Short vs long course lessons. Secrets from the road.
Thoughts from taking a 97-minute mini-course in 10 minutes.
I have a video recording of me saying this:
We all know that short course lessons are better.
When my friend replied UHM… do we? What’s better?? … it felt almost like everything I thought I knew about the world was crumbling.
Sooooo, I decided to talk about these things, no matter how obvious they might seem from where I’m standing.
If you can shorten lessons, do it! If you can help someone get what they need in 10 minutes instead of 90, why not do it? I promise that it will not take the value away. People appreciate the fact that you think about them, their time, and their energy.
All good.
Until… Tini, successful business owners have hour-long videos in their programs and no one is complaining.
Secret from being in some of those programs:
People do complain, but they usually don’t say anything to the person who created the course. Especially when they’ve invested quite a lot of money.
If you can help take some of the overwhelm off of people’s plates and can give them something clear and actionable in 10 minutes instead of spending 50 minutes teaching something… wouldn’t you want to do that for your people?
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Here are some analogies to support this idea that breaking things down into digestible lessons is more conducive to results:
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1. Driving to the airport.
Saw this sign that said 560 km to Berlin. Instead of the GPS showing 560 km to get to the destination, it shows you these smaller numbers depending on the change in direction.
10 km and turn right.
5 km and turn left.
And you get to win every time.
Of course, this doesn’t really work if there’s a straight line from here to there. But you can still break the thing down in your mind and assign milestones.
By the time you reach the destination, you feel like it was easier than you had initially thought.
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2. Weight loss.
When I was trying to lose weight, I wanted to lose 10 kg. That felt daunting. Especially since I wanted it to happen overnight. Once I started thinking about losing 1 kg 10 times aka 1 kg at a time, that took the pressure away.
That’s how people feel when they take a course.
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How do you take courses?
Would you not want to go through 5 lessons, 10 minutes each, get a win after each lesson, implement, and learn something really cool?
As opposed to going through a 50-minute lesson and just feeling overwhelmed, trying to make sense of everything that was said, figuring out the order of the things you need to take action on?
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Storytime: 97-minute mini-course in 10 minutes.
I received an email from this guy that I’d been following. He had a mini-course. Of course, I clicked on the link. Curious about the topic, but also wanted to see how the mini-course was structured.
Went through the mini-course in “professional style“. This is a fancy way of saying that I skimmed through the content.
The lessons were really long.
The first one aka the introduction, which I was super excited about, was 10 minutes long. Thought that was actually decent. Then, the second video was 30 minutes and the third video was 50 minutes… and I was like Noooo … Then, it got better, lesson 4, the last one was about 7 minutes long.
The introduction included a few concepts that were irrelevant to the topic. The course was about how to create an offer. The introduction went over why you need a team and the types of business owners. While this type of information is cool, it’s not essential to this particular course and might actually create false expectations.
The lesson which was 50 minutes long was about 3 crucial questions to ask yourself before you create an offer. And I was like Oh, 50 minutes for 3 questions… just give me the questions and I’ll use the rest of the time to answer the questions.
Got through the course in about 10 minutes and managed to get the result that the course intended. So, what’s with the extra 87 minutes, right?
The knowledge we include in a course is there to get people ready to take action, to implement the concepts we’re explaining.
Specific topic & topic-relevant info.
What helps stay on track is to keep things related to that one specific topic. That’s what has helped me make things easier for myself and for others. We’re not creating a course to tell people about all the things we want to tell them about but to explain a process or strategy that they can use themselves to get a specific result.
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A course is different from other types of content.
A course is supposed to be the shortest and clearest way to get a specific result, solve a specific problem, or learn a skill.
It’s not a place where distractions or side thoughts come to stay. Do you know all those cool thoughts that come to us when we passionately talk about a topic? Not all of them are essential! Even if they might be really cool and exciting.
You can always create a bonus section of cool, unexpected thoughts and pieces of information for people to browse through once they’ve consumed the main curriculum.
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Short vs long…
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It’s not necessarily that one is better than the other. But it might very well be… if you think about it… if you can get results in less time, wouldn’t that be way more satisfying?
Plus, from what I’ve seen, people really appreciate it when we keep things simple. That’s not to say that they will not attend longer sessions or consume longer content.
But keeping things simple and less overwhelming helps people get results faster.
They learn. Win.
They are clear on what they have to do. Win.
They have space to implement. Win.
And they can carry on with their day. Win.
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We're all busy, right? And yes, it's cool to hang out for hours too, but what if we left the hour-long sessions for networking events, Q&As, brainstorming, and co-working sessions?
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It's like a breath of fresh air to keep things simple.
PS: I’ve never been to Berlin. But I drove to the Netherlands for about 9 hours. If things were a straight line and I hadn’t had these smaller milestones, it would have probably felt twice as long and way less enjoyable.