Learn From Other People's Mistakes

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, welcome to Learn From Other People's Mistakes. I'm Wes.

Another phrase I use for this is Borrow Experience. I kind of laughed at myself as I was telling you the title because I've made enough mistakes that I could teach volumes of stuff you could learn from.

I'm hoping you get something from some of my mistakes, but also from some of my positive experiences through shows like this and through all of my Your Life Systems content.

Anyway, learn from other people's mistakes or borrow experience.

I'm going to give you the good and bad from this because sometimes you can learn good things that shortcut where you're trying to go, and sometimes you can learn what to avoid so it doesn't cost you time, money, or other things.

Experience is a wonderful teacher.

I'm in my mid-50s as I'm recording this, so I've had a lot of experience. I can remember growing up often thinking, "I don't need to know that," or, "I don't need you to teach me that. I'll figure it out," or, "I already know," or whatever.

I missed out on learning from other people's experiences for a long time.

Finally, you get to a certain age - or at least I did - and you start realizing, "Why don't you try to learn from somebody else here?"

It might save you some pain and suffering. It might help you avoid a bad situation. It might make wherever you're trying to go faster.

Here's what I finally figured out.

Anytime I'm trying to accomplish something big, I believe in goals. I set goals, sometimes big goals.

If it's important enough to me, I'll set the goal, write it down, and start creating a plan. I'll start gathering information. I'll read about it. I'll research it.

And here's something important: I find other people who have accomplished exactly what I'm trying to accomplish. I find out exactly what they did to accomplish what I want to accomplish, and then I try to do what they did.

That makes a lot of sense, right?

You find somebody who's already done what you want to do. You figure out exactly what they did, and then you do the same thing.

That's logical, right?

But when I was 25, that's not the way I thought.

It makes perfect sense now, but I'm not 25 anymore. After I've actually done that several times and seen how great it works, I wonder why 25-year-old me couldn't seem to figure that out.

So if you're 25, learn from my experience. That's a great system right there. If you use that system, you've got way more than your money's worth for watching this.

Experience is a wonderful teacher. It's just not the only teacher.

See, I had to learn that through experience, right? If I'd listened to some of the things people knew when I was younger, I would have been able to borrow from their experience.

One of the fastest ways to grow is to learn from people who have already walked the path you're trying to walk.

That's what I was talking about. Find somebody who's done what you want. Figure out exactly what they did, and then do the same things.

I've made plenty of mistakes in my life, but I've also learned and saved years by learning from people who had already solved problems I hadn't yet solved.

Let me give you a couple examples from my life.

Years and years ago, I wrote a book in the gaming industry. At that time I thought, "Well, I need a website. There's money to be made. You can make money from affiliate stuff," and things like that. We'll talk about that some other time.

So I said, "I need a website."

This wasn't super early in the internet, but it was so long ago that Google was either not a search engine yet or had just started being a search engine. That gives you an idea of the timetable.

At the time, I think Yahoo was the main search engine. Within a year after I started, Google had become a lot bigger.

Anyway, that's the time frame. This was a long time ago as far as the internet goes.

I started building a website, and I worked at it and worked at it for months. There was no traction. It was obvious I had no clue what I was doing.

I didn't know anything about SEO, search engine optimization.

What I did - and I was kind of lucky with this looking back - was join a forum. That's how long ago it was. Forums were popular.

I joined a forum of other people working in the same industry where I was building a site. I started building relationships, and then I started learning from people who were already successful.

Some of those people I still talk to today.

One is my buddy Randy, who is one of the most successful people I know. We still talk from time to time about different things.

He taught me as much as anyone about how to be successful in what I was doing at that time.

It still took me a year before I made any money with the website, which looking back seems like forever, but it also led to some of the most successful business opportunities I've had in my life from that experience.

The point is, I might have never gotten there if it wasn't for him and some other people in the industry I learned from.

First I saw the success they were having. Then I learned exactly what they were doing. Then I started doing the same things.

That's how I started getting more success.

Here's another example from my life.

I said I wrote a book, and that's why I started the website and then got into the affiliate industry and things like that.

But you don't just write a book.

The way I learned how to write was that I started writing, and it was hideous. Terrible. Unreadable. Unpublishable. Terrible.

Then I'd write a little more.

Finally, I found people I could send my writing to. They would mark it up and send it back. Then I would learn and rewrite it, and I'd send it again.

It was through practice and using someone else's expertise to help me shortcut my experience.

They'd send it back. I'd work through it and send it back again. Every time I'd get better and better, and my writing would get tighter and tighter.

Years later, I spent many years working as a full-time freelance writer.

This was way before AI and anything like that. This was back when there was pretty good money in it if you were good.

I went to work for a guy as a freelance writer. He worked for larger companies, and I worked on his team. He had a team of freelance writers.

He was an exceptionally good writer, and he would edit my stuff. If it wasn't good enough, he'd send it back because he had to get paid for it in order to pay me.

I would learn from that.

Eventually, it got to where he didn't have to edit my stuff because he taught me, as we were going through it, what to do and what not to do.

So I learned from his experience, and I improved from his experience.

Those are just two examples of borrowing experience.

You don't have to reinvent everything.

I didn't invent a way of writing because my way was terrible. I learned from someone else.

I put a website up, but it wasn't a good website. I learned from someone else's experience. I shortcut the method, and I didn't reinvent anything.

Here's something else: You need to learn principles as much as tactics.

This is probably a deeper discussion than I can shoehorn into today's show, so I'll probably cover this much deeper in a standalone show.

But learning principles and not just tactics means this: If you learn a tactic, you learn one thing to improve one thing one time.

If you learn the principle underneath why the tactic works, then you don't just learn the tactic. You learn what makes the tactic work.

Then you have a chance not only to fix that problem one time, but to recognize and fix the same types of things that require the same tactics over and over.

When you're looking to solve something - and this fits because we're talking about borrowing experience - when you can borrow the experience of someone else, try not to borrow it only to fix whatever you're working on right now.

Try to borrow it so well that you understand the principles underneath why it works.

The principles are where the best systems in your life, the most effective systems, will come into play and help you the most.

Borrow experience and apply it to your situation.

When I learned the principles of effective writing, the underlying principles helped with effective communication. That's helped me in anything involving communication for the rest of my life.

When I learned the tactics and the underlying principles with the website and getting traffic, at the time I was trying to solve traffic from search engines. That's back to search engine optimization.

But when I learned the principles underneath that, the principles had a lot to do with marketing.

The marketing principles I learned and have built on since then have helped me for the rest of my life.

That's what I mean when I say learn principles, not just tactics.

So in closing, wisdom grows faster when you learn from more than your experience.

When you borrow experience, you can accelerate your growth by intentionally learning from people who have already done the things you want to do or the people who have come before you.

I hope that helps. I look forward to spending more time with you. Like, subscribe, and we'll see you soon. Thanks.

·        Choose one important goal or problem you're working on.

·        Find someone who has already accomplished or solved something similar.

·        Study what they did well and what they learned from mistakes.

·        Identify the principle underneath the tactic instead of copying the tactic blindly.

·        Apply the principle to your situation and evaluate the result.

·        Keep building a library of borrowed experience you can reuse.

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