You really only need two people in your life. Not instead of everyone else, just to be clear, but if you're starting something new, you only need these two people and to explicitly know who they are. With everyone else, ok? Don't go crazy, but find THESE TWO PEOPLE FIRST.
This is the piece of advice I give young people and career changers all of the time. I decided it needed a standalone post for me to reference.
The person three steps ahead of you knows exactly where you should put your feet next. They remember what it felt like to be where you are. They can map the immediate terrain - the next job, the next skill, the next pivot - all because they literally were just where you are. Follow their footprints. Copy their moves. You'll always do okay if you stay in their shadow, at least to start.
BUT. The three steps ahead person has a problem.
It's tempting to just cling to them, but even if they're the buddy who got you the job, you have to resist. Seeing as they're only three steps ahead, they can't see the horizon, and you, in their shadow, definitely can’t see that far past them if you’re on their heels. They're too close to the ground you're both standing on and you have to make yourself aware of this.
Enter the second person.
The person three hundred steps ahead of you can't tell you where to put your feet. The path they took? It doesn't exist anymore. At all. Even if they tell you it does, and a lot of them will, I’m telling you now - it doesn't. The rules have changed since they were there and you have to know it in your gut. Don’t get mad at them, just know they’re in a different place than you. The whole landscape looks different from where they stand and that's a feature, not a bug.
But this person can tell you what the view is like, looking back, from way ahead where they are. They can tell you what direction matters. They can tell you which mountains are worth climbing and which are just in the way. You need them for distance and perspective.
Neither one of these people alone is ever enough.
Every day you learn something, but learning something isn't the whole equation. It's just one question on a bigger math test. The full formula is something like:
A) What did you actually learn? B) Is it moving you in the right direction?
A good teacher three steps ahead knows the terrain. A good teacher three hundred steps ahead knows the destination. You need both to calibrate. Plus, If you have both, now you can triangulate. That’s the magic trick right there.
I do this all of the time and use it in multiple domains.
Say you're trying to figure out how to be more present on YouTube but you've never done it before. This was me in 2022ish. I started talking to Jack Forehand and Justin Carbonneau about it because they'd started a few years prior.
I knew they were three steps ahead of me (maybe even 30). When we started collaborating on Excess Returns, we looked at channels we wanted to be like later - from Meb Faber, to Barry Ritholtz, to The Investor’s Podcast and Invest Like The Best and - it was just to see what was working and not working.
As we closed ground and eclipsed some of the people we looked up to at the beginning, we picked out new 3 step and 300 steps ahead folks to follow. It’s iterative like that. It’s also community building like that. Some of the people who were 300 steps ahead? We work with them now. That is so cool, I know you know what I’m talking about, and that can be your life too, if you think this way.
If you want to advance, if you want to learn what's going on, triangulating this way is the closest thing to a hack I can tell you. Go find your people.
