Modelling excellence

When you were a very young kid, did you ever flap your arms in an attempt to fly? Perhaps you were so young you didn't know better or maybe you just wanted to check for yourself. What the heck, either way you didn't take off (I assume).

It's funny that. Because it's what birds do. Well, actually it's what birds seem to do and it's a trap we easily fall into; when we want to get better at something we copy the observable stuff, the noticeable stuff, the dramatic stuff such as:
successful salespeople who make a lot of calls...
productive people who have lists...
novelists who always have a great sex scene...

Of course we can copy making the calls, having the list and including a sex scene but it doesn't necessarily make us as good as them. To be excellent we must replicate what a person really does. Birds don't really fly by flapping their wings and it took us a very long time before we got beyond that distractor to find out what we needed to do if we were going to get off the ground. There are a few things you want to be excellent at. A good bet is to find someone who is excellent at that very same skill and spend a lot of time with them and notice what they really do-right down to some of the subtle levels and then you might find that:
successful salespeople actually ask a lot of implication questions in their calls...
that productive people works vs payoff and...
great novelists create engaging characters with or without the sex.

Stop flapping; start observing.