We all have idols – guys we look up to, guys we respect the shit out of, guys whose every word is the gospel truth our little disciple ears so desperately long to hear. You know what I’m talking about – you have your own list of guys you’d give anything to be like.

For me, it was guys like Chris from Good Looking Loser, Rollo Tomassi from The Rational Male, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, a few prank channels like BigDawsTV, as well as a bunch of guys on various forums I frequented – guys who’d all done exceptionally amazing things with their lives.

I aspired to be like them, to live the lives they had lived, to be who they were. And for the longest time, I made that my number 1 mission. I tried to emulate their actions, their thoughts, their modus operandi – I wanted to be a copy-paste version of them.

As I progressed and started carving my own path, I realised something that at first seemed arrogant – I wanted to deviate from their path & go my own way. Not just that, but I wanted to be better than them. I wanted to build off of the foundation they’d laid. I wanted to fill in their philosophical potholes – the gaps in their knowledge.

I struggled with this at first, feeling like I was overstepping my mark. Who was I to think I could ever match – much less improve upon – the guys I looked up to?

In time, and with much mediation & self-reflection, I came to understand:

You’re disrespecting your idols if you don’t aim to be better than them.

They put in all the hard work – and oftentimes went through absolutely fucking hell – so that you wouldn’t have to.

They’re the guideposts that mark a safe path for you to travel; the lighthouse for you to steer your ship towards as you sail through the rough & often terrifying waters of your self-improvement journey.

You’re supposed to listen to your idols’ message and learn from their mistakes, then go out and do a better job than they did. You’re supposed to avoid the traps they fell into, and improve upon their body of work. You’re supposed to at first become them, and then later become a better version of them – an Idol v2.0. You’d be dishonouring them if you only ever matched them, given all the wisdom they’ve instilled upon you. It’d be a failure to launch.

You have their entire body of work to comb through, a roadmap of how they got from their starting point at the very bottom of the mountain all the way up to their current position perched atop the peak. You can see what they did right, where they misstepped, what they could have done better. You can use that to plan out your own path; a path that’ll take you far beyond where they had the time and the energy to go. It’s all laid out for you in glorious detail with the added benefit of their 20/20 hindsight vision & newfound maturity and wisdom – so don’t waste it.

The whole reason I started coaching was to save you months – even years – of making the same mistakes I made. I fucked up so many millions of times, in millions of different ways, so that you wouldn’t have to. I experimented, I tried things, I failed hundreds & thousands of times over, just so I could learn what would happen; I needed to build up my own base of knowledge as to how things really worked. Without all those pitfalls getting in your way, without you having to get bogged down in the mud like I did.

If you’re reading this, you’re obviously into self-improvement. You want to be better, you want to grow – hell, you want to be elite. Use your idols to springboard off, and you’ll have a very real chance at going above and beyond anything they’ve done. You you do it too – and then go even further.

Make the most of the information out there. Go kick the asses of all your idols.

- Andy