RAW - Model Success - Take #3

Whatever goal you have in your business life or in your personal life, the fastest way to go out and accomplish it is to find somebody who's already achieved it and model their success, put their strategies to work for you. Otherwise, you're going to end up banging your head against the wall, increasingly frustrated, angry, running out of money, and it doesn't have to be that way. Success leaves clues, you just have to follow it. When I had my first software company, it was hard. And it took so long for us to get a customer, media, partners, investors. It just took so long, and we thought, "There has to be a faster way. This is ridiculous." Whatever we tried didn't seem to work, or if it did, it took just crazy amounts of time for things to come back to us. And the funny thing is, when your business sucks, your life sucks too. You don't see many entrepreneurs who have a crappy business and are loving their lives. They're so well integrated. And one day my mother saw how disappointed I was and how I was kind of at rock bottom, and she said, "Try out these Tony Robbins CDs." And she gave me this pack of CDs to listen to. And I was so desperate and low at the time that I would have tried anything. And so I popped my CDs into the CD player. I'm sitting on the living room chair, and I put the headset on so I'm not going to disrupt everybody else. And I start listening to my Tony Robbins CDs. And it dawns on me that this shouldn't be that hard. There has to be a faster way to accomplish our goals here. Somebody must have already figured this out. I shouldn't have to come up with everything myself. Somebody has already solved how to sell the software problem for me. I just have to find them and model their success. And so I started looking at companies like Microsoft and McAfee and Intuit and looked at how they got started. I don't care how Bill Gates makes an extra million dollars now. But how do you go from zero to one? How do you go from that startup idea to making this first million dollars? That was interesting to me. And so I researched them and started to put their strategies to work for me. And finally we started to have some momentum. You could see a shift in the business. We started getting customers faster. People started to pay attention to us more quickly. And I was happy. I was so excited, but also so frustrated. Like, why did this take so long for me to figure this out? Why did I try to come up with everything myself? And if you're just starting your business, or if you're at a point where you just can't seem to get past that next hurdle, whatever challenge you're facing right now, somebody has already figured it out. You just have to find them and model their success and make their strategies work for you. It's the fastest way to shortcut your path to success. Just model others who have already accomplished your goals. Good luck.