What do you want to do with your life? Teach special education? Become a strength and conditioning coach at a university? Be an orthopedic surgeon? Become a successful trial attorney? Invest in real estate, retire early and travel the world? Whatever it is you want to do, odds are someone else has done it before you.

Rather than start from scratch and go in blind, find someone who has already done what you want to do. Ask them questions, build the relationship. Then go do what that person did. Don’t make it weird. Don’t be a robot and ask someone if they will formally be your mentor. Be a human, keep it organic, make friends. But be selective with who you are spending your time and cultivating relationships with.

Successful people generally like to tell their story and help others succeed too. By building a relationship with someone who has done what you want to do, you can expedite the process by learning from their mistakes – you can streamline the process by clearly identifying what to do and what not to do. You’re not having to “reinvent the wheel.”

What’s one of the best ways to learn from top performers? Read! You can have your own forum of mentors from the books you read. But it’s important to get up and take action rather than getting caught up sitting and reading about it all day.

In any event, finding a mentor and building a relationship is just like any other relationship – you have to bring value to the relationship. Do your homework to bring something to the table. The point is that once we make up our minds to go do something, if we want it bad enough, we can go do it too. The most effective way to accomplish what we want is to find someone who has already done it, learn what to do and what not to do, and then go do it ourselves.

So what is your purpose? Where is God calling you to be? Where do you want to be? Surround yourself with people that make you better. Find a person or four who have already done what you want to do. Ask them questions, Learn. Create a roadmap based on their feedback. Then go do what they did.