Whatsapp and International Masterminds

Thanh and I recently had an interesting email thread with one of our readers Mark P., where he mentioned:

What I think would help me the most was to form/find a meetup with like-minded individuals for us to bounce ideas and strategies off of. Just composing this email has been therapeutic.

To which Thanh responded:

I can certainly recommend to find like-minded people so you can bounce off ideas. Aaron and I do this all the time. Even tho’ we are miles apart (I'm in Budapest, he is in Bangkok) we still bounce off ideas on calls and text messages, including with our friends. Attempt to see if you can setup your mastermind group and get together once a while – this will indeed help. Sometimes when you work through your stuff, like your goals, by yourself it can seem hard but with support of others it will make things a lot lighter.

One of the ways we implement this concept of a mastermind, is through an amazing chunk of technology called Whatsapp (iPhone, Android, Blackberry).

Introducing Whatsapp

Whatsapp is a real-time cross-platform application that uses data to send messages. What this means, is that you can send message to ANYONE in the world, as long as you have a smartphone and data connection (be that a cellular data plan, or a wifi connection).

I know, sounds awfully a lot like iMessage right? Well here's the thing – long, long before iMessage was even heard of, Whatsapp was making the rounds in Asia as the top paid App Store application, and with good reason. It's the very first time that we've had access to free, instantaneous, cross-platform international communication.

While iMessage requires you to have each others' Apple IDs (an email address), Whatsapp works straight away as long as you have someone's phone number in your existing address book. This is Phat, and very likely a large contributing factor to Whatsapp's success/dominance as the main phone-based instant messaging platform.

Using Whatsapp

There are a duo of things you need to do to use Whatsapp to its total potential.

Take a look at this:

You'll see the way that I've set up his (fictional) phone number – I've tagged it as USA, meaning that it is his United States number. I've also prefixed his number with “+1”. “1” is the international dialing code for the US/Canada. The “+”, tells my phone to commence an international dial, regardless of which country I am in. This is significant, because in different countries, you have to dial a different code for international numbers.

For example, in the US, you dial 011, then the country code, then the number. In Australia, you dial 0011, then the country code, then the number. The “+” sign is a universal translator that treats that very first “001” or “0011” for you.

Go through your address book, and switch ALL your contact numbers to international format.

E.g., convert 0455-555-555 to +61455-555-555 (an Australian mobile number) or 415-555-555 to +1-415-555-5555 (a US SF Bay Area number).

I also like to tag each number with what country it is from (e.g., USA, Thailand, Hungary etc). This is because my contacts typically have different cell numbers for different countries.

Now let's take a look at Whatsapp itself (iPhone version, from what I've seen, BB and Android versions are similar).

When you very first stream up Whatsapp, it will ask you confirm your number, then it shows you a list of all the people in your address book who already have Whatsapp – it will likely be a LOT more than you think, especially if you don't regularly prune your address book.

Feel free to play around with the application and all the settings and functions – what's more interesting, is the mastermind aspect which I will get right into.

A duo of things you'll want to switch.

Talks

Your talk screen looks something like this:

Group talks are symbolized by the multiple-person picture and the talk subject, individual talks are tagged by the person's name.

Two-way masterminds

As I've mentioned before, I use Whatsapp to talk with Thanh all the time, even tho’ we're in different timezones and continents.

For example, here is a latest talk where we were discussing the upcoming AE series on Hook-up and Motivation:

It's pretty straightforward. You send a message, do the quick calculations to work out if your friend is awake or asleep, and either wait for a reply, or go about your business and let Whatsapp notify you when a reply has been sent back.

A duo of interesting things to note:

1. You can see what time a person was last online (in the example above, Thanh was last online at Two:27pm my time).
2. That timestamp will switch to “typing” or “online” depending on what they're presently doing. If they're typing in a different talk, it will also display up as “typing”.
3. Whatsapp comes with read receipts. One tick means your message has been sent, two ticks means that your message has been received and read.

International Masterminds

Now that you know how to use Whatsapp, here's how you leverage the technology to greatly increase your capabilities, and thus results.

Napoleon Hill-style masterminds were all about meeting in person, to discuss things. Whatsapp lets you do this regardless of geographical limitation.

For example, in one of my masterminds, I have:

Details blurred to protect the less-than-innocent.

It may seem subtle, but this is truly the next evolution of masterminds at an international level, and the sad thing is that most people see implements like Whatsapp as a fresh instant messaging program for high school students, rather than a valuable business and networking device to leverage.

The fact that you can send text, pics, audio and movie (all for free, over data) is an added bonus.

Yup, pretty sure I've saved fairly a bit on SMS.

But wait, there's more!

I want to give you some more actionable things you can do towards building your own International Masterminds, based on my own practice.

You can build them a number of different ways:

1. Collective practices. This is by far, the most effective way. People you've met while traveling, partying or going through some sort of event or seminar together, are usually utterly motivated to get their lives together, and the best sort of people to mastermind with. These are by far, the most valuable masterminds that I belong to.
2. Seminars and Events. This is a subset of the very first. For example, I like to attend Affiliate Summit, because it's related to my (other) business. I meet people there, exchange numbers, tell them to hop on Whatsapp, and BOOM – instant mastermind.
3. Existing Contacts. Don't neglect your already-existing friends, family and acquaintances. Many of them have likely done amazing things since you last spotted them, so reach out however you can (email, Facebook, phone call), get their latest mobile number and get them on Whatsapp.
4. Fresh Friends. If you've moved to a fresh city or just determined to expand your social circle, be sure to collect numbers of people who have similar interests to you, and get them on Whatsapp. A good way to meet people with similar interests is to attend Meetups in your city.

Next Steps

1. Get Whatsapp. There are alternatives like Kik or iMessage or BBIM, but for the moment, Whatsapp seems to be the defacto platform for Asia/Europe/Australia, and is kicking off to reach the US too. Plus it's not iPhone/Android/BB-specific.
2. Find people, network, mastermind!

Want to see a particular topic covered or a question answered on Asian Efficiency? Get in touch with us (or leave a comment)!

If you want more articles and tips like these, let us know where we can send them to:

Whatsapp and International Masterminds

Whatsapp and International Masterminds

Thanh and I recently had an interesting email thread with one of our readers Mark P., where he mentioned:

What I think would help me the most was to form/find a meetup with like-minded individuals for us to bounce ideas and strategies off of. Just composing this email has been therapeutic.

To which Thanh responded:

I can undoubtedly recommend to find like-minded people so you can bounce off ideas. Aaron and I do this all the time. Even however we are miles apart (I'm in Budapest, he is in Bangkok) we still bounce off ideas on calls and text messages, including with our friends. Attempt to see if you can setup your mastermind group and get together once a while – this will indeed help. Sometimes when you work through your stuff, like your goals, by yourself it can seem hard but with support of others it will make things a lot lighter.

One of the ways we implement this concept of a mastermind, is through an amazing chunk of technology called Whatsapp (iPhone, Android, Blackberry).

Introducing Whatsapp

Whatsapp is a real-time cross-platform application that uses data to send messages. What this means, is that you can send message to ANYONE in the world, as long as you have a smartphone and data connection (be that a cellular data plan, or a wifi connection).

I know, sounds awfully a lot like iMessage right? Well here's the thing – long, long before iMessage was even heard of, Whatsapp was making the rounds in Asia as the top paid App Store application, and with good reason. It's the very first time that we've had access to free, instantaneous, cross-platform international communication.

While iMessage requires you to have each others' Apple IDs (an email address), Whatsapp works straight away as long as you have someone's phone number in your existing address book. This is Enormous, and very likely a large contributing factor to Whatsapp's success/dominance as the main phone-based instant messaging platform.

Using Whatsapp

There are a duo of things you need to do to use Whatsapp to its utter potential.

Take a look at this:

You'll see the way that I've set up his (fictional) phone number – I've tagged it as USA, meaning that it is his United States number. I've also prefixed his number with “+1”. “1” is the international dialing code for the US/Canada. The “+”, tells my phone to embark an international dial, regardless of which country I am in. This is significant, because in different countries, you have to dial a different code for international numbers.

For example, in the US, you dial 011, then the country code, then the number. In Australia, you dial 0011, then the country code, then the number. The “+” sign is a universal translator that treats that very first “001” or “0011” for you.

Go through your address book, and switch ALL your contact numbers to international format.

E.g., convert 0455-555-555 to +61455-555-555 (an Australian mobile number) or 415-555-555 to +1-415-555-5555 (a US SF Bay Area number).

I also like to tag each number with what country it is from (e.g., USA, Thailand, Hungary etc). This is because my contacts typically have different cell numbers for different countries.

Now let's take a look at Whatsapp itself (iPhone version, from what I've seen, BB and Android versions are similar).

When you very first fountain up Whatsapp, it will ask you confirm your number, then it shows you a list of all the people in your address book who already have Whatsapp – it will likely be a LOT more than you think, especially if you don't regularly prune your address book.

Feel free to play around with the application and all the settings and functions – what's more interesting, is the mastermind aspect which I will get right into.

A duo of things you'll want to switch.

Talks

Your talk screen looks something like this:

Group talks are symbolized by the multiple-person photo and the talk subject, individual talks are tagged by the person's name.

Two-way masterminds

As I've mentioned before, I use Whatsapp to talk with Thanh all the time, even however we're in different timezones and continents.

For example, here is a latest talk where we were discussing the upcoming AE series on Lovemaking and Motivation:

It's pretty straightforward. You send a message, do the quick calculations to work out if your friend is awake or asleep, and either wait for a reply, or go about your business and let Whatsapp notify you when a reply has been sent back.

A duo of interesting things to note:

1. You can see what time a person was last online (in the example above, Thanh was last online at Two:27pm my time).
2. That timestamp will switch to “typing” or “online” depending on what they're presently doing. If they're typing in a different talk, it will also display up as “typing”.
3. Whatsapp comes with read receipts. One tick means your message has been sent, two ticks means that your message has been received and read.

International Masterminds

Now that you know how to use Whatsapp, here's how you leverage the technology to greatly increase your capabilities, and thus results.

Napoleon Hill-style masterminds were all about meeting in person, to discuss things. Whatsapp lets you do this regardless of geographical limitation.

For example, in one of my masterminds, I have:

Details blurred to protect the less-than-innocent.

It may seem subtle, but this is truly the next evolution of masterminds at an international level, and the sad thing is that most people see instruments like Whatsapp as a fresh instant messaging program for high school students, rather than a valuable business and networking instrument to leverage.

The fact that you can send text, pictures, audio and movie (all for free, over data) is an added bonus.

Yup, pretty sure I've saved fairly a bit on SMS.

But wait, there's more!

I want to give you some more actionable things you can do towards building your own International Masterminds, based on my own practice.

You can build them a number of different ways:

1. Collective practices. This is by far, the most effective way. People you've met while traveling, partying or going through some sort of event or seminar together, are usually enormously motivated to get their lives together, and the best sort of people to mastermind with. These are by far, the most valuable masterminds that I belong to.
2. Seminars and Events. This is a subset of the very first. For example, I like to attend Affiliate Summit, because it's related to my (other) business. I meet people there, exchange numbers, tell them to hop on Whatsapp, and BOOM – instant mastermind.
3. Existing Contacts. Don't neglect your already-existing friends, family and acquaintances. Many of them have likely done amazing things since you last witnessed them, so reach out however you can (email, Facebook, phone call), get their latest mobile number and get them on Whatsapp.
4. Fresh Friends. If you've moved to a fresh city or just determined to expand your social circle, be sure to collect numbers of people who have similar interests to you, and get them on Whatsapp. A good way to meet people with similar interests is to attend Meetups in your city.

Next Steps

1. Get Whatsapp. There are alternatives like Kik or iMessage or BBIM, but for the moment, Whatsapp seems to be the defacto platform for Asia/Europe/Australia, and is beginning to reach the US too. Plus it's not iPhone/Android/BB-specific.
2. Find people, network, mastermind!

Want to see a particular topic covered or a question answered on Asian Efficiency? Get in touch with us (or leave a comment)!

If you want more articles and tips like these, let us know where we can send them to:

Whatsapp and International Masterminds

Whatsapp and International Masterminds

Thanh and I recently had an interesting email thread with one of our readers Mark P., where he mentioned:

What I think would help me the most was to form/find a meetup with like-minded individuals for us to bounce ideas and strategies off of. Just composing this email has been therapeutic.

To which Thanh responded:

I can undoubtedly recommend to find like-minded people so you can bounce off ideas. Aaron and I do this all the time. Even tho’ we are miles apart (I'm in Budapest, he is in Bangkok) we still bounce off ideas on calls and text messages, including with our friends. Attempt to see if you can setup your mastermind group and get together once a while – this will truly help. Sometimes when you work through your stuff, like your goals, by yourself it can seem hard but with support of others it will make things a lot lighter.

One of the ways we implement this concept of a mastermind, is through an amazing lump of technology called Whatsapp (iPhone, Android, Blackberry).

Introducing Whatsapp

Whatsapp is a real-time cross-platform application that uses data to send messages. What this means, is that you can send message to ANYONE in the world, as long as you have a smartphone and data connection (be that a cellular data plan, or a wifi connection).

I know, sounds awfully a lot like iMessage right? Well here's the thing – long, long before iMessage was even heard of, Whatsapp was making the rounds in Asia as the top paid App Store application, and with good reason. It's the very first time that we've had access to free, instantaneous, cross-platform international communication.

While iMessage requires you to have each others' Apple IDs (an email address), Whatsapp works straight away as long as you have someone's phone number in your existing address book. This is Hefty, and most likely a large contributing factor to Whatsapp's success/dominance as the main phone-based instant messaging platform.

Using Whatsapp

There are a duo of things you need to do to use Whatsapp to its utter potential.

Take a look at this:

You'll see the way that I've set up his (fictional) phone number – I've tagged it as USA, meaning that it is his United States number. I've also prefixed his number with “+1”. “1” is the international dialing code for the US/Canada. The “+”, tells my phone to begin an international dial, regardless of which country I am in. This is significant, because in different countries, you have to dial a different code for international numbers.

For example, in the US, you dial 011, then the country code, then the number. In Australia, you dial 0011, then the country code, then the number. The “+” sign is a universal translator that treats that very first “001” or “0011” for you.

Go through your address book, and switch ALL your contact numbers to international format.

E.g., convert 0455-555-555 to +61455-555-555 (an Australian mobile number) or 415-555-555 to +1-415-555-5555 (a US SF Bay Area number).

I also like to tag each number with what country it is from (e.g., USA, Thailand, Hungary etc). This is because my contacts typically have different cell numbers for different countries.

Now let's take a look at Whatsapp itself (iPhone version, from what I've seen, BB and Android versions are similar).

When you very first explosion up Whatsapp, it will ask you confirm your number, then it shows you a list of all the people in your address book who already have Whatsapp – it will likely be a LOT more than you think, especially if you don't regularly prune your address book.

Feel free to play around with the application and all the settings and functions – what's more interesting, is the mastermind aspect which I will get right into.

A duo of things you'll want to switch.

Talks

Your talk screen looks something like this:

Group talks are symbolized by the multiple-person pic and the talk subject, individual talks are tagged by the person's name.

Two-way masterminds

As I've mentioned before, I use Whatsapp to talk with Thanh all the time, even however we're in different timezones and continents.

For example, here is a latest talk where we were discussing the upcoming AE series on Lovemaking and Motivation:

It's pretty straightforward. You send a message, do the quick calculations to work out if your friend is awake or asleep, and either wait for a reply, or go about your business and let Whatsapp notify you when a reply has been sent back.

A duo of interesting things to note:

1. You can see what time a person was last online (in the example above, Thanh was last online at Two:27pm my time).
2. That timestamp will switch to “typing” or “online” depending on what they're presently doing. If they're typing in a different talk, it will also display up as “typing”.
3. Whatsapp comes with read receipts. One tick means your message has been sent, two ticks means that your message has been received and read.

International Masterminds

Now that you know how to use Whatsapp, here's how you leverage the technology to greatly increase your capabilities, and thus results.

Napoleon Hill-style masterminds were all about meeting in person, to discuss things. Whatsapp lets you do this regardless of geographical limitation.

For example, in one of my masterminds, I have:

Details blurred to protect the less-than-innocent.

It may seem subtle, but this is indeed the next evolution of masterminds at an international level, and the sad thing is that most people see instruments like Whatsapp as a fresh instant messaging program for high school students, rather than a valuable business and networking contraption to leverage.

The fact that you can send text, photos, audio and movie (all for free, over data) is an added bonus.

Yup, pretty sure I've saved fairly a bit on SMS.

But wait, there's more!

I want to give you some more actionable things you can do towards building your own International Masterminds, based on my own practice.

You can build them a number of different ways:

1. Collective practices. This is by far, the most effective way. People you've met while traveling, partying or going through some sort of event or seminar together, are usually utterly motivated to get their lives together, and the best sort of people to mastermind with. These are by far, the most valuable masterminds that I belong to.
2. Seminars and Events. This is a subset of the very first. For example, I like to attend Affiliate Summit, because it's related to my (other) business. I meet people there, exchange numbers, tell them to hop on Whatsapp, and BOOM – instant mastermind.
3. Existing Contacts. Don't neglect your already-existing friends, family and acquaintances. Many of them have likely done amazing things since you last eyed them, so reach out however you can (email, Facebook, phone call), get their latest mobile number and get them on Whatsapp.
4. Fresh Friends. If you've moved to a fresh city or just determined to expand your social circle, be sure to collect numbers of people who have similar interests to you, and get them on Whatsapp. A good way to meet people with similar interests is to attend Meetups in your city.

Next Steps

1. Get Whatsapp. There are alternatives like Kik or iMessage or BBIM, but for the moment, Whatsapp seems to be the defacto platform for Asia/Europe/Australia, and is commencing to reach the US too. Plus it's not iPhone/Android/BB-specific.
2. Find people, network, mastermind!

Want to see a particular topic covered or a question answered on Asian Efficiency? Get in touch with us (or leave a comment)!

If you want more articles and tips like these, let us know where we can send them to:

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