Stop Trying to Reverse-Engineer Success
Published in
1 min readMay 6, 2016
What kind of pencil does Stephen King write with?
What kind of microphone does Oprah use?
How many hours of sleep does Obama get?
What kind of Piano does Billy Joel play?
See where this is going..
Mimicking your idols is a form of flattery, but it won’t actually help you “succeed”, whatever that means. Imitation is just another way to hide. The psychological rational is: if somebody famous does it, then it’s safe, I’m not the only one.
But it really doesn’t work this way. Life-hacking is fun and all, but what good does it actually do for you? To me, getting caught up in the details is another distraction.
Just do the work. Say what you have to say. And don’t worry about what kind of pencil you should be using, because it really doesn’t matter.
