I was catching up on some videos last week when I got to an excerpt from Alexis Neely’s master class session on pricing from Ramit Sethi’s Earn1K program. You can watch it if you sign up to Ramit’s list from that link, but read the post, it’s got a lot of good stuff there.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t get as much as I hoped I would from the video, but to be fair, it was only an excerpt and I wasn’t expecting to get all the gold for free. Like I said yesterday, I look for an insight an hour on these kinds of things, so getting one in 15 minutes is 400% beyond my “break even.”
The big insight I got from this lesson was about modelling. If you believe, as I do, that success is duplicatable, then a big part of the puzzle is finding someone who’s already done what you want (in any area) and doing what they do. That’s all modelling is: modelling or emulating your behaviours (input) after someone who’s done what you want to do (output.)
So why don’t more people get massive success? A big part of it is the (perceived) need for individuality – people who go down this path tend to want to do things differently than other people do, and it’s why they’re here in the first place, really, so it’s hard to follow a script.
But the other part is that the modelling might be partial. For example, if you’re trying to sell a product, and you set up the same ads, pricing, etc as the competitor you want to be like, you can (and often will) totally fail if you don’t know about their back end sales, supply chain efficiencies, and so on. This is why marketers often recommend you buy your competitors’ products to get some of these insights. Of course they also often say this to persuade you that buying things is good, including the course they’re selling, but as I wrote last week, it’s possible for both sides to be right.
Anyway, just blindly modelling what you can see is often a recipe for break even at best, at least compared to your potential, so it’s important to get scientific here and come up with some theories about how else things might be happening, and then come up with some ways to test that. And in the process, you might invent a few new ideas, which is something I’ll talk about another day.
Or, better still, hire a coach or mentor that can get you those insights. Working with a direct competitor is difficult but not impossible (thought partnerships etc) but you can also find past employees or retired founders.
I’m using business as the example today, but it’s true for other things as well – for instance, if I tried to eat at a restaurant like my friend with 8% body fat, I’d get the exact opposite of his results if I didn’t also see and model the 100+ kilometres he runs every week.
Are you using modelling as a practice in your goal monitoring? How do you dig into the stuff that isn’t easily visible? I’ll try to give a few of my examples in future posts, but let me know what’s up with you in the comments.
Photo by BinaryApe
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