Momentum Automation System

Eleven sessions · filmed at the house in Costa Rica, autumn 2016

“Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing — and Then Day 80.”

A three-day working event, filmed in front of a room where a seat cost $5,000. You come out of it with three things on paper and one exercise you cannot do from a book. Eleven sessions, restored, $149.

You have been doing the work for weeks. The numbers have not moved. Nobody told you that this stage looks exactly like failing, and feels exactly like it too.

The most useful thing I said that weekend was not a tactic. It was a warning about a shape.

“It seems like there’s nothing. It’s like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.”

That is where almost everybody quits — not from laziness, but from a completely reasonable reading of the evidence. You worked for weeks. Nothing happened. A rational person stops.

I told the room what my own first months actually looked like. Living in a van, in Alaska, in 2009. Eighteen hours a day for two weeks for a single sale, which coded to the wrong affiliate, so what I ended up with was $7. Then a night around day eighty that produced more than the previous seventy-nine put together. My own read on why that stretch breaks people is not that it is hard, but that it is uninformative: “it feels like there’s just like nothing, and it’s unbelievably frustrating if you don’t know what’s going on.” A man in the room put it less kindly when Will asked what was stopping him: “the fear of failure, and everyone who doubted me saying I told you so.”

I am not telling you day eighty will happen to you. Nobody honest can, and the income disclaimer says so plainly. I am telling you the curve is not a line, and that people who expect a line quit on the flat part.

The one exercise I would buy this for

Will teaches seven storytelling principles — stories install states; write in word pictures; interrupt the pattern; start at the peak and work backwards; write in the present tense so it moves you first; cycle through what people see, hear and feel; and choose what to leave out, because the cut is the story.

Then he does something I have not seen anyone else do on a stage. He runs it as a workshop with a scoring mechanic:

Write your story in 100 words or fewer. Pick the emotion you intend to create — and you are forbidden from using that word. Read it aloud. The room scores the intensity zero to ten and guesses which emotion you meant, before anyone tells them.

Ninety seconds to write, then “no more fire on the keyboard” — you are graded on what you actually wrote. Everyone writes their score down privately first, “so you can’t cheat.” Then, before a word of feedback, hands over hearts: “we’re giving you feedback on your story, not on your worth as a human being.”

Then you rewrite and perform it again. And again. Five people go through it on camera — one of them seven times — and you watch a flat 3 turn into an 8 in real time. The next session makes them deliver it standing, notes hidden under the chair. The whole lesson lives in the gap between what you meant and what the room actually received, which is precisely what a book cannot show you.

The sessions about the operator rather than the operation

My brother Will hosted the weekend. He is an NLP and hypnosis trainer, and he ran these:

• Setting the outcome — his four-quadrant model, where a goal is only finished when it has clarity, motivation, a named obstacle, and evidence. The evidence test is the memorable one: if I videotaped you achieving this, what would I see and hear?
• The three-why technique — write why you want it, circle the words that carry emotional charge, ask why those matter, and repeat. Then rate the words you landed on, zero to ten, with his blunt threshold: “if they’re anything less than a five, you probably haven’t tapped into your primary motivation source yet… You might need to follow that chain down, down, down, down, and you’ll feel it. You’ll feel a passion wake up inside of you.”
• The breakthrough session — drilling down through “what is stopping me is… because…” until you hit something real, then writing it out longhand to let it go rather than to understand it. In the room, people burned the pages in the fireplace, one person at a time, in silence, while everyone else watched. Will’s own timeline is in there too, unglamorously: “It’s taken me upwards of 200 days to make a significant belief shift.”

The working sessions, taught by the people doing it

I want to be straight, because the title carries one name: Will hosted and taught the mindset and story material. The traffic and targeting sessions were taught by other operators in the room.

• Tracy Walker on targeting — a five-step run from “five things you already know something about” to one avatar with a first name, a demographic, a psychographic and a sociographic. “Give them a name. My avatar’s name is Violet… So when I talk, I’m talking to Violet. I’m not talking to the group of people that could be Violet.” She works the room through it live until people can say out loud that they have found theirs.
• Lawrence Tam on traffic — three methods for getting content without writing it, and an outreach email he makes everybody type as he dictates it: the specific-compliment subject line, one sentence of flattery with a single keyword in bold, one small ask, a hard deadline, and a postscript carrying your best work. He recaps it as six words: butter, short, topic, keyword, deadline, your fan. The most immediately usable hour in the set.
• Rob on the ideal customer — he passes a microphone round and asks the room why they are in business. Time freedom. Helping people. Retiring a mother. Being the model his son grows up watching. Then he points out what nobody said: “not one single person said, I’m in this business to make more money… I’ve asked it hundreds if not thousands of times — not one person has ever said to me, I just want to make more money. Why is that?” And then: “But if that’s not what we want, why are we selling it?”
• A panel on opt-ins and first emails with John Oakes and Michael Martin, arguing on camera about whether the first email should introduce you or just deliver the thing. They never resolve it, which is the honest answer.

You should know what happens to Rob’s question, because it is the best question anybody asks all weekend and this recording does not answer it. He turns it into a copywriting instruction — sell the thing the money is for, not the money — announces exercises that would have taken it further, and then the session runs out of time. Nobody comes back to it. The room raises it and leaves it standing. If what you want is somebody to hand you your own reason, that is not in here.

What you finish with

If you do the exercises rather than watch them, you end the eleven sessions with three things on paper: one customer with a first name and a life, one story under a hundred words that produces the feeling you meant it to produce, and one outreach email you could send without rewriting it.

Will’s homework for the story is why it sticks: record it tonight, on your phone, give it to ten people, and ask them the same two questions the room used. How much emotion did you feel, zero to ten? What emotion was I creating? You get your answer before you ever spend money finding out.

Who should not buy this

Now the honest part. Session eleven is me at a whiteboard on the old company’s funnel economics, and it is a period piece: those products no longer exist and the commission numbers describe a plan that is gone. I left it in as history. I am not going to sell it to you as a training. The other ten sessions are the product.

And if what you want is automation, the title is writing a cheque the sessions do not cash. The traffic method taught here is manual outreach, roughly a hundred contacts at a time, done by a person. It works, and it is dictated to you line by line — but nobody in that room automated anything, and I am not going to let a word in the title imply they did.

The price, and why it is this number

Seats in that room were $5,000. The recorded product sold for $197. It is $149 here.

The teaching did not depreciate. The tape did. Forty-eight lessons across this archive had to be pulled off dying storage, transferred, transcribed word for word and indexed before any of it could be sold again. You are not buying a recording that was made. You are buying one that was found — and eleven sessions is all that will ever exist of three days in that house, because the room does not reconvene.

One payment, never rebills, lifetime access, downloadable audio on every session and searchable transcripts on ten of the eleven. It holds at $149 through the relaunch year. All three restored Will Wood courses together are $297. Thirty days, full refund, no questions asked — one email returns every dollar, and nobody is going to ask you whether you finished it.

If you are in the flat part right now — the part where you are doing the work and the numbers are not moving — the button below buys the ten working sessions, and the hundred-word exercise, for $149. Do that one out loud, to somebody who will score you honestly, and watch your own flat 3 become an 8.

In Prosperity,
David Wood

P.S. Session one is the open one, and it is Will, not me. It is where he says the line I would have wanted handed to me on day forty: “you spend your whole life doing nothing, knowing what to do and not to do it. And there’s nothing worse than knowing that you can climb Everest and just camping out at the base.” Watch that session before you decide about the other ten.

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