HOW to Be UNIQUE in 5 Minutes

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is: Try to be different. Over to you, Jimmy Iovine. I wake up every morning with espresso to keep me going.

And I would also say, try to be unique and try to be different. Everybody today, if you put on like alternative radio, the guitars sound exactly the same. You know, it's like, it's, a lot of people blame the record companies for that, but it's got nothing to do with the record companies. It's got to do with the lack of imagination that we're going through right now in certain areas of music. And kids think that they're supposed to copy things on television or on the internet, and that's how they're gonna get successful. Well, the best way to be successful is to have it influence you, but make up your own thing.

[Speaker] So I'm a big believer in modeling success. I think you can learn a lot from other people, I think whatever problem that you have faced, somebody else has already faced it before. And by trying to come up with every unique thing yourself, that's a recipe for failure. And it's something that I learned early on in my career as an entrepreneur, failing and failing and failing. And then I realized, hey, I'm not the first guy to try to do this before. And I modeled the success of Bill Gates in particular to help build my software company up. I think though The part of the story that maybe I don't talk enough about is that in the modeling of the success, you need to make it your own. You need to apply the knowledge that worked for them to your situation. And so, you know, Bill Gates's partnership strategy that helped skyrocket my business, I didn't do the exact same thing as him. I took that idea of partnering and looked at, okay, who can I partner with in my industry? 'Cause it wasn't the exact same industry. I remember when I was training with my media agency and they were training me to be a better speaker, and every week I'd get assignments from my media coach, Janie. Every week she'd give me assignments, and they always felt a little bit off to me. They were always— they always stretched myself, they always pushed my boundaries, but what she asked me to do never felt quite right. I always had to shift it to make it my own. And she had all the knowledge, you know, she'd worked with tons of people before, she had improved a lot of people before, and the message she was giving me was, was really good, just not perfect for me. I needed to, I needed to take that knowledge and then make it my own. Same thing for, for Steve, who ran the agency. He would give me feedback and tips on how to get better and give me assignments that also never felt fully me, and I did them anyway, and And through that process, I learned what I liked and what I didn't like and then made my own thing. And I think that's the thing. At first, you can copy. You can copy to understand how something is done. You can copy to get some knowledge. But then you gotta twist it to make it your own because people don't want just a copy of somebody else, right? There's a lot of people who try to copy what I'm doing on my YouTube channel. And it's awesome. I don't care about them. People keep notifying me to say, "Hey Evan, this person copied you." I'm like, "Great, I'm not looking back." 'Cause you can't be a better Evan than Evan. I'm looking forward to what else I can do to be different and continue to make a mark. And so I think that's such an important part of modeling success is that if you watch these videos and you learn something from them, you can't just do exactly what they're doing. You've gotta take it and make it your own. And part of what I love about the videos, and I stress a lot on the channel, is that I don't want you to be Steve Jobs or be Bill Gates or be Oprah Winfrey. I want you to take pieces of them to make you the best version of yourself. That's the point. That's why I can learn from someone like Kanye or someone like Donald Trump, even though they have personalities that rub people a lot the wrong way. And I'm saying I want you to be Kanye or be Trump or be these characters, but there's a lot you can learn from them. And a lot of people can't pull out the knowledge and the genius from sometimes the craziness. And that's great because I'm not saying be Kanye, I'm saying Learn from Kanye to be the best version of yourself. And so whatever knowledge is out there, it's not going to work exactly just by copying it. It's going to be by modifying it to fit you and allow you to be the best version of yourself. So the question of the day today is, I want to know one thing you've modeled from somebody else and twisted it and molded it to be your own thing and have had success with it. I think it could be a really helpful experience for others to read about your success and get some ideas on how they could do it themselves? Leave in the comments below, really curious to find out. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.