How to Put Achievement on Steroids

Many of the successes in life come from trial and error and learning from repeated failures.  You go after what you want, notice what's not working and make adjustments until you get your desired outcome.  The problem with this is it can take a long time.  A really long time.

Fortunately, there's a shortcut.  It's called modeling.  Modeling is based on the premise that there are specific actions that produce a result.  So if you find someone who has the result you want and copy their actions, you will reproduce their results.  Instead of having to reinvent the wheel, you just reproduce what someone else has already figured out.

As a child, you naturally learned modeling the people around you.  A lot of your behaviors came from simply modeling your parents. 

Why You Need to Use Modeling

Now, you are probably an intelligent person.  You could figure out a large percentage of what it takes to be successful simply by applying your logical skills and using your past experiences as reference points.  However, there is a portion of success that comes from taking non-obvious, counterintuitive actions.  Learning these actions makes the modeling process so wonderful.  It's the minor distinction that took the person 10 years to figure out that you can learn from them in a few minutes and save yourself massive amounts of time.

Consider, for example, making money in business.  The approach that most people take is thinking about how they can get other people to give them money.  Seems like the natural things to do.  However, it won't work. The key is figuring out how to give massive value to others and then ask for money in return.  It is easy to get someone to give you a $1 when you've given them $10 worth of value.

Your reasoning abilities are only effective to the degree that you have an accurate map of reality.  The conclusions drawn when you have holes in your mental model will be invalid.  If your map of reality lacks the feature that says you can leverage compound interest to become financially free in the long term, you probably won't come to the conclusion that you should save 10% of your income.  The advantage of modeling is that it can fill in gaps and distortions in your model of reality much faster than you can on your own through trial and error.

How to Model

Some NLP practitioners utilize very formal procedures for the modeling of behaviour.  Although these can give very precise descriptions of fairly complicated patterns of behaviour, learning it requires some more formal training.  If this is something you would like to learn, I suggest getting some NLP training.

However, for most of your purposes, a relatively simple modeling procedure can be used.  Let's say you know a cook who makes an amazing chocolate cake.  But he doesn't have a recipe he uses; he just knows how to make the cake unconsciously.  So how do you go about getting the recipe (the model) from the cook? 

You put the cook in the kitchen and tell them to make the cake.  When he reaches for the first ingredient, you stop him and measure the amount of the ingredient and write it down.  You repeat this process for all of the ingredients.  You also notice how he mixes the ingredients together and how long he bakes it for. 

Next, you follow the recipe and bake the cake yourself as he watches you.  You then compare the cake you made to the cake he made.  If there is a difference, you ask him what you did incorrectly and continually refine the process.  After baking the cake maybe 10-20 times, you would get it down perfectly.  Now, you have the recipe for baking an amazing chocolate cake; you have modeled successful.

Let's generalize this process of modeling:

1. Find a model for the result you desire. Ideally, this should be a person you can interact with personally, but books, audio and videos can still be useful if they have sufficient detail.
2. Find out what their beliefs about the behaviour you desire to model are. Do they enjoy it? Do they find it easy? What does it mean to them?
3. If you can, put them in the situation where they exhibit the behaviour you desire to model.
4. Note their behaviours. Make sure to capture sufficient detail that the behaviour could be emulated by someone else based on your description.
5. Periodically interrupt them during the behaviour and question them on their internal process - their thoughts, feelings, internal images etc.
6. Repeat this process until you have sufficient detail.
7. You now have a basic model of their behaviour which includes:
   • Their external process (behaviour)
   • Their internal process (thoughts, feelings)
   • Their beliefs
8. Internalize the model through practice (to make the internal and external process automatic) and mental reconditioning (to internalize the beliefs.
9. Consistently get feedback and refine the model until you get the result that you desire.

For simple tasks, the modeling process can take a few hours.  For very complicated tasks, the process can months.  Nonetheless, modeling provides consistently faster results than simple trial and error.

An Example

Let's say you would like to learn to be more outgoing.  You have a certain friend who seems to be a good person to model.  Everyone he meets seems to like him and he is very easy to talk to.  So you decide to model him.

You start by looking at his behaviours.  The starting point might be:

• He is smiling most of the time.
• He makes eye contact with the person he is talking to.
• He jokes around a lot and finds the humour in any subject.
• He is completely focused on the person he is talking to and not easily distracted.

You then try to understand his internal process as he is conversing with people. What is he thinking? What is he focused on? What is he feeling?

• He thinks to himself: how can I make this fun? How can I make this person smile?
• His focus is entirely on the other person. He totally forgets about himself. This is the opposite of being self-conscious. He isn't thinking about how he is coming across.
• He is feeling relaxed, excited, and silly.

The final part is defining the beliefs that he has about socializing.

• Talking to people is fun
• Everyone is my friend
• At the core, everyone is a good person
• People are interesting
• If someone has a bad reaction to something I say or do, they are probably just having a bad day.

Now that you have a model, you work on internalizing the model over time.

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Modeling is a great to accelerate your achievement.  It makes it far easier to make massive process in a short period of time.  It allows you to leverage the experiences of others to help you become successful.