If you want to climb to the top of ANY endeavour, you need only remember THREE strategies: copy success, adapt what works, and apply the best to the best.
By copying success, I don’t actually mean to suggest plagiarizing, or cheating, or stealing. But you must study the best of the best and understand it enough to be able to adopt much of it to fit your particular circumstances and goals. You must repeat, often, their tactics and strategies for achieving their success. You need, you MUST, find role models.
You can think of those role models as your teachers, even if you do not know them. You can find them everywhere: in autobiographies, (movies, books); seminars, courses, even picking up the correct tips here and there from conversations. Think of successful role models as your personal teachers. Successful marathoners, for example, are constantly upping their game through study and applying the experiences of others, particularly what works and what doesn’t work.
By selecting the right roles models, (aka. teachers), you shorten your learning curve. The better the role models, the shorter your learning curve.
Even if you pick the very best teachers/role models, you still need to make their strategies and tactics work for you. You ARE DIFFERENT. Don’t expect to be a perfect clone to whomever you model. You should be a COMPOSITE, a collage of multiple pieces of success techniques from a wide selection of successful people who also preceded you in your chosen endeavour.
Perhaps, it was Bruce Lee who can serve as our most successful celebrity promoting the concept of copying success secrets from those who came before. Bruce was a highly reputed martial artist who built his particular system, “Jeet Kune Do”, by borrowing many of the great techniques from multiple schools of martial arts, from Wing Chun to Eskrima, from Judo to western Boxing. His “system” succeeded, became his own, and remains a very effective fighting system to this very day.
Notice HOW, the METHOD, involved in copying successful people’s strategies. No one person will entirely fit you. You can NOT BE someone else. However, you can use bits and pieces of what those role models used to make them successful. You can become a COMPOSITE of what they, together as a collective, are/were.
To borrow wisdom from the field of martial arts, one more time, a famous, feudal Japanese swordsman advised that one must practice a technique 10,000 times to BEGIN to know it. But to truly understand it, a technique must be practised over 100,000 times. He understood that anybody can literally imitate the behaviour of another, but to make the new technique truly your own, to truly fit your particular brain-body neural pathway, incessant trial and error under real-world conditions is mandatory.
Our third technique is to borrow from Peter Drucker, one of the wisest business consultants to ever have lived.
Drucker recommends focusing your strongest resources upon your best opportunities. Let’s adapt this to your strategy of succeeding. [See! I’m doing that right now. I am borrowing a SECRET of business success, copying it by adapting it to this particular NUGGET.]
You will have two choices along your path towards your goals. You can either apply your commitments, your resources, to repairing and strengthening your weaknesses, and, thereby minimize the number and intensity of your weaknesses. Or, and the better strategy, as per Drucker, is to maximize your strengths by finding those successful role models who best fit your strengths, more so than those who minimized weaknesses similar to yours.
Drucker made this quote in his writings, “Strong people also have strong weaknesses…there is no such thing as a ‘strong person’… Good for what? is the question”.
Don’t ignore your weaknesses. You do have to find strategies to minimize those weaknesses. You won’t have perfect skin by eating greasy, sugary, fat-laden foods. You do have to stop doing that to improve your skin tone. You won’t become a champion power lifter, marathoner, world-class Jiu-Jitsu player, …by sitting on the couch watching others practice. You have to get off the couch and put out the effort, too. You won’t improve your heart, brain and circulatory system by running your ass off then coming home to eat a bag of potato chips washed down with half a bottle of soda.
The point is, whatever your weaknesses, you need to spot them, face them, crush them, keep them in check, while you focus on what helped others to succeed.
There you have it. To do AWESOME:
