A Proven Achievement Strategy – FTM

If you chose to train as a basketball player, and you could choose anyone in the world to be your personal basketball coach, whom would you choose?

You’d most likely choose someone like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, or Tim Duncan.

If you wanted to be successful as a musical artist, and you could choose anyone in the world to be your personal music mentor, whom would you choose?

That answer would probably be someone like Justin Timberlake, Madonna, Diddy, Jennifer Lopez, Toby Keith, Steven Tyler, or (insert your favorite artist here).

What if you wanted to be a successful investor?

What if you wanted to be successful in relationships?

If you are going to learn from someone, why not learn from the best?  Someone that has done successfully what you want to do and knows how to do it and how not to do it.  They’ve already been through the trial and error portion of their path to success and have learned invaluable information along the way.  You can benefit from their experience by not having to test all of the strategies that didn’t work.

 You know what’s interesting?  I was reading articles by Smart Money and The Consumerist – both about Lottery winners.  Have any of you ever thought to yourself something like, “If I could just win the lottery, I’d have it made.  I’d be set.”

Those articles about the lottery winners were talking about how 1 in 3 winners is broke within 5 years.  One of them also talked about how in most of those cases, the winners had won more money than all of the debts they had at the time.  That means they could have easily covered them.  Yet they ended up bankrupt again.

Lottery winners didn’t become wealthy because they had learned wealth management skills.  So without those skills, the sudden inflow of cash didn’t solve any of their money mismanagement problems.

To be successful, you have to go through the learning process.  You have to develop the needed skills.   Once you know that you need to develop skills if you want to be successful, then it’s a matter of deciding how to go about doing that.

That is where the FTM strategy comes into play. 

FTM stands for:

• Find The Master
• Follow The Model
• Flex The Mindset

It takes much longer if you have to create the model.  It’s much faster and super effective to find someone that is already great at what you want to do and follow his recipe.

The three aspects of the model you need to know are: 

What, How, & When

If you are going to use someone else’s recipe to cook with, you need to know what ingredients, how much of each ingredient, and when each one is suppose to enter the mix.

If you are learning from someone about physical fitness such as a trainer or an athlete, you have to know what they do (strength train vs endurance, etc), how they do it – which exercises specifically, and when (how often, how much time they spend).

It’s the same for achievement in any area.

After you’ve found the master – the person who is already succeeding at what you’d like to succeed in, and you’ve followed their model – how they succeeded in it, then it will be time to Flex The Mindset.

What usually happens, when you are new at something, is it won’t go the way you want it to the first few times or you won’t see the results right away.  If that happens to you, don’t take that as evidence that the model doesn’t work or the master is wrong.  It is normal to go through growing pains, and it can be just that – painful.

At that point, doubts will creep into your mind – things like, “Maybe it won’t work for me because I’m not like them”, “Maybe it won’t work for me, because I don’t have what they have.”  We all have empowering and disempowering thoughts.  You just have to learn to flex your mind muscle and push the negative thoughts away.  Focus on positive outcomes, even if they are still awaiting you in the future.

The more you flex your mind muscle, the stronger it will become.  Eventually, it will be nearly natural to block negative, doubtful, and fearful thoughts.

So keep following the success model while envisioning the outcome you desire, and when the level of achievement you want is reached, you can seek out the next master of the next skill you’d like to learn and follow their model.