🚀 Making a change is harder than you think…

A little psychology that makes it easy for you to understand...

👆🏼 You can listen it, up here 🎧:

⏳ Current status

👥 Active users: 1349
📝 New Developments: Google challenges 🤯
⏰ Time it took to write: 7 hours 22 minutes

Change is a bad and ungrateful thing...

More precisely, it's in people's minds! 🤔

Individuals are most inclined to change when they realize the hidden costs of their inaction. 😱

In this Blog Post I try to outline a solution to this complex problem!

But first, let's see... 👀

🚀 How's the challenge?

🌑 The Downtime

Google has officially removed BookClub from the Play Store temporarily. They claimed that they couldn't log in because they didn't have a password (of course because they have Magic Link). 🔮

1. So a Google employee tried to log in with his own email address. (Which is not subscribed)

2. And he didn't get a code and couldn't log in.

3. Then he tried with my email address, which I got a code for

4. Only he doesn't have access to my email account

5. So I guess he got upset and overnight

6. They took the App down... ❌

Of course we submitted a review request which took 7 days... 😓

And after that they may still be into something.

Just to give you an idea of the seriousness, for us this "little mistake" costs about 84.000 HUF per day. 😵‍💫

And we are losing very valuable users day by day...
For me this is the most painful! 😔

I have experienced many times that life is unfair, but it always hurts. No way around it, you have to move on and wait for the problem to go away. 💪🏼

✅ UPDATE: Thankfully it has since been restored!

🥹 If it happens again... here's what you can do

If you're on Andorid and have the App downloaded, it should work without a problem. You just simply cannot subscribe.

If you can't, but you're subscribed, you can use it on the web here: webapp.bookbase.app (it's optimized for PC, don't be surprised) 🖥

If you wanted to subscribe now, you can do it here on the web only:
onlinemarketinges.com then you can log in on the web using the link above. 📲

If I can help you with anything feel free to contact me, I'm here to solve your problem! 🙏🏻

🎬 OM Documentary

We have a big surprise for you on 14 April at 18:00. We have been working on this project in secret for several months. We're going to unveil the "Matrix" and show you how to actually get out of it! 🔗

To add a thought-provoking quote from the video: 💭

"The Matrix is not a science fiction movie, it's a documentary."

P.S. Thanks also to Geri for all the perseverance and hard work he has put into this project, without him, it would not have been 100% possible. More than 40 hours of editing, scripting and research went into this video so that we can say... 🙏🏻

It's finally authentic and understandable! 😉

But let's get started!

Let's see...

💭 Why is change so hard to achieve?

The very first thing to understand is that people collectively do NOT like change. Because change is: unpredictable, weird and often requires adaptation, which takes energy. 😕

So, people - the vast majority of them - reject change. ❌

There is also a very good curve on the diffusion of innovation:

👥 There are 5 groups of people:

1. 💡 The innovators, who try new things immediately and are signed up to every "waitlist". They are the ones who try things first. The problem is that they are only 2.5% of the population.

2. 😲 The early adopters who also try things out before the hype. For example, they hear about a new AI on Twitter that lets you chat and try it out, and 2 weeks later millions are using ChatGPT.

3. 😉 The early majority who jump on the hype train and once they've heard a lot about it, they try it out.

4. 🧐 The late majority, who are not too familiar with the new technology or just don't want to try it because they are just fine.

5. 🤨 The laggards, well they're the typical people who still have a Nokia phone and are fine with it. They avoid the new completely and only switch when it is absolutely necessary.

It is important to understand this figure in order to move forward.

📕 Book review: I read this diagram in "The Innovator's Dilemma", perhaps by Clayton Christensen. It's about exactly this topic, explaining how it is that some giga-companies go bankrupt. There is Nokia, for example, which had more than 50% market share and yet years later went bankrupt. This book will soon be included in the BookBase. 📲

Sooner or later, the industry will reach the point where they are completely obsolete and need to innovate. I have given you some examples: xxxxxx

• There's the music industry, you had to buy CDs one by one and you had to have the whole album even if you only liked 1 song in it, then came Thepiratebay. What solved this problem was just illegal and very slow. And then came Spotify, which innovated this perfectly with streaming. 🎧

• It was very similar in the movie industry, BlockBusters dominated the whole market, but after a while it was no longer convenient to rent DVDs and travel for them. That's why Netflix became a big success. 🎬

• Why not do a similar thing with Books... More specifically, Book Summaries. 📚

Two problems arise here:

1. There are no such with books as far as I know. ❌

2. People don't have time to read books, so we need summaries. ⏳

However, sometimes innovation comes too fast or too much...

There is the case of the Tablet. Bill Gates brought out the Tablet PC back in the early 2000s. More than 10 years earlier than Steve Jobs. (No tablet emoji)

Yet it turned out to be a huge flop. Almost no one wanted it. 🤮

It didn't grab people. 🥱

💡 Side note: At the time, even the fold-out phone was a Giga innovation, let alone this. In fact, going further maybe that's when they had those phones that you just plugged in your ear and it was like a USB stick. 😅

How is it that 10 years later - in 2010 - Apple released an almost exactly the same product and still made it a success? 🤔

The answer is complex, but I'll try to simplify it:

• Because people's attitudes have changed in 10 years.♻️

• In 2000, the tablet was like a flying car would be now. 🛸

• It was too new for society and you know...

Society does NOT like change! ❌

At least not to this extent. 🙅🏽‍♂️

That's my little "fear" too, that the BookBase is so new and changes self-development so much that we don't want to go the way of the Tablet. 😵‍💫

But, then again...

🧐 How to make a difference?

First, we need to raise awareness of the consequences of doing nothing. Because people think that if they do nothing they will stay in this situation, but that is not true... 😳

There are hidden costs that we don't even know about. 😰

I'll show you 2 examples, one I read in an article and the other will be an experience of my own! 🧐

1. Example of Berger 📧

"I will give you a painfully concrete example. I have a cousin who, every time he signs his email, he writes at the bottom, "Regards, Charles". ✏️

I watched him do this and asked him, 'Why do you type that every time? He replied: 'It only takes 5-10 seconds' ⏱.

I said, 'Yeah, but you could automate it and put it in your "email signature" to save 5-10 seconds every time. His reply was 'I don't really know how to use "email signatures". So it's not worth the time for me. ❌

To highlight the exact cost of his cousin's inaction, Berger calculated how much time his cousin wasted every time he decided to type his signature. He then contrasted this with the 5 minutes it would cost to look up how to set up an automatic email signature. 🧐

When his cousin saw the calculations and realized it would save him around 20 hours a year, he looked into how to automate an email signature, says Berger. ✅

"We can't just say, 'We have a better way to save you time or money', we have to quantify the cost of inaction." 📊

2. My example 🎙

You know I read every email so you can listen to it if you want. This takes me about 30 minutes a week, which isn't too bad. ⏰

Recently AIs came out that let me clone my own voice, they're just a bit more complicated and I haven't been able to use them. 🤖

Then I calculated those 30 minutes a week for a year - 52 weeks - is 26 hours.

Which is more than a full day! ☀️

So, if I took the 1-2 hours to understand it, I could save 26 hours a year. ⏳

And that was the point when I started looking into these things. 🔍

True, I haven't found a breakthrough AI for it yet, but I keep looking, because 26 hours motivates me enough! 🔥

💡 Side notes 2: If you know of one or if you're looking for similar ones, don't hesitate to drop me a line on my Instagram and let's search together! 😉

People will change when this statement becomes true. ✅

"The cost of action is less than the cost of inaction." ~ Berger

So, when it is "cheaper" to act, people will change. And by cheap I don't necessarily mean money, it could be time or even energy. 🙏🏻

📕 Book Recommendation: I read the same concept back in the book "Evolutionary Psychology" by David M. Buss. It's when you realize how much is connected and how good it feels when you can connect the dots. By far the best book on Psychology! You can also find it summarized in BookBase! 📱

How can we achieve this at BookBase?

It's a perennial question that I occasionally come up with and spend days thinking about. 💭

Maybe if we could show people 2 possibilities. 🔴 🔵

The first is that if they DON'T study outside of school, they will, one way or another, live an average life that they don't want and later regret will have a really big cost. 😰

The second is that if someone is already self-developing and reading books, put the two side by side. A book can be read for two purposes one is to entertain - I don't know the solution to that, but that's not our case -, the other is to learn from it. 🤓

So, if you can learn nearly as much from a summary as from a full book and it takes 7-8 hours to read a book and only 15-20 minutes to listen to a summary. 🤔

So that's 10 books a year:

70 hours vs. 3 hours 20 minutes... 🤯

Yes, you read it well!

Which is a big enough cost difference to NOT act. ❌

Because by doing nothing, you don't earn 0 hours, you lose nearly 67 hours! 😱

Right? That doesn't sound too good... 🤨

📕 Book recommendation: This comparison is also in Robert Cialdini's book The Impact. A basic work if you want to learn about marketing! Of course, you can find it in the App!

One more factor left to help you achieve change. 👀

We have to be careful that the change itself is not too big. If someone has never read a book in their life, we do NOT ask them to start reading and listen to summaries instead of full books. 🍎♻️🍉

Because it would be too big of a shift and mentally draining. 🪫

Try to find a similar action that you can easily replace. 🍎♻️🍏

For example:

• If you used to listen to Spotify on the way to school, now listen to BookBase instead. 🎼♻️📚

• You see what we did, we tried to make an apples-to-apples comparison, the two actions are the same, yet the end result is completely different. 😎

• The habit is already established that this particular young person is listening to something on the way to school, now we just need to change WHAT they are actually listening to. 🎧

💡 Side notes 3: I swear try listening to 1 book summary instead of Spotify. It won't be a big change, but it will be a bigger change!

Okay, now comes probably the hardest part of this blog article, as I'm going to try to put together a checklist of exactly what you need to do if you want to make a change! 🏆

So...

✅ What exactly do you need to do?

[ ] First, look at how big a change you need to make. 🤏🏼

[ ] See if you are ready for it or if society is ready for it. 🧐

[ ] Try to break it down into smaller steps. 👣

[ ] Look at what the change is similar to and where it would be smaller. ♻️ (Spotify - BookBase)

[ ] Calculate the cost of inaction using a clear example and show your audience. 📊

[ ] Then try to turn the equation of inaction and action in favor of action. ⚖️

[ ] Finally, allow time for yourself and for change, because you know, it has to go through the first diagram! ⏳

I'm not saying it will be easy, but it will be worth it! 😉

After all, at OM we specialize in challenges. 🏆

Hope you enjoyed this email and were able to learn from it or just understand this complex problem. 🔥

All-in-all thank you for reading! 🙏🏻

🔥 Challenge

By far the highest priority is to get the App back on the Google PlayStore. It's mentally hard to process that such a small bug cost us about 84.000 HUF a day. 🤑

At first, I was very upset, it didn't feel justified and I was getting nervous. I felt like we were trying to go headwinds again and they were really trying to stop us. 🥵

But I had to realize that firstly I was not going to get anywhere with this, secondly life is unfair - which I already knew -, thirdly I had to focus on the solution. 🎯

So, I explored every possible way to contact Google to speed up the process. ⚡️

I got as far as a Chat but unfortunately, they were unable to help. So, it's just a case of waiting and praying that this all gets resolved as soon as possible. 💬

We've never had a mistake this big before. ❌

We will learn a lot from this! ✅

Am I angry for someone? 🤔

At most at myself for getting lost in all the little things again and not being able to pay attention and solve the problem in time. 😤

✅ UPDATE: Thankfully it has since been restored!

📖 What have I just read?

• I spent my reading time trying to solve the PlayStore problem, with varying degrees of success. I didn't solve it, but deep down it felt good because I could tell myself that I had done everything I could to solve the problem. 🙏🏻

• However, 3 books have now really caught my interest:

  • The Innovator's Dilemma

    • Clayton Christensen 💡

      • Which I am reading, but very slowly...

  • Breakout Brands - Jared Schreiber 🚀

    • What I listened to on the podcast sounds terribly interesting from what I've heard.

• The History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind - Stephen Goodson. 🏦

  • This may have been banned, but I found it online in PDF format. It's actually about who runs the world and why, in principle. I know, big promise, but why would it be banned after all. ❌

  • I'm not putting a link here simply to avoid blocking Substack, but you can google the title and + pdf download and it will throw it up. 🔍

  • Because of OM Documentary I have to dig into these topics quite a bit now. 🕵🏼‍♂️

🎧 What have I just listened to?

• I was listening to a joint podcast with József Gyarmati and Jared Schreiber, where they talked about the Hungarian startup ecosystem. Why there are no really big Hungarian startup success stories. Listening to Jared, I just thought that he is by far one of the most sympathetic people I've listened to in a podcast so far. 🙏🏻

  • Jared is an American super angel investor who lives in Hungary and wants to boost startups here. 🚀

  • He says that Hungarian startups are not successful because they don't dare to think big and make big promises - which is a virtue, he added. 📈

  • While in the US they throw around huge numbers, Hungarians only dare to say what they are 100% sure of, so big investors don't want to put money into startups that would bring a small return. 🤏🏼

  • However, he also said that it would take 2-3 Unicorn Startup successes to boost the Hungarian ecosystem. 🦄

  • Let's hope BookBase will be one of them! 😉

  • I link you to the Podcast here! (HUN)

• I tried a very new and interesting way to get energy for myself. It was none other than Dr. Andrew Huberman's NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest) protocol. 💆🏽‍♂️

  • It's all like meditation only with more attention to breathing. It takes 10 minutes and I swear I feel more energetic afterwards. Not saying I would climb Everest, but it really helped!⚡️

  • I'll link it here for you! 🔗

✍🏼 Top quote

"The obstacle in the way once becomes part of the journey. Never forget that in every obstacle lies an opportunity to improve your condition." ~ Ryan Holiday

🧪 Question of the week