Why not to follow the “How I did it” recipes
A tale of misbehavior.
There are a lot of people who made it, people who reached millions of followers on social media, thousands of dollars in revenue with their side hustle, extreme productivity, sometimes they write how they achieve it, but you should not try to follow their steps blindly.
1. Butterfly effect
What is the problem with someone following the same exact steps of someone successful? You might not be in the same place that person was.
And you are in our first problem:
When a FIRE advocate says she retired at 35 and starts by saying that she could do it by saving 30% of her income, it sounds like something anyone of us can do, but then she says she earned +$100K a year… and you earn less than half of that, things start to get complicated.
The first problem trying to follow someone else’s path is that you are not that person, your circumstances, your preferences, your mindset, even your location might be different and, if you are familiar with the butterfly effect:
small changes in initial conditions might lead to very different results.
2. Invariance
Assuming you can start with the same initial conditions, say, you start a dropshipping business, use the exact same products that worked for a person, same shopify template, same product photos, same copies for value proposition.
Then you find other problem:
When the person you followed created his store, the product might been popular and now it lost it’s shine or a powerful word of mouth he was never aware of helped him or less competition in that niche.
The second problem trying to follow other people success is that the environment where you are trying to follow the same steps might be different, in fact, it can be entirely different, if you don’t believe me, try to start your financial empire the same way Warren Buffett did many decades ago.
A life situation might be very different depending on the time, place, person and circumstances
These two problems are the reason why you should not try to follow someone else’s path of doing things.
What worked for someone else, might not work for you
Are those stories worthless?
Of course not. There are two things I like about those stories:
- They show you what is possible. It is possible to retire early, it is possible to build a successful dropshipping store, you can increase sales by 4x.
- Some even show you first principles that can be integrated in your learning process. It is about earning more or spending less, customer experience is vital for a store to grow, your value proposition should be placed in your copies and landing pages.
So, these stories are your base, from that, you have to work to reach what you found is possible by following the first principles you found and going the scientific-way.
Create a hypothesis, design an experiment to test your hypothesis, measure the results
- You can’t make your first sale? Define your audience, talk to them and create a hypothesis of which products might be of interest. What if your target audience was not the right one anymore?
2. You might not be able to save $30K a year. What if you lower your expenses? You might create a hypothesis of the impact in your savings by changing your job, your place to live even your expenses.
Final thoughts
It’s always interesting reading about successful people and their stories, but you should not take their path as a granted way to succeed, only as a general guide of what is possible. You have to get your hands dirty by generating your hypothesis, testing them, learning and repeating the process.
Happy testing.
