🥘 Recipe for Reverse Engineering

Failure is a great teacher. But success has better lessons.

Hey friends, it’s Samuel! 👋

Or Sam if we know each other.

Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I share bite-sized doses of marketing goodness for marketing people.

Today’s topic — reverse engineering success.

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James Clear @JamesClear

Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be. Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back. Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work. Necessary, but not sufficient.

I think we get this one thing wrong about success.

We think we can boil success to one thing:

• You just have to be consistent

• You need to produce daily content

• You just have to show up

But success is rarely every due to one thing, and failure can be.

In my quest to reverse engineer reverse engineering (that is trying to figure out how to learn from success), I needed to go on a side track.

The big idea I’m fascinated with is this:

We can learn so much more from success than failures.

Mistakes are great teachers.

But success has much better lessons.

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🔄 The Recipe for Reverse Engineering

MasterChef Australia’s pressure test puts the home cooks to the test in recreating recipes

How do we learn from success?

There’s a segment on the MasterChef Australia show that requires participants to recreate a dish from one celebrity chefs.

Contestants get to taste the food, and are often given the ingredients and recipes.

The goal is to recreate it EXACTLY like the pro.

Sounds easy enough?

It's insanely hard.

So hard in fact, that winners of pressure tests could end up winning the whole competition.

It’s a little bit meta — but I think here lies the recipe for reverse engineering.

Here’s how I think you can get better at reverse engineering:

1. Becoming a collector of great recipes

2. Identify the unique ingredients

3. Recreate the recipe exactly

4. Bonus: Putting in a personal touch

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📝 SUMMARY — Recipe for Reverse Engineering

The big idea:

We can learn so much more from success than failures.

Success leaves clues and lots of it.

To learn from success, we can use this simple recipe:

1. Collecting

2. Identifying

3. Recreating

4. Personalising

This is such a large topic, I thought it would be appropriate to dive deep into each of these in future newsletters.

Hope that this helps!

Hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. Subscribe or share it.

Til next week,

Samuel

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☕️ The Good Stuff

Pull yourself a shot and grab a mug. Let’s dive in to this weeks’ good stuff.

📺 YOUTUBE — How to 10X Your Learning with David Perell. I’m always fascinated with how to learn better.

🐦 TWEET THREAD — Wes Kao (who writes brilliant tweet threads) reflect on how to find inspiration.

Wes Kao 🏛 @wes_kao

To build something new, you have to find new sources of inspiration. THREAD: A framework and examples of how to do it:

🎙 PODCAST - Failing On Our Way To Mastery w/ Seth Godin. Love a good episode with Seth Godin. I plucked a quote from the podcast for today’s Quote of the Week.

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🖊 Quote of the Week

Learning is the act of failing on our way to mastery. - Seth Godin

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🪃 Throwback

Catch up with last week’s newsletter.

🥇3 Principles For Being The Favourite