Ron Friedman on Decoding Greatness – What You Need To Succeed

Mo asks Ron Friedman: How can the audience get better at growing their book of business, their relationships, and their career?

• The big idea behind Decoding Greatness is that the stories we were told about success were wrong. We were told that either people are born with special talents or that greatness comes from years of practice. The third story that most people don’t know is that those at the top of a profession have most often mastered the skill of reverse engineering.
• Reverse engineering is simply taking the best examples within your field and working backward to see how it was achieved and what can be applied to what you’re working on. Methods vary depending on the field you are in.
• Regardless of what field you are in, having the reverse engineering mindset of looking to decode how something is created is the key to getting better.
• Become a collector. Most of the great people in the world started off as collectors before they were creators. Finding greatness requires seeing greatness in others. If you see something that you want to achieve, collect examples of those things and you will begin to identify the patterns that are different from other things. Finding the differences is the first step to figuring out what makes someone or something unique.
• Asking great questions is another method of discovering the differences when you have the opportunity to speak to your model directly. A mindset of naive curiosity is one of the fastest ways to allow people to open up when they are with you.
• Contrast this reverse engineering method with the idea of practice makes perfect. Improvement through isolation is a failing strategy. You can’t practice an idea you’ve never considered. The real path to greatness is having a systematic approach to learning from the best and applying it to your work.
• Simply copying someone else’s formula will probably not work for you. Their value proposition may not apply to your industry or the audience expectations may have shifted. The key is to evolve what you are modeling to make it unique to you and novel to the people viewing it.
• One way of doing that is by combining two or three examples of greatness and taking the elements that resonate with you to create the best possible version.

Mentioned in this Episode:

GrowBIGPlaybook.com

decodinggreatnessbook.com

ronfriedmanphd.com