Mindset gets your head right. Goals draw the map. The third key tells you how to find the road that leads where the map is pointing — by studying the people who have already walked it.
This is modeling. It is the most underused tool in a serious career.
Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, c. 1490 — the canonical study of ideal proportion drawn from Vitruvius's earlier architectural model. To model success is to study what already produced it: the proportions, the patterns, the underlying principles. The persona is theirs; the principles transfer. Photograph by Luc Viatour via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).
What modeling actually is
Modeling is not imitation. It is not picking a hero and copying their voice. It is the disciplined analysis of behaviors, strategies, and habits that produced a specific result, so you can extract the underlying principles and apply them inside your own practice, your own personality, and your own values.
There are three layers to look at:
- What they do. The visible behaviors — how they prepare, how they pitch, how they manage their calendar, how they handle a hostile witness, how they price an engagement.
- How they do it. The patterns — the order they work in, the sequence of decisions, the quality control they impose on their own work.
- Why it works. The underlying principle — the reason a particular behavior produced a particular result in their context, which is the only part you can transfer into yours.
Most people stop at layer one. The compounding professional goes all the way to layer three.
Where to find your models
You do not need a celebrity. You need three people, each chosen for a different reason:
- One who is doing exactly what you want to do, well. This is the reference standard. Study them closely.
- One who is doing it differently than you would. This is the antidote to your blind spots. Their methods will offend your assumptions, which is exactly why they are useful.
- One who is one or two steps ahead. Far enough that the ascent is visible. Close enough that the climb is real.
What to do once you have them
Modeling is an active discipline. Reading their book once is not modeling. Modeling looks like this:
- Quantify the metric. What is the specific number they hit that you want to hit? Cases settled per quarter, fees collected per matter, referrals received per month, jury verdicts won? Pick the number.
- Reverse-engineer the inputs. What had to be true on a daily basis for that number to land? What did they read, who did they talk to, how did they spend their first hour every morning?
- Adopt the principle, not the persona. If their secret is that they prepare three days for a one-hour deposition, the principle is over-prepare for high-leverage moments. The persona — their voice, their wardrobe, their courtroom manner — is theirs and is not transferable.
The mistake that wastes modeling
The most common mistake is to model the personality and skip the discipline. The lawyer who watches a mentor and adopts the swagger but not the seven-day prep cycle. The entrepreneur who copies the founder's quotes and skips the customer-research routine.
Style is downstream of substance. Adopt the substance.
Stay yourself
Modeling done well leaves you more yourself, not less. You are stealing the principles, not the personality. The work is to keep the framework that produced their results and pour your own values, your own client base, and your own voice into it.
If you do this for thirty years across the right three people, the compounding is invisible from the outside and overwhelming from the inside.
Next in the series: Systems — the path that turns goals and models into daily output. Coming up on stevenfraser.com.
If you are at a point where the right next move requires a candid outside perspective, request a private introduction or call 877-862-7188.