One thing I see people do that is often not optimal is that they’ll see someone else doing a thing and say “they’re very successful, so I’m going to do the same thing”.

That’s the extreme way to take inspiration or advice. I call it reasoning by analogy. You’ve heard a story about a thing that works, so you go off and you do that.

And you very often find that it doesn’t pan out the same way that it panned out for the person you saw succeeding with it.

Because the context is different! There’s so much that you’re not seeing in what they did that took them from A to B.

And also because, even if you could accurately figure out what took them from A to B, you are probably not quite at A, which means you’re not going to quite end up at B.

The way I see working more effectively, more often, is to reason from first principles.

When you see someone else do something, reverse engineer it. Which parts of that worked, and why did they work?

And then you have some more basic building blocks, these first principles, that you can transfer across to your own context and say ‘my business isn’t exactly like theirs, but now I’ve got these basics, these fundamentals, and I can see that this one might actually help me and this one might not’.