BEST PRACTICES
FINDING AND USING THEM FOR LIFE SUCCESS
FIRST, COPY!
One prominent successful individual when writing to his younger self wrote that the biggest thing that would have made the biggest difference in his life would have been to use existing successful models of how others had done it - from individuals to methods used.
Another term for this in business is "best practices". ("A best practice is a technique or methodology that, through experience and research, has proven to reliably lead to a desired result." See the outside article Best Practice.)
And best practices is the place to start in any field or situation - if someone else has figured it out successfully, don't reinvent the wheel! Copy it. Use it as a base to design from.
And don't think you can do a better job than someone else who has already thought it out and tested it and perfected it! Or at least start with the good strategies and improve them from there.
Ask yourself and/or others: Who produces the best results? Which teachers, businenesspersons, politicians, psychologists, hospitals, success strategies, salesmen, etc.? Who are the happiest people in life?
Find the latter first and be sure to copy them and then supplement around that way of living.
Copy, copy, copy, copy...
PREPARATION IS GOLDEN
Spend sufficient time finding the best resources and/or models so that you have some confidence that you've reaped the benefit of your research. Most people want to get right to "the doing", but that is a major mistake, as it shortcuts "beneficial preparation". And if you do ahead of time the "beneficial preparation", you will find that you will save alot more time than you spent and prevent alot of costly mistakes/errors.
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Before I switched into "financial planning" (the real kind) and financial advising, I went out and interviewed the successful marketers (who generously shared their "secrets"!) and then I did that. When I floundered after some initial success in my first six months, I called all the top producers in the company and went around with each of them for a full day. I kept on finding "best practitioners" and best practices until I accumulated enough to exceed and break all the records of those top producers who I spent a day with. When I did my Rookie Of The Year speech (with a new company I switched to) to 900 people, I included so many "best practices" that a wholesaler (who markets a product to financial advisors) copied the audio and provided the "tapes" to all of his customers. The point of the latter might be that of all the people in my field few actually went far enough to really gather the best practices and to do them...
If you were to get good at finding and using best practices, you might want to start with Wikipedia's discussion: Best Practice.
Before you engage in any new endeavor (or when you need to improve what you're already doing), so a search engine search of "best practices" and then add the area in which you want to find the best practices.
