited and so decisive in your actions and feeling great is just something that just happens by chance occasionally. And when it happens, you should take advantage of it but in reality, this is a way of living and feeling that you can access at any time if you condition yourself properly which it sounds like, you’ve done a great job of. And one of the things that I thought we could talk about was how you get yourself into a peak state in a daily basis.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Sure yeah, I have something called my morning ritual and I’ve got a YouTube video on this, it’s been really popular with like 400,000 views now I think. I do first thing in the morning just to make sure — because I think how you start the day is one of the most important times to do of them all because it’s going to set up the frame and everything and momentum for the entire day. So I do a little ritual that I do to help condition myself and make sure that I’m in a peak state — I think most people, they wake up and they are generally in a horrible state and they are dragging themselves to work and they are stressed out and of course when you are like that, you are not going to perform very well throughout the day and you’re not going to getting most out of the days in your life.

 

So there’s something I do in the morning and there’s also something a ritual that I do throughout the day as well; certain moments that I need to perform at my best. For example, I have a ritual before I do an interview, I have a ritual before I coach a client, I have a ritual before I create a video on my blog just because those are moments I want to make sure that I am in a great state and I can be at my best in that moment. And so just like a professional athlete before a game, they’ve got the ritual they do, I have that as well. So to give you some practical stuff, what I do the first thing in the morning is, the moment that I wake up, the first thing that I do is smile and as simple as that sounds, it’s probably one of the most important things you can do because just by putting that smile on your face, it represents so much.

 

For me it’s just — what it means to me is just being grateful for this day, being actually appreciative of like ‘oh my god, I’m alive today’, like I have another day, another opportunity to grow, to give, to improve my life or to pursue my goals or my dreams. So smiling is key; it’s also going to affect — it affects your physiology so it’s going to release different chemicals in your brain, endorphins and everything and so you are going to start to feel geared right away. I also do some breathing as well, some breathing exercises just to give my body some oxygen and just kind of get that flowing. I like to do something physical right away too so I have a mini trampoline, it’s called the Rebounder and I just kind of jump up and down on that for a few minutes and what that does for me is that it helps — it just kind of helps loosen up my body and it helps you take in a lot more oxygen and the more oxygen you have, the more energy you have because it goes into your bloodstream and the more oxygen that goes to your brain, it’s just going to wake you up and make you feel good.

 

And it also helps stimulate lymph in your body which is the sewer system for your body to get rid of all the toxins that you accumulated over night. I drink water, some [Inaudible 0:40:28] water because your body has been dehydrated while you are sleeping and so you want make sure you hydrate yourself. I try to stay away from coffee and all those kind of stimulants and everything because I think that we can naturally just nurse our bodies and put ourselves in a state naturally instead of having to depend on those things. So those are a few physical things that I do and then I also do what are called incantations or affirmations.

 

Tony Robbins’ incantations by basically saying out loud, certain phrases or certain affirmations that really help put me in a great state. So one of them might be, ‘all I need is within me now’, or I might say, ‘every day, in every way I am getting better and better’ or ‘every day, in every way I am getting stronger and stronger’, ‘every day in every way, I am getting healthier and healthier’. Just by saying that and getting it in a rhythm and when we say it actually saying it by actually using our body or voice and actually having some emotion behind that and it’s amazing when you start doing that for a few minutes, you start to feel vibrant.

 

And I also have — I usually have little cards that I have with different phrases and stuff but for me, I’m really into health and fitness, I’m doing a fitness competition and so one of the beliefs that I always condition every day is that ‘nothing tastes as good as being healthy and fit feels’. So I’ll say that to myself or I’ll say — I need to fuel my body and not satisfy the appetite and so those are these little things that I say; I might even say little short things like ‘I’m determined’, ‘I’m confident’, ‘I love my life’ — just by saying those aloud, it starts to put you in this incredible state and you start to change your beliefs and start to believe that stuff too. I also do — I ask myself certain questions to change my focus, so I might ask myself, what am I grateful for in my life, and what am I happy about and what am I proud of in my life, what am I excited for in my life, who do I love in my life, how can I be more passionate today, how can I really enjoy today and get the most of it, what can I give today?

 

By asking myself those questions, it changes my focus because I have to come up with the answers to them and it starts to put me in a much better state.

 

Scott:                     I think that’s the way our brain operates, we end up answering the questions that we ask ourselves and that’s what we decide to focus on which thus in turn determines how we feel. And we suck naturally at asking ourselves the right questions or that’s thinking about like how to grow our business or whether we should eat something, or how we feel or whatever it is. So I’m just really impressed and thankful that you are sharing with us, all these type of questions and basically rituals and practices that you intentionally insert into your day so that whether you feel good or you don’t feel good, is not even a question, it’s almost a guarantee.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         And you have to be proactive with it, you can’t be reactive. You have to cautiously do this and consciously put effort into conditioning yourself every day just like building a muscle at the gym because if we don’t then we are just going to be responding to the demands and everything else around you. Most of the beliefs, the thoughts, everything we have, we basically model that subconsciously by the people in our lives; maybe our parents growing up, or your friends or family, the media, the news, all this stuff has been feeding us and if we don’t consciously put in effort to feed ourselves and become better each day, then we’re just going to be the byproduct of everything else around us.

 

And the key thing, it doesn’t matter what you do each day, but having some sort of ritual to get better and put yourself in a better state — because I also do things like meditation, I do reading, I read a book, listening to audio programs, I go for walks some days, I go to the gym — the point is that take in the most scarce resource that you have which is your time and giving that to yourself first and foremost so that you can be happy and you can improve yourself. And really the more you can give yourself and you do that first thing in the morning, the more that you’re going to be able to give to others and it’s going to make such a difference to our day because we’re going to be vibrating and have this great state and it’s going to affect all the people in your life and also everything that you do.

 

Scott:                     Yeah, and I’m really glad that you decided to do yours and talk about yours in the morning because it’s so funny man, a lot of people — they are like, oh, I’m not a morning person, I hate the mornings and I’m like well, if I was like getting out of bed 12 minutes before work, hustling into the shower, like saying to myself, ‘oh crap, oh crap, I’m going to be late’ and then like throwing a Twix bar or something in my mouth as I walk out of the door, that sounds like a pretty miserable morning. But if you build these routines that make you feel really good, nobody can mess with you at 7:00 in the morning like they can at 7:00 at night or even earlier.

 

You’re going to love waking up in the morning. It’s going to be a special time that is blissful and that is empowering. And that’s why I always personally advocate people — build a strong ritual and morning routine. So dude, I guess like your routine is pretty elaborate and to a lot of people that are listening to this that don’t have any much of any routine and don’t know where to start or a little bit or maybe intimidated by doing all these things when they are barely waking up for time, time to work in the morning, what would you recommend they start it with?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         I think sometimes when you try and take on too much at once and try to build that habit of all these different things, then in many ways it’s just a bad way of doing things because it’s not going to be sustainable. So, I recommend anyways to start of really small, pick a few things and just make your ritual, start off just ten minutes a day; five or ten or fifteen minutes a day and just whatever you feel is going to benefit you the most at this stage of your life or whatever maybe your biggest sticking point is or challenge is, try to incorporate that into your routine.

 

So, I have a whole list of activities that someone can do but maybe it’s waking up and doing some meditation or maybe it’s waking up and doing those questions for a few minutes, maybe it’s getting a Rebounder; I also do juicing in the morning. I just juice a bunch of vegetables and stuff and that’s part of my morning routine. Maybe it’s reading a book, maybe it’s just reading for five minutes each day or ten pages of a good book each day because over a month, that’s going to be one book per month and you’ll be feeding yourself with that positive stuff. So I can give specific things, I think what I love for me is just doing something physical; so it can be the Rebounder, jumping up and down, it could just be doing push-ups or ab-exercise or just go for a walk; doing something to change that physiology and just kind of loosen up our body and as I say, that’s one of the most important things to exchange how you feel.

 

Doing something physical is key, doing something mental or emotional is key and so maybe the questions that you can do or maybe just begin journaling or something like that or the incantations, the affirmations and maybe something a little bit mental as well as — I like to maybe learn something, reading something to stimulate my brain, but I think as long as you engage those three things; physical, mental and emotional, then you’ll be setting up yourself for the day in the right way.

 

Scott:                     I love it man, and so I want to wrap up here and one question that I always like to finish with and you’ve already given us ten answers to this question but maybe there’s one other thing that you might be able to touch upon briefly is, people listening to this show, they want to get an edge in their business and their life, they want to find out what successful things people have done; what successful actions people have taken to bring them the abundance they have in their life and if you could just give one tip to people out there that maybe aren’t happy with where they are on a habit or a practice that they can implement in their life to improve, that would be great.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Yeah, that’s a great question and I wish I could give like a really sexy, cool, unique thing that I haven’t mentioned before or something that is revolutionary or something different, but honestly, the best thing that I could say that’s made the biggest impact on my life and I think will make a huge impact for anybody that is listening to this, if they just incorporate it in their lives, is a ritual. You know, because our life is rituals, we are basically creatures of habit, we are — 95% of who we are and what we think is thoughts that we had yesterday.

 

So I think that’s one of the most important things you can do is just taking time just for yourself each day, it doesn’t have to be in the morning, it can be but just at some point in the day to give to yourself to become better, to improve yourself, to grow. If you are depressed right now and if you are going through a hard time, if you are going through challenges, that’s an immediate thing that you can do each day that’s going to get you better and all your problems aren’t going to be solved tomorrow by doing this but I promise you in 30 days, if you did this, your life is going to be a lot better than it is today. I can promise you that your business is going to be a lot better 30 days from now, if you didn’t do this as opposed to if you did.

 

Your relationships are going to be better as well and so I don’t care what problem you have in your life, whatever challenge you have or whatever your goal is, doing something like this each day for yourself to make sure that you are in a great state of just being happy each day or grateful or putting yourself in that resourceful state or that confident state, whatever it is that you need, I believe that whatever you need, give it to yourself first. I used to think, if I’m like lonely or if I feel needy like in relationships or whatever, I’ll find out what is missing, what is it that I’m trying to get from making money or from a relationship or whatever it is, and I’ll find what that emotion is and I’ll give that to myself each day.

 

If it’s love and that’s what is missing myself, then, I’m going to give that love to myself each day. I’m might even have a ritual just looking in the mirror each day and looking in my eyes and just say ‘I love you’ complementing myself, giving to myself in that way because that’s how you — the way you know — let somebody know that you really love them is you tell it to them or you spend time with them or you do nice things for them and when was the last time most people do that for themselves? So I think giving that gift to yourself each day in whatever form it might be, is one of the most powerful and the best things that anyone can do.

 

Scott:                     It’s great parting advice man, so if people want to learn more about your Kindle course, about your blog, about all the different things that you are up to and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to know more after this 50 minutes of amazing information that you gave us, what is the best place for them to go?

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         So my blog is a self-development blog but I blog about everything from motivation, how to make money online, health, fitness; anything as you said, that is giving people that edge in life and business and to get access to that, go to w-w-w dot projectlifemastery dot com and I do a lot of videos, I have a podcast as well and a lot of written articles and then if you are interested in learning about Kindle specifically, then I have a course called Kindle Money Mastery and to get access to that just go to w-w-w dot kmoneymastery dot com.

 

Scott:                     Well, thanks again for coming on the show man, it’s been amazing and I hope you have a great day and a peak state.

 

Stefan Pylarinos:         Great, thanks Scott, I really appreciate it.

 

[End of interview 0:52:22]

 

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