Food for Thought #14: Footsteps of the Wise
“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” – Matsuo Basho
Have you ever caught yourself looking at someone else’s site and thinking, “Wow… That looks great. I need my site to look like that”?
Or hearing a fellow WA member talk about doing a particular thing to their site and it “made all the difference” and now you think you need to do it too?
Tony Robbins talks a lot about the concept of modeling. By finding someone who is already successful, and doing exactly what they did, you can be successful as well. Of course, I am a big believer in the idea of modeling. And I have at least a dozen or so people that I strongly consider as mentors.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people misinterpret how modeling works.
Modeling BS
Modeling is not about following another’s exact steps. You can’t just follow what someone else did – their actions – to achieve results like it is some kind of recipe. There are too many variables; life just doesn’t work that way.
You want to model their belief systems (BS). What problem were they trying to solve? What factors did they consider? What beliefs did they have, or have to adopt, in order to get the results they were looking for? Why did they actually do what they did?
I’m not saying you can’t also perform some of the same actions. For example, if I tell you that I write articles of a minimum of 1000 words (or 1500, or 5000, or whatever), then of course you can perform those same actions and write 1000 words. But merely repeating the same actions, or performing the same tasks, without understanding why I write so many words will not help you in the long run.
Example
I may be doing it because Google loves long articles, for instance. Then, for the sake of argument, let’s say Google wakes up one day and decides that 400 word articles are far more important. Because I know why I was doing it, I will naturally adjust. But you might not, and then you start getting poor results without really understanding what is happening.
Therefore, as Basho stated earlier, don’t just follow in other’s footsteps… you may not actually know where you are going. Instead, look at what they looked at – the structure behind why they do what they do.
When you truly understand the WHY, the HOW becomes effortless.
Recent Comments
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Very well expressed. We make our own path, aiming for the same objective as someone successful, but doing it in a manner that fits us.
Thanks for this awesome post! It really makes a lot of sense. Not following the footsteps of experts but what they aim for. Thanks for the reminder! Much impressed! See you at the top of the online world soon!
I agree.
To follow blindly a mentor as talented as he could be,
it doesn't help us to move forward. On contrary it can
block us in our progress.
Thanks for this informative post.
Have a nice weekend!
Ingrid
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Very interesting concept AJ.
When you think about it, our WA training is setting us up to do some modeling. We are learning what Kyle or Carson or Jay ... or any of the great trainers we have in the community DO. But the training sinks in when we learn how the think.
There is a reason why the Tasks in the training are so important. They help secure the knowledge of what they do, but it's dialog in the instruction before the the tasks that gives us some insight into how they think.
I often catch myself going back to certain parts of the training to review the ... how they think part.
Exactly.
It's easy to get sucked into the "that looks awesome" mentality and add something to our site we see and like, but not realize that the site owner did that particular thing to solve a particular problem or achieve a particular effect. If you aren't trying to solve the same challenge, it might not work the way you think it will.
I think Kyle does it right. He's not just showing you the "what", but he goes into detail and explains why he's doing it that way.