Paul Sokol, Data Scientist, Infusionsoft

Another awesome post from the one and only Paul Sokol. Check out this post, or this one, or this one on the Ninja Turtles if you want to a formal introduction to The Mad Scientist.

Hello fair Monkeypod reader, good to see you again!

Some people are curious about this Infusionsoft Cookbook thing you might have seen floating around. If you hadn’t heard, I recently wrote a book about Infusionsoft strategy.

My fellow Jedi Greg (aka the dude who owns this blog) asked an excellent question, “Why did you write it?”

The literal reason is that someone presented me with the opportunity to do so, and I chose to pursue it. Why did I choose to pursue it? Because I want as many people as possible to succeed with their small business and writing a book seemed like a great opportunity to push that agenda.

Its a fascinating story of manifestation actually.

You see, back in early 2014 I was blessed with an opportunity to speak at ICON14 on the topic of workflow automation. To accompany the talk, I included a PDF (here ya go) that was a workflow cookbook with some “recipes” for different Infusionsoft campaign models. It was fun playing around with the recipe idea in the writing.

The talk happened and people downloaded it. Around that time, I recall saying something to the effect of, “I’d love to write an entire Infusionsoft cookbook some day“. How powerful those words were. The download rates dwindled soon after ICON14 and that was the last I thought about it.

Towards the very beginning of 2015, Packt Publishing in the UK reached out to me with a tremendously appealing offer: Do you want to write an Infusionsoft Cookbook? Of course, in my head the answer was an emphatic “Yes!“. There was an interesting dilemma though. Being a proud Infusionite I am unable to get paid for my Infusionsoft knowledge outside the building. In other words, there would be a conflict of interest if I did any outside consulting or implementation.

This opportunity was too good to be true, so I had to at least try for it. After getting approval to ask the CTO from my manager, it received a blessing to ask the legal team. That team verified it was ok with the CMO and I was given the green light to get a publishing contract. Gotta love working for a company that believes in people and their dreams 🙂

The marathon of writing and editing began. About 9 months later, the drafts of all chapters were in the hands of the publisher. Soon after the final drafts were completed and it went to print-on-demand.

Which is how we get to this post today, fair Monkeypod friends.

What can you learn from this? Why did you even just read this?

Hopefully, it provided some hope and inspiration for you to tackle a big dream of your own. No idea how to start? Perfect! Start researching and meeting others who might know how to do it. Know what you have to do but simply aren’t for whatever reason? Perfect! Make the choice to spend 15-30 minutes on it today. Not tomorrow, today. Writing this book was a marathon; and not writing for a single day pushed it back exactly one day every time.

Shameless Self-Promotion Section: If you want to get my Top 3 Marketplace campaigns along with the Infusionsoft Cookbook, please visit https://www.iscookbook.com

What big dreams do YOU have? Leave a comment and maybe we can help each other out as a community!

So, I think the takeaway is that by putting himself out there, by speaking at ICON, or writing for Infusionsoft’s blog, or being generally active on social media, someone saw something they liked, and it sparked an idea somewhere that ultimately manifested as this book. What are you doing to put yourself out there?