Why You Shouldn’t Study Successful People

This is possibly the biggest mistake that I see people make when it comes to studying the behaviors of successful people, the people that you put up on the pedestal that you idolize, that you look up to, and you’re like, I want to be like you. The big mistake we make is we try to emulate the activities, the actions, the systems that those people have now, and we lose sight, or rather, we don’t have any sight to what they did to get there. So, yeah, we should be studying successful people. Absolutely. There are, you know, success leaves clues. We can follow in the footsteps, but do not do what they do. Do what they did. Such a huge distinction, and it’s an easy trap to fall into.

And this comes to mind because last week I was working with an entrepreneur who was asking me, hey, specifically through the lens of my morning routine and the systems that my team uses for producing content scale and my feedback is, hey, listen, here’s what I do now. But this is not what I did to get here. My morning routine today is drastically different than the morning routine I had in getting here. In the beginning, when I was trying to build leverage, all you have is time and hustle. I didn’t have any experience. I didn’t have any leverage. I didn’t have resources. I didn’t have people in my life that I could lean into and I could deploy towards the, our collective goals.

So I just had to be the one that was doing all the brute force, grunt labor. Right. And so I would wake up early. I’m not a morning person, but I was that 05:00 a.m. person for many years, writing every single day, doing the work that only I could do. I needed the extra hours to be able to put out the output that was required, because, again, I didn’t have the resources to get leverage through hiring or through technology or through any of the other means. Right. And over time, as I just kind of beat my head against the flywheel, waking up early, grinding around the clock, working real hard, doing all that stuff, the flywheel started to move faster and faster.
I started to get more leverage that I could then deploy and buy back some of my time, start to focus my time and energy on the other areas of life that were maybe that now had more potential output, given my relative number of inputs, but it didn’t start that way. And so today, the morning routine that I have is probably not super accessible or helpful for somebody who’s just starting off on their journey. And I do share those things because I’m a voyeur I like to know what people ahead of me and what people just generally are doing with their lives. I’m curious. I like to learn in that, but just understand that when I say, hey, I don’t wake up these days until about 630, and I don’t start working until 08:00 a.m. i’m puttering around for the first hour and a half, not doing anything, not any, like, super formalized morning routine process. I’m just kind of puttering, getting my mind right and then starting work casually and leaning into it. That won’t work for you if you’re at the beginning of the journey, you can’t follow that same game plan in the same way when it comes to, say, content production or leading a team or building a company, you can’t look at what my systems and my processes are now and think, oh, I can just duplicate that.
It won’t work. And maybe I’m not the person that you’re comparing or that you’re looking to emulate in this way, but whoever that person is in your life that you’re looking up to right now that has that level of success that you’re ascribing to, just understand that what they do right now, which is easy to see, like, you can see their behaviors, it’s much harder to get to where they’re going, doing what they’re doing, rather than doing what they did. In fact, if you do what they do now, you probably won’t get anywhere, because I know plenty of people who adopt the similar work ethic that I have now. Not even work ethic. It’s not the right way to think about it. The work that I do now is less physically demanding. The hours that I have to grind is less. I work just as much, but I work on things that look like a whole lot more fun.
So, you know, different strokes, different folks. But this is where we get to staying within your zone of genius and being able to do the work that only you are uniquely suited to do. And when you do that, your work doesn’t really look like work. It looks a whole lot like play. But all that’s to say is, I just want you to be very cognizant when you’re out there and you’re observing and you’re trying to duplicate. Because, again, we talk about funnel hacking all the time. This is a great way to grow a business. Go look at what the competitors are doing, go look what others in the industry are doing, and then reverse engineer what’s working and then give that a shot.
But you have to be aware that you don’t see underneath the hood. You can’t see why they’ve made the decisions that they’ve made to do the things that they are in the way that they are. And it might be a function of some unique advantage they have in the marketplace that allows them to run their funnel in XYZ way. And so you need to be aware that it’s not just enough to copy paste and expect to get the same results, because there’s a whole lot of context you’re going to be missing. Missing. And you need to be aware of that so that you can tweak and adapt and you can make educated guesses as to why it might work better or worse for them than for you. And that could be because they have advantages and resources and things that you just don’t have at this point. That’s why I’m a big fan of people who create content of their journey.
On the way up, you can go back and see what they were saying at the beginning. And Alex Formozzi talks about this, one of the reasons he does so much content, and he wants to document his journey of building a billion dollar company. And so you can look back and see, where was this guy at when his business was only at 40 million, at 100,000,200. And you can see the behaviors, the mindsets, the philosophies, they shift as you ascend through those levels. But the things that he’s doing now, the things that I’m doing now, they won’t be helpful to you at level zero if you’re just starting off, or level two or level five, right? You need to be aware at different levels, the different strategies and tactics are going to be a little bit different. And so this is all to say, like, take with a grain of salt. When people like myself give you advice without context to your unique situation, because it might not be perfectly aligned with what you need to hear and what will actually move you forward. That is where the value of having a personal coach or some kind of mentorship program comes into play.

They can look at what you’re doing, they can understand your context, and they can give you feedback based off of their long history, their I experiences. But when I’m putting out content for the general masses here, you just have to understand that I have to keep it general and vague and context less. So everybody can get as much maximum value out of it as possible. But if you want to get personal value out of it, you need to either take this information, this advice and contextualize it to your situation, or come find me and ask me and maybe if we’re a good fit, we can work together. To do that, go to beyondtheapex.com dot if that’s not you, cool. Totally understand. I appreciate you guys being here. I hope this brings you a ton of value, and if not, I will try again tomorrow.

But if it did, awesome, huzzah. Let me know. Leave me a review on itunes or Spotify. Those are the two platforms that it helps on the most. And I appreciate you guys for being here. I’ll catch you tomorrow, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.