How to find the fastest path to success without wasting years exploring the wrong ones!

This seemingly obvious advice can save you years of time!

Patrick Lee Scott
5 min readOct 19, 2023

It’s a hard thing to generalize what exactly makes someone successful, but, over many years, I’ve landed on a framework that works well for me.

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first, let me share a quick story that illuminates the point I am trying to make.

In 2019, one of my best friends died. This was due to a congenital heart defect, and a resulting build-up of scar tissue over the years. As this was something he was born with, knew about, and saw a specialist to monitor yearly about, I’m not suggesting there was a lot that could have been done differently, yet, regardless of that, it certainly made me consider my own mortality.

“You can just die at 30 years old…” I thought to myself.

Up until this point, I have to admit, I felt pretty invincible, but the sudden death of a close friend brought that belief crashing down around me.

I took a good long look at myself, and my health, and had to admit that I was far from where I needed to be…

It was time to make some drastic changes… but what changes, exactly?

There are a plethora of differing opinions on the internet about what to do to be healthy. Luckily, I had learned some very poignant advice from one of my mentors, Russell Brunson…

“If you want results, find someone who has already achieved those results, and do what they say! Don’t take advice from someone who hasn’t achieved those results themselves!”

So that’s what I did. I found a dude who was jacked to be my mentor in getting in shape and did what they said. This person was Dr. John Jaquish.

Dr. Jaquish had previously spent years in the gym with very lackluster results but recently had figured out a formula that worked for him, and suddenly he was unstoppable. He clearly had the results I wanted, so, I figured I should listen to his advice.

This advice consisted of a few key pieces:

  1. Variable resistance strength training
  2. Carnivore nutrition
  3. Fasting

All I had to do was be disciplined enough to follow the advice consistently, and it should work for me too!

So I did.

In the first three months, I went from 210 lbs to 180 lbs. In the 9 months following, I leaned out all the way down to 160 lbs.

One year of following advice from someone who’s done it – down 50 lbs!

In just one year, by following the advice of Russell, to follow the advice of someone who had the results I wanted, Dr. Jaquish, I was healthier than I had been in years! Not only that, but the results came quickly and easily.

This wasn’t the first time I’d tried to reach these goals, but in the past I just went off on my own, reading conflicting opinions from different people, and trying to figure out what worked or did not on my own.

If someone has already been down all of the paths and has seen what worked, and what did not, you really don’t need to do that as well!

And so, that leads to my key point – the fastest path to success is the one that has already been proven to get the results that you are looking for! Instead of wandering down many paths yourself, find someone who’s done that already and ask them “What is the best path to take?”

Yet, this seemingly obvious path is not one that many people consider. We’ve been trained from a young age to “figure it out” through our schooling system — to seek the “how?” of a solution when all along there’s been a better question to ask. “Who?”

This simple advice, “who, not how”, is something that the highest achieving entrepreneurs are intimately aware of.

The first time I became aware of this concept was when I read the famous book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. The premise of this book is simple — think about what you are going to do before you do it and you’ll get much better results.

For those who are not aware of this cult-classic book, let me explain a bit…

Napoleon Hill was Andrew Carnegie’s right-hand man. He was tasked by Carnegie to go out and research — how does one become “successful”? He leveraged Carnegie’s network of successful people by interviewing them all and compiling everything he learned into a book. This book became “Think and Grow Rich”. Napoleon became fascinated with the subject and went on to write many other extremely influential books as well, such as “Outwitting the Devil”.

In “Think and Grow Rich”, one of the key concepts that Napoleon Hill outlines is something he called a “mastermind”. A mastermind is a meeting of the minds of the various masters of a subject. This concept is extremely popular nowadays, with every Guru leading a mastermind of their own, and for good reason! Getting the best and brightest together to share what paths they’ve taken, which ones paid off, and which ones did not, is an ENORMOUS time saver.

Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich is a highly recommended read. It’s widely revered for a reason. Mr. Hill was a legend of his time. A first edition of a rare book set of his was recently sold for $1.5M to give you some idea.

So there you have it, my secret framework for success — if you want to be successful, find someone who’s gotten the results you’re looking for, and do what they say!

My business partner Phillip and I with the founders of Clickfunnels: Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson. Thanks for the advice Russell!

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Patrick Lee Scott

I make things for the internet, that scale, look nice, and make money!