07-Copying Mentors Easiest Path to Success!
b'Today, I am going to talk about one of the most critical topics I feel for success, copying mentors. One of the concepts that can accelerate your success the most, and probably one of the easiest. All that said, it is one that almost nobody does well or completely.\\n\\n\\n\\nLet me explain this a little bit. Everybody agrees that it\\u2019s good and important to find a mentor. When you find a mentor, there\\u2019s really three possibilities when they make a recommendation or that you have something, that you have a question for them. Either it\\u2019s going to be very clear, and their advice is great, and you hadn\\u2019t thought about it, and it sounds reasonable to you, and you accept it. The other one in the opposite end is that it\\u2019s something that the mentor didn\\u2019t really know anything about it, but it is something that you know and understand, and it\\u2019s something that the mentor basically would just agree with you to go and follow your own path.\\n\\nThe middle one is the most critical area. That\\u2019s the area where I refer to as having a dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. There\\u2019s nothing you can say to convince the mentor that your idea is correct or right, and there\\u2019s not a logical conclusion or a logical path that can get you to receive that mentor\\u2019s advice. That is: what is that critical area?\\n\\nWhat I do in that situation is if I picked my mentor well and it\\u2019s in his area, I will pick and take their path, no matter how convinced I am that mine would be better but I can\\u2019t explain it, I can\\u2019t prove it. This really is a precept to getting into what I call copying mentors, and copying well.\\n\\nBear with me a moment as I explain how critical this topic is, and how well it\\u2019s been used by some people or countries or industries. Let me follow the Japanese. The Japanese have been very good at copying or mimicking other people\\u2019s products. Everybody knows about the car industry, but let\\u2019s think way back maybe 30-40 years, something like that. Originally, what the Japanese did is they started copying electronics, radios, etc. The Germans were the masters in that; they had all the great receivers, etc. but the Japanese decided to copy them.\\n\\nWhat they did was they copied exactly to start out. They didn\\u2019t add their own flare to it at all until they had mastered the copy first. How else did they do that? They did it with watches. The Swiss had the watches, the Rolex, etc. Only after many, many years, the Japanese copying those very precisely, then they went on to make innovations or adaptations of them. It was only after they mastered that which already existed. Then they went on, of course, to do that in cameras and cars. In each case, they first copied very much so.\\n\\nActually, in Japanese, there\\u2019s a compliment that you can pay somebody by actually saying: \\u201cYou copy well.\\u201d Where if you said that to an American engineer, he\\u2019d get very insulted and excited, etc. I actually have some stories in my forthcoming book about a General Manager in Chevrolet who actually tried to get some engineer just to do it the way it was already done, and how he had to fight with him for a month to get him to just copy something that already existed.\\n\\nI\\u2019ve copied that exact same philosophy, those exact same ideas in things where I basically have tried to find the particular mentors, and it could have been in computer programming or it could have been in language, etc., I copied what I was told was the right way to do it by somebody who is knowledgeable. It worked very, very well for me.\\n\\nWhy do people seem to resist to it? They seem to resist because they always feel like: \\u201cI have a mind, too, and I thought\\u2026\\u201d Forget thinking for a moment. Save your thinking. Put it all down. First master what the master has already done. If you were to learn Karate or Taekwondo, a form of Karate or something like that \\u2013 what would you do? You would go to the master, and you would mimic and do exactly what he said all the time. You wouldn\\u2019t say: \\u201cI thought I would do it a slightly diffe...'