Why listening to ultra wealthy people can be detrimental.
“I’m a millionaire, and you need to do the things that I do!” – Random guru.
I talked before about the problem with modeling successful people and mentioned to “model the path, not the person.” Once you’ve found the path, then you can find someone else that’s on that same path but just a bit ahead of you and start trying to model that person.
Don’t ask a bodybuilding champion about their daily routine when you’re 200 pounds overweight yourself.
Instead, see the path that he took may have required at some point the bodybuilder wasn’t overweight, so you’d look to find and model someone that was only 100 lbs overweight. The advice from a bodybuilder of getting the best gains is going to be using ammonia capsules, specific pre-workouts, and carb cycling. The advice from someone that is only 100 lbs overweight vs 200 lbs might be that you simply need to stop eating an entire cake and only eat half a cake like the 100 lbs overweight person is.
Eating half the cake is a lot more possible and doable for someone vastly overweight than not eating the cake at all, or worse yet, trying to execute complex diets like carb cycling.
A better strategy is to find someone that is living the life you’d like to make sure your objectives are possible, find out what path they went on to get to where they are now, then find someone slightly ahead of you on that same path and model the person slightly ahead. Rinse and repeat.
A side note of importance is that I said “living the life you’d like” and not “has achieved what you want” because many people want the single achievement someone has had without all the other stuff. They want millions of dollars, but don’t want the stress and lack of leisure time that millions often has with it. They want 6 pack abs, but don’t want to restrict their diet from their beer and cake. It boils down to a big problem,
Most people’s goals are incompatible with one another.
Many people at the upper levels of achievement don’t remember what it was like to be a novice or can’t even relate to that stage anymore. Just like in sports, the best athlete is NOT the best trainer. We’ve been trained to think that the best in a field is the person to listen to – it’s not. Use them to find out that a) the life you want can exist and can happen, b) observe the entirety of person to see if it’s still something that seems possible or if your goals are incompatible, c) discover the path that successful person went on, d) find someone on that same path that’s slightly ahead of you, and e) model that person that’s a bit ahead of you.
How many times have you sought out someone at the top of their field, asked for their advice, and realized it just wasn’t very valuable for you? Instead, who’s slightly ahead of you on where you want to be headed and can you seek that person out for advice?