A role model is someone you want to emulate. It could be their behaviors, successes, or experiences that you appreciate and want to model after.
Typically, your role models are older and have more experience than you, and many are often thought of as family members, teachers, or community leaders.
But what about your role models from long ago?
Do you have role models from history?
It’s not our first thought, but what if it were?
I have role models who were alive 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and one who was alive even 2,000 years ago.
It’s better to have many role models than to have few.
Because the next part will help you decide your future.
When you have enough role models, ask yourself: What is the commonality between all of the people I admire? What trait does each person have that sticks out to me the most?
It might take a while to connect the dots, but when you do, you’ll experience an incredible realization.
For me, the realization came when I seriously considered why my role models became my role models.
Why Saint Augustine, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Malcolm X, Benjamin Franklin, Jacqueline Novogratz, and many more have become the people I admire the most.
And it was this: because, throughout their lives, they reinvented themselves. Either by choice or necessity, they were challenged and had to rethink everything about who they were so that they could overcome their challenges. They discarded their old selves to become someone new, someone better.
It didn’t always work out, and it wasn’t always pretty, but they continued reinventing themselves anyway, because they had somewhere they needed to be. They were willing to do whatever it took to get there, even if it meant starting from scratch.
That was my realization. And, as it turns out, I’ve already undergone my own reinvention, twice: once when I gave up my dream and identity as a professional basketball player, and the other when I stopped dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur after college.
The first reinvention led me to my love for reading books. The second reinvention sparked my interest in writing and storytelling.
My life will be shaped by the reinventions I undergo. But one thing is certain: those I look up to have reinvented themselves in more ways than we could imagine.
My love for stories and storytelling will be the one thing that’ll remain consistent. But my occupations, careers, and disciplines will vary widely depending on where I am and what I’m doing.
And I have a new dream. One that will outlive me. As of now, I firmly believe that everything I do will be the culmination of realizing that dream.
To achieve that dream, I must embrace my reinventions and share as many stories as possible.
That’s the only way to honor those who came before me.
Find your role models, discover the similarities, and tackle the world with your newfound knowledge.
We’re waiting for you to become a model for the next generation.
In fact, once he is motivated, no one can change more completely than the man who has been at the bottom. I call myself the best example of that.
Malcolm X