Copy the Person Two Steps Ahead of You

Last updated: 2026-09-07

When I was scaling Asian Efficiency, I started hiring experts instead of trying to invent every process myself. Webinars were one of those bottlenecks. I booked a call with a webinar expert. I didn’t ask for general advice. I asked a specific question: what are the 3 things I must know to start?

That’s the move.

I used to default to “How do I do this?” Now I start with a different question: “Who has already done this?”

Katie Milkman’s book How to Change and Tony Robbins talking about modeling success both point at the same habit. When you ask how, you become the bottleneck. You’re sitting there trying to figure out a process from scratch. When you ask who, you get leverage. Someone has already solved it. You go find them.

Are you currently stuck on something you’ve been trying to figure out alone?

Two steps ahead beats twenty

Most people copy the most successful person they can find. That’s aspirational mentorship. It usually doesn’t travel.

The most valuable people to copy are slightly ahead of you in their journey. Advice from someone making $100k a month is actionable if you’re making $10k a month. You can run it. Advice from a billionaire is often irrelevant. Different infrastructure. Different leverage. You’re not dealing with the same problems, even if the quote is a good one.

I ran into this while scaling AE and hiring experts. The useful people were close enough that I could take what they said and actually use it. The ones wildly ahead of me were interesting. They were not practical.

So audit where you currently get advice. The newsletters, the podcasts, the people you treat as models. Are they relatable, or just aspirational? If you can’t apply what they do without first building a completely different life, they’re the wrong person to copy.

Match the lifestyle

When you’re choosing who to copy, prioritize people with similar life constraints. Parents versus people without kids. Corporate versus entrepreneur. Values alignment matters. Lifestyle similarity is what keeps the tactics transferable without massive tweaking.

An entrepreneur and someone in a corporate role can share principles. The tactics don’t automatically transfer. Their constraints are not the same.

List three constraints in your life. Kids. Job type. Location. Then filter potential mentors through those. If their life doesn’t share those constraints, you’ll spend more time rewriting their system than running it.

You also need to see that it’s possible

There’s a second job here. You have to be able to picture the outcome.

Katie Milkman talks about going vegetarian and seeing colleagues eat vegetarian food. That visual made the change feel doable. Same pattern if you want to become a Chief of Staff. Find a visual example of the life or work you want so you can see what success looks like in practice.

Once you’ve seen someone navigate the change, the mental friction of starting drops. Your brain has proof someone already did it.

Don’t copy the two circles and skip the owl

You know the meme. Draw two circles. Then draw the owl.

A lot of online tutorials work like that. They make a complex process look like a clean sequence and leave out the hidden context and the skill gaps. You copy the tidy version and it fails, and you assume you missed a step. You didn’t. The tutorial never showed the step.

Does this sound familiar?

A friend ran into this trying to make a Spanish tortilla. It failed. The instructions looked straightforward. The messy middle is where the real cooking happens, and that’s the part most tutorials skip.

When you’re learning from a tutorial, ask the expert about the common pitfalls they didn’t show. Ask for the why. Ask what usually goes wrong between the circles and the owl.

Run the same check on success stories. Just because someone succeeded by doing X doesn’t mean X caused the success. Plenty of people did X and failed. You see this with Hollywood actors. You see it with business success stories too.

Before you copy a strategy, look for the graveyard of attempts. Ask what the common reasons this fails. If you only study the people who made it, you’re copying a highlight reel.

Rent the expert by the minute

If you don’t know who to copy, you don’t have to wait for a mentor to appear. Platforms like Clarity.fm let you hire experts for short, focused calls.

Don’t pay for general advice. Pay for specific answers. Ask, “What are the 3 things I must know to start?”

I did this with the webinar expert. A friend did it on a Chief of Staff call. Search for an expert in your niche and book a 15-minute call. One bottleneck. One person who has already solved it.

Let AI do the reading

The research phase of copying is where people stall. Too many articles. Not enough of it gets translated into your actual context.

I set up a Personalized Podcast using Claude, Instapaper, and 11 Labs. An AI agent scans my reading list, summarizes the articles, and generates personalized action items based on my goals and context profile.

You don’t need that exact setup. Set up a simple AI workflow that summarizes content related to your current goals. Give it your constraints. Have it spit out action items that fit your life.

Pick one bottleneck you’re stuck on right now. Find one person two steps ahead of you who has already solved it, in a life that looks enough like yours. Ask them what the tutorial left out. Then copy that.