Have you ever wanted to be successful at a particular skill or field?
All my life deep down I wanted my own master or sensei.
A mentor to help guide me through life, from my career to business, or just in my everyday life.
What I came to discover is there are millions of people in my same position.
Not to talk down on my parents, but sadly they haven’t taught me anything that would prepare me for life.
I mean even the simple things: like how to cook, or even more importantly what do you do if you end up in a car accident.
Honestly, I am still not sure what to do to this day and I’m 31 years old!
I mean I know if it’s a serious wreck you call 911, but what happens if it’s just a fender bender.
When does your insurance come into play?
It’s not like they have a class on it.
Trust me I looked.
It’s like this hidden rule you’re just suppose to figure it out all on your own.
Better yet just trust that society is going to teach you and then throw you into the school system.
You don’t have to look far and you can tell thats not true.
Unfortunately the teachers teaching us, and our kids, are in the same boat and are just trying to figure it out themselves.
For the most part they are just following the “script” they’ve been given.
No one takes the time to dive deep, study, and specialize in a particular field.
That’s when I realized and wanted to understand the concept of mastery.
This led me to my search of those who were successful in life and how I can be successful.
In school we’re taught not to copy off another’s paper or homework assignment, but in reality…
That’s exactly how we need to approach the road to success.
If the student who is passing the class and excelling effortlessly why wouldn’t I want to follow his process, his system, his paper.
We Need To Learn How To Model Success!
In the past, people would have a trade or a business…
in order to pass on the business, or if anyone wanted to learn the trade, the tradesman would have to take on an apprentice.
This is when the apprentice would learn the skills and techniques it required to be successful in the trade.
But the apprentice wasn’t learning 20 different things, everything they learned was focused on a specific trade.
They would dive deep, and they learned the art of…
Specialization
That is the key to success in any field.
One has to learn to specialize.
But how do you specialize?
This is where education comes in, but not just any education…
Self-education.
It’s time to create your own curriculum.
Research should now be your best friend.
You’re going to create your own college course.
What is the thing that you want to learn and go really deep.
I say give yourself at least a year in this subject.
I am a strong believer that you can change your life within a year.
Just think about this…
There are 365 days in a year,
if you study one thing for at least 365 days, that means wherever you are you can create huge difference between you and your competition in the market where they may only study a few days a week.
So what books are on your new desired skill, what seminars, who are the top 5 leaders in the industry, do they have a course, what youtube videos are on this subject?
Immerse yourself !
Study them, analyze their techniques, what are the strategies they used to get to where they are.
And here is where you get good, don’t just listen and watch but…
Implement
Results doesn’t have to take years to come into affect.
The thing about this game of getting good at anything is experimentation.
You have to test and keep testing until it works.
Success is not overnight but the more you throw something on the wall the more opportunities you will see what sticks.
But here is the beauty.
You have found a focus to specialize in and you are copying (modeling) the ones who came before you and have done years of testing for you.
So the years it may have taken you to discover what works, you now have a huge head start rather than years it took only weeks or months.
The idea is not to reinvent the wheel but take the invented wheel and add it to your car.
Once the vehicle is in motion (successful) you can test and tweak to see how you can make it faster or better.
When copying the successful it’s best to model the framework of the system.
Too many of us try to just copy another students test and we get caught cheating.
Your efforts may pay off for a while but eventually it can flop.
That is why I say to go deep.
Going deep means the reasoning why the successful person system works.
When you do this you now become the master and are able to replicate that skill can demand greatly for your services.
That is what it means to specialize.
I did this personally with my coding skills and still am.
I am not at the highest level of where I want to be, but I am taking the concept of diving deep and learning the why behind how and why coding works.
Now with even the basic knowledge of these skills, I am able to share my knowledge on how others can do and learn this too.
Going deep can even allow you to see flaws or inconsistencies in others processes.
You become, in a sense, a searcher for truth.
You begin to question “what is the truth in these books, the courses that holds true and can be utilized?”.
When you filter through the noise and see that, it’s like you gained a super power.
That is why I am building my business for young developers.
I want to give more super powers away to others who were like me growing up.
Oblivious to how the world works.
When you obtain understanding you gain more confidence in yourself because essentially you become a problem solver.
And problem solving really can be transferred to anything you do.
So don’t become a victim to life, but learn to be a problem solver.
To recap how to be successful in any field…
- Specialize
- Self-educate and GO DEEP
- Then Implement and Test
Thats it, these 3 things will yield you tremendous results. It has for me when I got my first job as a web developer.
If you would like I have a goal calendar I created to help me keep track of progress on a daily.
It has 3 lines to the left for your goals because as Jim Collins said…
“if you have more than 3 priorities your don’t have any”
I couldn’t agree more!
So you can get my calendar HERE
and if you like these kind of articles and want to see more be sure to give me a follow, because there is more to come for certain.