Perhaps is due to pride, but most people’s first instinct when trying to accomplish a new task or goal is to create their own system based on what intuitively feels right.

Think about it, if you want to start investing in real estate, you would probably just start calling realtors or learning construction.

You want to lose weight, you start cutting back on what you normally eat.

You want to build something, you drive to home depot.

None of these are bad things to do, but are they the very best, most effective, actions to take?

When I left the military, I knew my goal was to start my own real estate investment company.

I arrived home from Japan on a Wednesday and had an appointment with a realtor to start looking at houses on Thursday.

I was all in.

I started doing whatever felt like it would get me closer to what seemed like a success.

I found some “deals,” I asked contractors for quotes, I found partners, I rented an nice office, I got a nice website and business cards.

It started to feel like I had traction because I was starting to look the part and do some deals, but there was one problem, I wasn’t making any money.

Eventually I stumbled across systems, books, and mentors that laid out exactly how to run certain aspects of my business, and when I set pride aside and started following the proven steps, things drastically improved.

I found a house flipping instructor and learned things like why it’s important to have a scope of work before you do a walk through with a contractor, and different options for funding my deals.

I read the E-Myth Revisited and Traction, and totally restructured the way my business is structured and operates.

I found a friend who had built a strong portfolio of cash flowing properties and realized that this was a much more effective strategy for building wealth than flipping was, so I started following her lead.

When I look back, knowing what I know now, I often wonder how much quicker I could have achieved my goals if I had just sat down and identified what I really wanted as a result of my hours of work, and then started following someone who had done exactly that.

As a matter of fact, I believe if a person’s only skill was the ability to identify who has done what they want to do and copy the crap out of them, they would be incredibly successful as a result.

I’m not against innovation when a person is intentionally trying to innovate, but inventing your own system for how you will operate each day when a better one exists is insane.

If you decide beforehand (before each day or before you start working toward a new goal) that you will follow a system that that has a proven track record to get the results you want, then life becomes much simpler.

You stop making decisions. You made one decision upfront to follow the system and that’s all you have to do.

For example, if you wanted to run a marathon, Hal Higdon has the most famous step-by-step plan to take you from where you are today to a marathon runner.

If you want a plan for getting out of debt, Dave Ramsey has walked millions through this process with his 7 step plan.

If you want to lose weight, there is a crazy Canadian who has laid out a fasting plan called the Snake Diet to help you shed the pounds quickly.

I’ve tried all these, and they all work well if you just follow the steps.

Almost anything you can google, someone has perfected and probably shared their system for.

All you have to do is decide on what’s most important to you, find the best there is at it, and unapologetically plagiarize every single step!

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