Smartcuts

Smartcuts explains how some people and businesses achieve rapid growth and build sustainable, profitable companies in the time it takes you to get another promotion, by working smart, not hard and hacking into the ladder of success, instead of climbing it one step at a time.

If you haven’t stumbled across him on Youtube yet, I’d be surprised – Tai Lopez, probably the loudest voice telling you to get a mentor on the internet. This book agrees, making an often-cited argument: all professional athletes have coaches, all professional musicians have teachers, and all professional businessmen (and women) should have a mentor.

However, there’s a caveat, and it’s an interesting one: your mentor should be an informal relationship, not a formal one.

There’s plenty of paid mentorship programs, but according to a study by Christina Underhill, informal mentorship yields better results than formal mentorship, simply because mentors are more invested in helping their mentees through struggling times when they feel personally connected to them.

Paying someone to tell you what to do can help some of the time, but when a true friend commits to helping you get up to his or her level, that’s the kind of mentorship that’ll show the biggest results.

For example, when a London hospital team reached out to Ferrari’s Formula One pit stop team for help with transferring patients from operating to the ward, they eventually ended up building close-knit relationships, which led to a long-term cooperation. The error rate in the hospital decreased by 66% over the years and Ferrari even became their sponsor.

The best way to grow any successful venture is to double down on what’s already working. But what if you haven’t found anything that works yet?

This is where timing comes in. You can never know which of your ideas turn out to be brilliant and which ones no one will care about. But you can at least try to have good timing.

For example, Michelle Phan has one of the most popular Youtube channels about make-up and fashion around. She’d made videos since 2007, but had her first big springboard hit in early 2010. Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ video had come out around a month earlier, and Michelle explained how to do one of Gaga’s creepy makeups and the video exploded to 30 million views.

Now she had a stepping stone to work from, which she instantly used to make more videos re-creating popular make up styles, like from Catwoman, Tim Burton movies, or Disney princesses.

Once you find something that works, do it again. But until you do, try to strike the right nerve at the right time.