Copy Successful People
A description of this post.
I am a believer in watching successful people and copying what they do. Something I like to do, to really learn from what I learn is I read their books and outline them in a language I understand and rewrite it to teach it to someone else. I am a believer that you really learn something when you sit down and write out how you would teach it to others. The beauty of this method is I really learn the subject, and the second best thing about it, is it becomes very easy for me to refresh my memory at a level of very high understanding when I go back and read the teaching post I wrote. This idea is perhaps one of the most powerful I can give you. Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you get value from this post.
Introduction to this post.
This video presents eight simple habits designed to transform how you approach and solve problems, turning them from painful obstacles into enjoyable puzzles. The key is to build a foundation of discipline, energy, and continuous learning, supported by practical systems that streamline your life and amplify your efforts.
The eight habits of one successful person:
- Start on Hard Mode
- Workout Every Day
- Measure Daily
- Learn Daily
- Teach Daily
- Prepare for Tomorrow
- Keep a Do Not Do List
- Keep It DRY (Do Not Repeat Yourself)
The eight habits of a successful person explained.
Habit 1: Start on Hard Mode
You hear people say building momentum with easy wins. F easy wins. I'm all about going hard. When I'm creating, when I'm writing, when I'm strategizing, when I'm thinking of the biggest problems in my life, I do it first thing in the morning because I want to be creating connected to my Creator. And all I know is that the more I build the muscle of starting with the hardest thing, it also builds my confidence. Cuz confidence is built when we keep the commitments we make to ourselves in private. And anytime people come to me, they say like, "Oh, I don't feel very confident, I'm uncertain about myself," I always say it's cuz you're not keeping the promises you made to yourself when nobody else is watching. We often commit to the big project cuz that's fun, that's exciting, that's easy, but the game is won on the daily discipline of doing the hard thing first, not putting it off to when you feel in the mood or you feel it's going to be easier. Start in hard mode.
Habit 2: Workout Every Day
It's not always the work that's holding us back; it's the energy and focus we bring to it. Small problems feel massive when you have low energy, when you're not feeling good about yourself. Every little thing feels like a mountain. They also feel massive when you constantly live in your comfort zone.
A lot of people see me today and don't realize that not that long ago I was a little chubby and my whole life I struggled with my weight. I weighed 265 lbs when I was younger and I just went up and down and up and down and for a long time it was this yo-yo and I always had an excuse. And then I eventually said no, I'm going to do the hard thing and I'm going to get way outside my comfort zone. And I decided to get visible abs in 90 days. It was crazy but I got ripped. But guess what else working hard did for me? It also turned out that my nutrition and my body were connected and allowed me to really activate my ADHD into a superpower. It built my confidence outside the gym even though it also shaped my body.
That's why today, if you see anything I post on social media, it's always about "sweat every day." I believe that when I go to the gym, it's about my mind, not my physicality. I exhaust the body to tame the mind. I do the reps in the gym to make sure that my mind knows what to focus on. The crazy part is some people go to the gym feeling super tired and they're like, "I don't want to go to the gym, I'm just I'm already tired." I've never left the gym not feeling better and it gives you the energy to work on life's puzzles.
If you have trouble with being consistent going to the gym, here's an advanced move: schedule it with somebody else. Decide to choose a workout partner where you made a commitment every day at 8:00 a.m. you go to the gym together. You will do more for somebody else than you'll ever do for yourself. I've never canceled going to the gym when I knew I was going to have to meet somebody else there. So do yourself a favor, find a training buddy and go all in. I've never met one person that couldn't find 30 minutes to get down on the ground, do some push-ups, do some pull-ups, do some jumping jacks, do some sit-ups, do whatever bodyweight movements to get a sweat on to feel better about themselves. And that energy will allow you to take over the world.
Habit 3: Measure Daily
You can't just brute force your way to success or hope your way to wealth. If you're like most people feeling a lack of direction or spinning your wheels or not feeling motivated, it's usually because you can't physically see if you're even moving towards your goal. Most people don't even have goals.
Think about money. One of my core philosophies is if I want my money to grow, I got to focus on it. And I look at my bank account daily. Every day I get email reports for all the companies I'm involved in with the daily cash position and I personally look at all of my bank accounts. Why? I learned a long time ago that if I want something to grow, I got to look at it. I got to focus on it. I can't pretend like I don't know. I track everything. I track all of my food, my workouts, all my businesses have dashboards, scorecards, they have metrics, KPIs. If something's important to you, you want to measure it. And if you distill it into a metric, it means you understand it. Most people can't distill their life into the right measurement, which means they don't understand it, which makes it impossible to improve.
Measuring things daily is a must. First off, it gives visibility into the things that are important to you. So if you want to grow your business or you want to get healthier, you have to measure those things because then you'll focus on them. Just the act of measuring it and writing it down will change your prioritization. You'll be like, "Okay, I'm measuring my weight again, it didn't move yesterday, what do I got to change today?" And the cool part is it also gamifies your growth. It makes it a thing that you measure and see if you're getting better over time. And some things like my food, I measure throughout the day so that way it makes it fun and all I'm trying to do is take my best score and try to beat it every time. It turns life into this fun video game.
If you want something to get better, the higher precision that you measure it with, the tooling that you use to measure, the frequency of measurement is the first step. Most people struggle in their life or in business and it's because they haven't broken down each step from the initial concept to the finished revenue. This is the big idea: what you focus on will expand, and when you measure daily, the thing you want to grow will grow. The first step towards progress is just looking where to step.
Habit 4: Learn Daily
The problem is that so many people hit a wall. They want to grow, but then they hit what I call their complexity ceiling. And what I've learned is that each level, there's a new devil. Usually what happens when people hit those ceilings, they just spiral inside their own head. They keep searching for answers, but they're missing information.
When I was 17, my dad did one of the coolest things ever, which is he gave me an unlimited budget for books. He said as long as I finished them, he'd buy me the next one. Today I've read over 1,800 books. My life has been shaped by books. Books are incredible. They can give you the confidence to tackle any new and bigger problems. It's literally the cheat code. Think about it: for 20 bucks, you can get 20 years of knowledge from some person that became an expert on a topic and read it in 8 hours.
These are my three rules of reading:
- Don't read just in case, read just in time. People ask me, "Hey Dan, what book should I read?" I'm like, "What are you dealing with?" Just in time is the thing you need to learn to apply to your life today. Just in case is almost kind of like entertainment. Read books with the number one problem you have in your life right now and execute what you read.
- I read to learn, not to finish. Some people are so OCD when they start a book, they won't allow themselves to start another book until they finish the book, even if it's not relevant. Most of the books I've started, as soon as I find that golden nugget, I go execute on it. If I decide to read it, cool. If I don't, I don't mind. I probably have five or six books on the go right now. I read the first three chapters, if I get something awesome from it, I'll then go to ChatGPT and ask it to give me the seven top takeaways from the book, learn those, and see if there's anything in those seven that I want to learn. Then I'll go to that chapter. Other than that, I move on.
- Read books to serve others. This one is a game changer. The bigger move is to ask yourself, for your customers, for the person that you serve, what could you read to add value to their life? I believe every person should wake up to create the most value for other people. Read books that could help them. I believe you receive what you desire for others.
It doesn't have to be just books. Find mentors to follow on social media and watch them regularly.
Habit 5: Teach Daily
What good is consuming 1800 books if you're not retaining or using it? There's this old concept called The Learning Pyramid. It says you only retain about 10% by reading alone, but by teaching someone, you'll retain about 90%. When I started making my role about teaching, everything changed in my life. In my 20s, I just expected everybody I hired to just know how to do the thing. It turns out that's a really bad way to lead. Now, I literally don't go a single day without achieving some kind of teaching because it reinforces the learning.
Here's how I'd recommend you do it:
- Teach one-to-one: colleagues, team members, spouse.
- Teach to a group: leadership training for your company, youth program, or even a live Q&A.
- Teach in your content: Pull out your phone and talk to it. Teach a concept, a lesson, an insight that you got that day, and just post it on social media.
The cool thing about social media is you can teach anything at any time to anyone. Not saying anybody's going to watch, but it's about you retaining the information, not necessarily how many views you get. Building a teaching habit forces you to learn new things.
Habit 6: Prepare for Tomorrow
This is actually the opposite of what people are talking about. If you really want to set yourself up for success, it's not a morning routine. Here's what most people do: they change their alarm from 7 to 5:00 a.m., getting up a little early, and then they stack 10 things together and power in some morning routine. Then in a few days, it all falls apart.
People see me post stories at 4:00 a.m. and think I'm crazy, but I'm not that impressive. The only reason my morning routine works is because of what I do the day and night before. So here's how it looks. I call it the daily shutdown.
- I review my day. At the end of the day, I take any open loops and I write them in a list. This list is a perpetual list of things that I want to get done, and I use it to prioritize and block in my calendar. I dump anything that's still an open loop that I didn't get to, I put it in my laptop, I categorize it, I put it into my calendar, and then I shut my laptop. Why? Because I want to be present with the people I spend time with, which is my family.
- I prepare the work. I look at my calendar and my projects and make sure the things that I need to do, the actual work, are in the description of the calendar. If it's not, I reach out to the people or I go grab it and I copy-paste it there so that it is ready to go.
- I go to bed on time. I think most sins would be solved if you just went to bed on time. I'm not that impressive, I just go to bed at like 9-9:30 and I get up really early because that early morning time when it's quiet is where I get the most work. And no TV show at 10:00 p.m. at night is worth me not having that focused time. How about you set your alarm for when you're going to go to bed and honor it?
Habit 7: Keep a Do Not Do List
We assume growth is about doing the right things, but in my experience, I got so much more leverage by not doing the wrong things. The advice you usually hear is about adding more to your plate. The truth is that's not easy when you're already overwhelmed. But we forget we're allowed to remove.
I do this program called King's Club for 15 to 20-year-old youth and the number one question they ask is, "I want to be successful, what do I need to do?" And my answer is always the same: The truth is, it's not what I did, it's what I don't do. What I don't do is I don't drink, I don't do drugs, don't eat sugar, I don't gamble, I don't vape. I don't do all the things that I know are going to hold me back. If you need to take a substance to change your state because you're not happy with who you are, that's an issue.
The big idea: every new level came when I gave up a bad habit. It's almost like if you made a list of everything you're not willing to give up, I would consider that the reason why you're never going to win. Here's how I do it in practice: I reflect a lot on decisions I've made and ask myself, if I had to make that again today, would it be an "F yeah"? A lot of people say yes to things that are 2, 3, 4, 5 months into the future. What if it was tonight? If you're not enthusiastically excited to do it, you're allowed to say no.
Here's the way I think about it, simple scales:
- Level one: Stop bad habits, and you know what those are. It's literally the thing that you wish other people didn't find out about.
- Level two: Stop low-value tasks. Anything that you're doing that you could pay somebody else a quarter of what you get paid per hour to do, let the other person have the employment.
Habit 8: Keep It DRY (Do Not Repeat Yourself)
This is for the pros. If you're serious about tackling life with speed and without burning out, you'll make this a habit. DRY stands for Do Not Repeat Yourself.
Most people assume if you want more money, you got to work harder. Not true. The most successful people get obsessed with actually doing less. And the reason why is they don't want to repeat themselves. If they create a system, if they have to give somebody something to do, they want to build a checklist so that every time it happens the same way. People that drive themselves crazy is because they're always having to tell people how to do stuff. They never thought, "Hey, if I'm going to do this a thousand times in my life, maybe I should sit down, document it, and give it to somebody else to follow."
So, for example, recently I was in Chicago meeting with my team and we're launching my newest book, Software as a Science. And I've got the task of signing 500 books. I sit down and I think about the process and I map out a simple five-person book signing process. I had 60 minutes in the calendar to sign those 500 books and I ended up doing it in 18. How did I do it? Systems.
In software development, you write code that is DRY. That concept you can apply to your whole life. For example, I always wear the same outfit. I have the same blue shirts, the same beige pants, the same white shoes. It is my uniform. I have like 27 versions of it, but I go into my closet, I wear the same stuff, it matches with everything. I don't have to think about it ever again.
When I make decisions once, I try to look for stencils, which is kind of like a pattern that I can give somebody else. For example, when I'm creating my events, I've got like a one-day and a two-day event stencil. It's like a blueprint so that I have a stencil I give to somebody else who is organizing the event to follow.
Everything in life is like a process you go from raw materials to some form of finished goods. If you design it, it removes all the stress out of it. You can either choose to run your systems or a lack of systems will run you. Your life will dramatically change when you create systems for your personal life. And James Clear probably said it best: "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." Having systems in your life creates the foundation for success.
I have read the original text 4 times and after writing this, I decided to live it, so check back in a year and I will let you know how it worked for me.
