Today, I am going to talk about one of the most critical topics I feel for success, copying mentors. One of the concepts that can accelerate your success the most, and probably one of the easiest. All that said, it is one that almost nobody does well or completely.

Let me explain this a little bit. Everybody agrees that it’s good and important to find a mentor. When you find a mentor, there’s really three possibilities when they make a recommendation or that you have something, that you have a question for them. Either it’s going to be very clear, and their advice is great, and you hadn’t thought about it, and it sounds reasonable to you, and you accept it. The other one in the opposite end is that it’s something that the mentor didn’t really know anything about it, but it is something that you know and understand, and it’s something that the mentor basically would just agree with you to go and follow your own path.

The middle one is the most critical area. That’s the area where I refer to as having a dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. There’s nothing you can say to convince the mentor that your idea is correct or right, and there’s not a logical conclusion or a logical path that can get you to receive that mentor’s advice. That is: what is that critical area?

What I do in that situation is if I picked my mentor well and it’s in his area, I will pick and take their path, no matter how convinced I am that mine would be better but I can’t explain it, I can’t prove it. This really is a precept to getting into what I call copying mentors, and copying well.

Bear with me a moment as I explain how critical this topic is, and how well it’s been used by some people or countries or industries. Let me follow the Japanese. The Japanese have been very good at copying or mimicking other people’s products. Everybody knows about the car industry, but let’s think way back maybe 30-40 years, something like that. Originally, what the Japanese did is they started copying electronics, radios, etc. The Germans were the masters in that; they had all the great receivers, etc. but the Japanese decided to copy them.

What they did was they copied exactly to start out. They didn’t add their own flare to it at all until they had mastered the copy first. How else did they do that? They did it with watches. The Swiss had the watches, the Rolex, etc. Only after many, many years, the Japanese copying those very precisely, then they went on to make innovations or adaptations of them. It was only after they mastered that which already existed. Then they went on, of course, to do that in cameras and cars. In each case, they first copied very much so.

Actually, in Japanese, there’s a compliment that you can pay somebody by actually saying: “You copy well.” Where if you said that to an American engineer, he’d get very insulted and excited, etc. I actually have some stories in my forthcoming book about a General Manager in Chevrolet who actually tried to get some engineer just to do it the way it was already done, and how he had to fight with him for a month to get him to just copy something that already existed.

I’ve copied that exact same philosophy, those exact same ideas in things where I basically have tried to find the particular mentors, and it could have been in computer programming or it could have been in language, etc., I copied what I was told was the right way to do it by somebody who is knowledgeable. It worked very, very well for me.

Why do people seem to resist to it? They seem to resist because they always feel like: “I have a mind, too, and I thought…” Forget thinking for a moment. Save your thinking. Put it all down. First master what the master has already done. If you were to learn Karate or Taekwondo, a form of Karate or something like that – what would you do? You would go to the master, and you would mimic and do exactly what he said all the time. You wouldn’t say: “I thought I would do it a slightly diffe...