The frontman and the two ways to pick your trench mate | Insider's tricks on assembling your support team

Have you ever though about the people you are surrounded by and how they came into your life?

Did you choose them or did you allow circumstances to choose them for you?

In this 67 steps program lesson, Tai Lopez explains the importance of choosing the right people in your life and how picking the wrong ones can cause major set backs.

How to assemble your support team

Let’s take a look at Warren Buffett for example, he understands that choosing the right people for the right job is so detrimental that he has a system which he follows to hire people for his companies.

Here are the main three attributes Warren Buffett looks for in his hires:

1 — Energy

2 — Intelligence

3 — Integrity

How about you, what traits do you look for when choosing your friends, teammates, partner? Have you even thought about that?

Take audit of your own life

In order to get a real understanding of how you made your choices and how they affected you, you must start auditing your life as well as those who you are surrounded by.

For example, as I took an audit of my life and friends I made along the way, I realized that most of my female friends were not loyal and in fact, always tried to be in competition with me.

However, what I never realized is they were just competitors by nature, it wasn’t a personal attack against me. With that in mind, I made the decision that I no longer wanted to have friends that were highly competitive in every aspect of life.

Not that there is anything wrong with being highly competitive, my preference just leans more towards team work rather than competition so I started setting guidelines and start paying attention to the signs people give.

Because people always gives you signs of who they truly are, you just have to be ready to catch them. They usually come in forms of jokes, indirect comments, body language; pay attention and you will see how people give themselves away very easily.

But how do you go about choosing who stays in your life and who goes?

How about choosing someone who isn’t in constant competition with you? How about choosing someone who is going to have your back and help you improve rather than the one who will constantly be setting traps so they can be on top?

If you are at war, you don’t want your battle buddy to be in competition with you and end up shooting at you instead of shooting at the enemy. From now on, be sure that the people that are on your side are not competing with you.

The best way to make sure of that is by picking people who are strong where you are weak, and weak where you are strong. People who’s ego are so high that they have the need to prove they are better than you.

The real trick is finding out who the person really is. 

As you first meet a person, you won’t be able to see any fallacies, it is said that it takes about a year to discover someone’s true character and values.

Tai provides two different approaches on how to find that out so you can make a decision based on facts rather than just feelings or circumstances.

Approach A is used by the billionaire Charlie Munger. When Charlie Munger wants to hire someone, he never relies on a interview. Why? Because humans are vey good at hiding who they really are. Take actors, for example, they can easily incorporate a different character.

For that very reason, Munger is very adamant about interviewing referrals and not the ones that are provided by the interviewee. He takes time to dig a little bit deeper in order to find references that will be able to relay exactly who the person is.

On the other hand, approach B consists more of a direct approach and it is slow and steady. Considering it takes about a year for a person to show it’s true colors, approach B analyzes how the person reacts and acts in certain occasions.

Take this example, a company looking to hire a CEO takes a candidate to dinner and observes them to see how many thanks he/she gives to the people around such as waiter, driver. If the minimum amount of thanks expected aren’t said, then the person does not get hired.

Why? Because if the person cannot be grateful towards others that are working hard to make sure his experience is a great one, then he is not best suited for the position of a leader.

You see, observation takes time but understand that people will always show you who they are if you are willing to take time to pay attention. It isn’t that you are judging a book by its cover but rather that you are judgments are based on observation and only through analyzation can you make the determination whether or not that book will bring you any value.

Finally, remember that if you don’t set guidelines and keep them, circumstances you will bring you all kinds of people, including those you don’t want in your life.

Books Mentioned in this step:

Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed by Michael D. Eisner

Strengthsfinder by Tom Rath

The 67 steps | Step 26 | Creating Perfect Systems

how to create a perfect system for your life and business

Imagine if you could lower the amount of mistakes you make in your life, how much better would your life be?

This 67 stepslesson helps you figure out possible mistakes before they happen so you can better prepare.

Never rely solely on One Thing or One Person

Tai Lopezdescribes a scenario that happened between him and his mentor, Joel Salatin,where Tai asked Joel why he used a belt and a suspender. Joel’s answer was simple and yet very tactical. He explained to Tai that there will be a time which the belt fails and most likely it will be at time that he needs it to work the most. However, the suspenders will be there to minimize the chances of the pants falling.

You see, in order to prevent mistakes you must think about what could happen so you can then create a system with no single point of failure!

Hence, number one key to minimizing failures is to never rely solely on one thing or one person. Expect that things and people will fail you but you will not fail yourself!

For example, let’s say you are a parent who usually depends on a baby sitter. Be sure to always have on two or more in your contacts so when you truly need a baby sitter, you will have more than one to count on.

Once you start expecting things to wrong, chances are they never will. This occurs because once you materialize the idea of failure, your brain usually starts working on ideas to prevent it.

Plan for failure and they won’t happen

So, key number two is to realize and materialize possible fails so you can plan ahead and prevent them from happening. This can be accomplished by utilizing the F-22Pilot Exercise Technique (at least that is what Tai calls).

The exercise consists of describing three scenarios and creating a plan for each one. Let’s say you are a business owner of a start up company, this is how you would plan for your company’s future:

A — Best Case Scenario + Plan

Ex:What would you do with all the money once your company hit a great profit

B — Most Likely Case Scenario + Plan

Ex:How would you keep your company afloat considering all the competition

C- Worse Case Scenario + Plan

Ex: How would you come back up after a bankruptcy

If you are all about being positive and want to discard all ideas of thinking about the worse case scenarion, then you need to change the way you think.

Charlie Munger, the multimillion dollar investor, describes how he spent his life preparing for the worst and made him a lot happier.

The Six Sigma Level

Big companies are constantly thinking about the bad, that’s how they keep customers happy and items free of defects and mistakes.

Motorola, for example, uses the Six sigma Levelto test their products. The Six Sigma level is a quality control tool that uses levels to analyze mistakes and defects.

This is how it works; the percentage represents the amount of mistakes and defects per million

Level 1–69%

Level 2–31%

Level 3–6.7%

Level 4–0.62%

Level 5–0.023%

Level 6–0.00034%

Level 7–0.0000019%

Level six is the level which companies strive to be in. Level 7 is practically perfect and as much as humans can try, no product is perfect and free of mistakes and defects.

Now, here’s a question for you, what level in the Six Sigma Doctrine would you say you are on? How many mistakes are you making ?

Take some time to think about that and then take some time to plan for mistakes that can happen in the future.

Planning is easier than you think. Start analyzing and thinking about what have others have done that made them fail? What would you do differently? How would you solve certain problems and situations?

You see, most of us have much to say and advice to give to others but we tend not think about our own lives and how we could do things differently for ourselves.

Which is the very reason why Tai suggests to make war with a multitude of counselors and that means reading more books, acquiring more mentors, going to more seminars so you can step out of your own box and take a look at your own life and analyze your actions and how will they lead you to your end goal.

Finally, it is important to remember that you can definitely learn from mistakes but who said they have to be yours?

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Books Mentioned in this step:

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman

The Story of my life: Helen Keller’s Autobiography