I’ve been trying to resolve a conundrum in my head for the last couple of weeks. The type of conundrum where you have a few choices, they all seem roughly equal in merit, and regardless of which one you pick, you’re going to have a severe case of FOMO (fear of missing out).
Can you relate?
We All Have Different Definitions of Success… and That’s OK
Getting advice is great in principal, but sometimes we make the mistake of getting too much advice. In particular, we get or take advice from people who might be massively successful, but their definition of success is completely different to our definition of success.
For example, one person’s idea of career success might look like a company with a hundred employees, multiple locations, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, and staff meetings every day.
Another person’s idea of career success might be a one-person business from home doing $100k per year in high-margin revenue, talking about their favorite board games.
Here’s the thing: neither option is better, and neither option is more morally virtuous, but the advice for achieving Option A is going to be significantly different to the advice for achieving Option B.
Why Would You Take Advice from People Who Haven’t Been Where You Want to Go?
When it comes to goals, clarity is power. The more specific you can be, within reason, the better. Compare the following two goals:
“I want to lose weight.”
“I want to lose twenty pounds of body fat within the next six months, whilst maintaining or increasing my lean muscle mass, and I want to do it in a way that’s totally enjoyable, where I don’t even feel like I’m working out.”
Which one gives you more power? Heck, which one sounds more exciting? And, to drive my point home, can you see how the second goal, because of its specificity, would cut out a lot of the generic weight-loss advice that’s out there?
What About a Pageant Example?
I see contestants get this wrong all the time. They choose to work with a particular pageant coach simply because that coach won a title at some point in the past, but they don’t take into account what that coach’s definition of success in pageantry looks like, and whether it’s anything like their own.
Or they choose them for interview coaching, when either the title they won had a negligible interview component, or they completely bombed interview and only won the pageant because of their on-stage performance.
Just because a particular coach had their own personal success, or success with a particular client or system, doesn’t automatically make them the best coach for you.
The Homework: Modeling vs Copying
I talk about the concept of modeling in today’s video, as in modeling someone who has already achieved the very same thing you want to achieve. It’s a concept I came across early on in my personal development journey, and it’s the secret to compressing decades into days (it’s also how I was able to teach myself tennis and eventually became a head tennis coach, something that most coaches would tell you is impossible).
If that sounds intriguing to you:
Do a search for “modeling vs copying”.
Learn what modeling is, and how it differs from copying.
Pick someone to model for your most important 2027 goal, and compress decades into days.
If you have any questions or want to join in the conversation, remember to join our new community (https://www.skool.com/the-pageant-project-1687/).
Best,
Adrian.
