The Best Advice You’ll Ever Receive

When I find out who first told people to “take a millionaire to lunch and pick their brain,” I’m going to kill them.  Okay maybe that’s an overreaction.  But asking someone to “pick their brain” is a lousy strategy for becoming successful.  And my experience has been that the only people who employ that strategy are mostly lazy, not willing to do the work required to become successful.  I agreed to do this five times, and each time I ended up picking up the check and the person asking never really followed through on my advice. 

Truth is, the take-a-millionaire-to-lunch strategy isn’t really that effective.  Surprisingly, many successful people are not very good articulating what made them successful.  So they resort to clichés and tropes like: follow your passion, work smarter not harder, hustle, grind, etc.  Success is a much more complex result to achieve…

Here’s the best advice for success I could ever give you… 

Look for people (alive or dead) who have done what you desire to do, and have become the kind of person you desire to be. Then model how they lived their life.  Even people who can’t articulate their success, leave a well-documented roadmap of how they achieved it – if you will take the time and do the critical thinking to discover it.

- RG