A role model is someone who sets an example of where you want to go and who you want to become.

A coach is someone who will help you to get from where you are to where you want to go.

Putting the above two together, if you have a good coach, he or she might help you to create strategies to design your life similar to that of your role model. But unfortunately, not many people have coaches. But why fear? Unlike a decade ago, today you can just Google and find out what your role model says their success secrets are and probably all you have to do is to follow them and you will be there.

This is precisely where you will hit upon a blind spot. Let me explain.

When your role model shares his or her strategies, tactics, preferences and their world views, remember that one or more of them might be true resulting in the blind spot:

* He or she might share working for them now not what worked for them when they were at your stage.

* Their current focus is to find strategies and tactics that will take them from where they are to where they want to go. They might even forget what strategies and tactics brought them to where they are today.

* When they share about their journey to where they are, there is a really good chance that their stories may be “enhanced and updated” for their convenience.

* Even if everything what they are saying is true, the ecosystem in which they are operating has been completely upgraded because of who they have become. Strategies and tactics are always to be looked in the context of an ecosystem as they can’t operate in a vacuum.

Here are a couple of examples of blind spots:

Imagine an entrepreneur who has been so inspired by Zen that he has taken a minimalism route for the next phase of his life. The entrepreneur might get a ton of press because what he or she is doing is not ordinary. [ Note for you: That entrepreneur may have had multiple exits before and you may be on your first company. Plus, you won’t get any press if you follow him as you have no such accomplishments in your past ]

Imagine an author who prescribes that there is no reason to do anything on the web for the sake of traffic. [ Note for you: The author might already be getting so much traffic already that in his case he might not need to do anything specific to get more traffic.  The current traffic will beget new traffic. In your case, you may just be starting off and this would mean that you HAVE to do something to get traffic. I am not suggesting that you do silly things to get traffic but you have to walk the extra mile for sure]

If you miss this blind spot and blindly follow the advice, note that you are bound to get frustrated because the strategies and tactics are displaced in time. You have to do one of the three following things:

1. Record those strategies and tactics somewhere so that you can revisit them when you reach a point in your life where they become practical for you to implement.

OR

2. Go back to the history of your role models. Go back at least a few years back so that there is a reasonable match to your current state and their historical state and observe how they built their life from there. Get the wisdom from that time, translate them to make those strategies to work for the current times and go all out.

OR

3. Get a great coach who will guide you through all the above translation and focus on being the best you can be NOW.

In summary, what works for your role models today may not be what works for you to get to where they are today.

All the best!