See what others that are more successful than you are doing, and do that! – Random Guru

There’s pieces of truth to this statement, but the problem behind simply modeling is not being able to see the entire process.

Imagine that everyone that is a professional actor has had 10 movies before they have their break out performance. The guru advice would be to simply get 10 movies under your belt as quickly as possible. But the reality is that making 10 movies isn’t what you need to model, it’s the process of acting in a movie, and then internally, the actor studies how to make their next movie better by increasing their skills.

To a modeler, the answer is to just mimic the results of “make 10 movies,” but the reality was it took 10 movies of practice, and then study behind the scenes, to get good.

There’s no such thing as modeling someone 100%, and there will always be parts of the puzzle that are unseen.

One of the best ways to determine if a model is missing critical data is to see if anyone else has the same output, but different results. If so, you’re missing something.

But there’s a bigger problem than just that…

If you notice someone with the same output but different results you MAY not be missing any critical information, but dealing with a larger problem which is probabilities.

If you’re modeling a gambler on how to get rich, just because someone bought a ticket and didn’t win as opposed to the other person that bought a ticket and won, doesn’t mean that you’re missing some part of the formula to model. It means you’re dealing with probabilities.

When was the last time you modeled someone and got different results, and worse, didn’t know if you were just missing some part of the formula, or you were dealing with issues of probability?

We basically only avoid pain / seek pleasure but avoiding pain is MUCH stronger of a motivator. If you hate everything like your job or wife it can make you seek the things you hate less.

If you hate nearly everything, you’ll instinctively gravitate to the thing you hate the least.

Don’t let a positive attitude keeping you from pissing yourself off enough to do something different. – Truth Cake

This is why we hear success stories so often say things like, “I hated my job. I hated my relationship,” etc. Since hate is the primary motivator for most of them and if they hate 99% of jobs, then they’ll land on the job they hate the least (or actually even like). It’s one of the same reasons you hear of so many ‘rags to riches’ stories. They hate their poverty, have nothing to lose,

Amplifying the hate in your life will actually make it better since it’ll push you towards what you really want faster.

Not all negative emotions are ‘bad,’ and they can often be used to push yourself. – Truth cake

It’s the same reason that starting out with having a good life can be a curse for many people. Think about how many people have the same story of starting out being broke and destitute like Lewis Howes, Vin Diesel, Tony Robbins, etc. When your in those terrible situations, it gives you no other options and makes you want to move forward. Sam Johnson (founder of The Hustle) talks about how he is motivated from anger in a similar fashion as well.

But when things are terrible, you have nothing to lose. Tony Robbins talks about how you can do anything with a strong enough “why” (as in a good reason to do it). And when stuff is good there’s not often a good why to motivate you through the pain of progression.

People that use hatred unconsciously and without caution are also the successful people that are hateful assholes. Don’t be that person.

When did you try to quell your hatred for a situation, when in reality, you should have leaned into that emotion to use it productively to make your life better?

“Take my 3 day intensive boot camp to avoid the mistakes I made!” – Random Guru.

Isn’t it interesting that every successful person you hear interviewed talks about all the mistakes they made? Why didn’t they just read the books to learn from other’s mistakes and not do them? Why didn’t they just take that guru’s class to avoid the mistakes? Because the secret is this,

Everything you do is a mistake. – Truth Cake

People have this goal to “avoid mistakes” without realizing what a mistake really is, and also waste time not realizing that literally no matter what, it’s a mistake in some way. It’s a mistake because of what mistake means, which is usually “I could have done this better,” which results in, “I could have been happier.”

Since human beings have an never ending desire for more happiness, then every decision could have been different to result in something making you a tiny bit happier. Making $1M feels like a mistake if you realize you could have made $100M. Cause you’d think you’d have been happier with $100M than $1M. This is why EVERYONE talks about making mistakes that’s ‘made it big.’ Because they know of some way that it could have been better or faster, and consider many decisions along the way that weren’t the “best” to be mistakes.

People often say to stop worrying about making mistakes, and that you’re going to make them. That’s true, but the underlying message is that some of your decisions will somehow NOT be a mistake, and they actually are still mistakes.

Since mistakes are often tied to happiness, if you can be happy regardless of outcomes, then nothing is a mistake. That’s probably only going to be achieved by a monk though, so for the rest of us, we’ll just embrace the mistake, know it could be better in some way, and move forward.

When did trying to avoid mistakes cause analysis paralysis and cause you to waste time by not moving forward? Embrace the mistake.

If everyone would follow my advice, they’d all be rich! – Random Guru

I’d talked at length with the problems with “good” advice. Another part of advice that is exceedingly important is the specificity. As advice reaches general concepts, the value approaches 0 but is applicable to the widest audience.
As advice reaches high levels of specificity, the value maxes out, but the audience approaches zero.

This is why Alex Hermozi can give advice such as “give all your information for free.” This works for him because he has SO much information about a wildly complex topic (business management) that people quickly become overwhelmed, give up trying to spend months on end learning everything, and just partner with him. The free advice is just a demonstration of his competence, and is inherently, a sales pitch in the most beautiful of ways.

If you have a simple business that isn’t generalized at all like Hermozi’s business, and you follow his advice, then you’re going to give your secret sauce recipe for free. And since it only takes 45 seconds to explain for free, you’re also going to get nothing for it because, well, it was free.

If a lot of different people think something is good advice, the reality is that is probably isn’t good. – Truthcake

What’s some good advice you heard but then realized it was actually only good advice for someone else and not you specifically?

Gurus will have you believe that the reason you’re not accomplishing all your goals is that you’re not motivated enough. As you may guess, this is only half true, and mostly garbage.

The reason why people don’t achieve goals is they don’t know what it takes to achieve them. – Truth Cake

What this means is that for someone that thinks they want to lose weight, they may think that they only have to workout 2x a week and cut back on soda. When they realize it takes feeling starvation pangs, working out 6x a week, giving up beers on the weekend, and so on, they give up.

It’s not that they’re not motivated – it’s that they didn’t know what it REALLY was going to take to achieve the goal to begin with. If they knew precisely what it would take to lose weight and already knew the pain of it and what they’d have to sacrifice, start down the path, and THEN give up, then that’s a motivation problem.

The real problem is simply not having a REALISTIC plan that details all the sacrifices (and/or pain) that must be endured.

Why do I use the word “pain?” Because every goal requires pain or sacrifice, otherwise you would already be doing / having it. If a goal has neither of those apparent to you, then you’re not seeing the real plan laid out. You inherently have to give up something to have something else. You may be giving up an abusive spouse to have a better relationship, which may be easy and painless to give that up, but it’s still a sacrifice of some sort.

Gurus will tell you to try to get you to write out your ultimate end goal, which is terrible advice on its own. Most don’t get you to write out the process of achieving those goals. If the process doesn’t look favorable, you may not want the goal. Want to be a huge bodybuilder and that’s the goal? The process is gobs of steroids and potentially dying younger. Is that acceptable to you? Want to make a million dollars in 1 month? The process will likely be filled with enormous risk / stress, and/or bending your ethics. Is that acceptable?

A goal is just a pipe dream until you know the path to achieve it, and that path is typically only legitimate when you can see the sacrifice / work / pain that’s involved. If there’s none of that, it’s likely an erroneous path (ie. magic diet pills that don’t sacrifice your long term health, etc).

Pick your goal, find the legitimate plan to get there, determine what you’re willing to sacrifice, and THEN decide whether to do it or to amend your goal. – Truth Cake

What’s a goal you set for yourself that you abandoned, NOT because you weren’t “motivated,” but simply because you didn’t know what was TRULY required to achieve that goal?

People think about pursuing goals, or pursuing a mate and so on. It can also be far more effective to attract your goals. You can either figure out the right things to say when pursuing a mate, or you can work on yourself such that a mate will want to find the right things to say to you. You can either pursue money, or you can develop enough value that money will find a way to be attracted towards you (ie. when people say “shut up and take my money!”).

“You don’t catch a rabbit by running faster, you catch a rabbit by attracting it to a trap.” – Truth cake

If you’re struggling with a particular goal, take a step back and see if attracting the goal towards yourself makes things easier.

“If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe.” – Abraham Lincoln.

This is garbage advice for most people. Also, it’s likely that Lincoln never said this nonsense either.

The underlying framework here is to “make sure everything is perfect and then start,” and we all know that things are never perfect or feel like the right time. It’s the same reason why people start that book, or their diet, etc.

Starting stuff just needs to happen – even without knowing precisely what to do, or knowing the most efficient way to do something. If you subscribe to this sharpen the axe philosophy, it’s a slippery slope and then you’re met with the next destructive piece of advice which is,

“Work smart, not hard.” – Random guru.

Which slips you into more garbage which is, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”

It’s all very dangerous pieces of advice, because they are slightly true, but these are the exact horrific mentalities that make people say, “I’ll start tomorrow. I need to research a little more.”

The idea of being efficient, doing something well, or working smart are all just lines of BS that keeps people from starting. In their defense, these are better ideas later on, but not initially.

“Whether advice is good or not depends on where you are in your journey.” – Truth Cake

Good advice for getting started is to simply get started, and good advice for getting better is all the typical guru quotes I’ve listed above.

“If I was given only an hour to chop down a tree, I’d chop the tree for 15 minutes and determine how much, if any at all, sharpening was needed if I hadn’t already chopped the tree down in 15 minutes.” – Truth Cake

How have “good” pieces of advice slipped into your mind and actually held you back from starting?