Copy & Paste Strategy: How to Accelerate Change by Borrowing What Works

What It Covers

Tian and Brooks explore the copy-and-paste strategy from Katie Milkman's book How to Change, demonstrating how to accelerate personal and professional growth by finding people who have already solved your problems and adapting their proven methods rather than reinventing solutions from scratch.

Key Questions Answered

• •Who Not How Framework: Instead of asking what to do or how to do it, ask who has already figured it out. This shifts focus from being the bottleneck to leveraging others' expertise. Platforms like Clarity.fm allow booking experts by the minute, where one sixty-dollar hour-long call can replace weeks of trial-and-error experimentation and research.
• •Proximity Matters for Modeling: Learn from people two to three steps ahead, not decades ahead. A business owner making ten thousand dollars monthly gains more actionable advice from someone at fifty thousand monthly than from billionaires whose infrastructure, resources, and context are too different to translate effectively into immediate next steps.
• •Survivorship Bias Awareness: Recognize that successful outcomes don't guarantee replicable strategies. Just because someone moved to Hollywood and became an A-list actor doesn't mean the same path works universally. Evaluate whether the person's success factors are transferable to your specific situation, resources, and constraints before copying their approach wholesale.
• •Context Translation Required: Copy-paste works best with similar lifestyle and values alignment. Productivity advice from someone young without kids requires significant translation for parents of three. Look for warm referrals and consistent track records rather than trend-chasers who switch strategies annually, jumping from crypto to AI to penny stocks without mastery.
• •Possibility Before Process: Seeing someone successfully doing what you want unlocks belief that it's achievable. Katie Milkman couldn't visualize vegetarianism working until she observed colleagues eating satisfying, protein-rich meals at restaurants. Witnessing real examples removes mental barriers about feasibility before you even learn the how-to steps.