Role Models #31

Hey all,

I hope everyone is well and enjoying life.

Things on my end are settling down a little with the redundancy, and one of the week's highlights for me was seeing a friend and colleague, who got laid off a month before me, start a new job.

For me, I’m pretty determined not to rush into anything. In fact, I’ve turned away a few recruiters. Mainly for 2 reasons…

• you don’t often get a summer off work with the family, and I don’t want the stresses of preparing for an interview to get in the way of that

• but mainly, I have my next ‘thing’ lined up. It’s not a job, it’s more of an experience. Unfortunately, I can’t share more at the moment.

I’ve also been looking at getting a commercial qualification in sailing, but I need to think if that will lead to anything cool that I’d like to do.

Now before we jump into this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share this video I made for you all.

On to this week’s topic…

Role Models

This week I wasn’t sure what to write about until I was watching a YouTube video by Katie Steckly. The video was talking about recognising how close you are to the skills and characteristics of the people you admire, and also what you need to do to close those gaps.

And it got me thinking…

Over the past 4 years at Meta, I’ve been very lucky to be surrounded by great people. Additionally, the culture at Meta is one of “fast feedback” where you are encouraged to share feedback quickly, and also encourage to seek it out.

The result is, those great people I was surrounded by became great mentors. Some of those people knew they were mentoring me (formal) and some didn’t know (informal).

But having access to great mentors can be difficult for a number of reasons. Therefore people need an alternative option, and one such thing is through ‘role models’.

The role model

So let’s just pull a definition of what a role model is…

someone we respect, admire, look up to, and aspire to be like in some way.

They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are famous people you saw on TV or know about via other means. Others are maybe successful business people. But it can also be people who you work with, or who you know locally.

It really goes back to “someone we respect, admire, look up to, and aspire to be like in some way”.

Challenge when looking for a role model

Identifying role models can be a difficult task in itself, made further worse by only selecting role models because of a specific metric or outcomes.

For example, Richard Branson - the self-made billionaire who also owns his own island in the Caribbean. This would seem like a worthy role model for some, but the challenge for myself (and maybe others) is that I don’t know enough about the person to learn. I know the outcomes he has achieved but not the characteristics that got him there. Therefore I can not learn from him.

Another challenge is that often successful people often attribute their success to things which either didn’t have that much influence on the outcome or their behaviour changed as they became more successful and therefore offer bad advice.

Instead, I would suggest we look for role models we can see in action.

So how can we learn from them?

Once we’ve identified our role models, the next challenge is to actually learn from them. While this shouldn’t be so much of a challenge, people will often identify people they would like to be like but fail to do anything useful with their newfound admiration.

And this is where Katie’s video comes in.

Katie suggests 3 steps to help you grow…

1. Identify and write down the characteristics and traits of the person who you are thinking about. What is it you admire about them? Is it their work ethic? Their adventurous nature? Their willingness to help others? Their technical ability?

2. Next, compare yourself to them. How close are you to them and their characteristic? Are you also adventurous? Do you also have a great work ethic?

3. And finally, identify the areas which you might want to develop.

And if there was a 4th element it would be - do something about it.

Now generally comparing yourself to others can be seen as a bad thing. But in this context it’s OK.

In fact, it might help build confidence as you identify some commonality between you, your characteristics and those of your role models.

But also, helps identify the next steps you could also take.

Seneca says this…

When you look at all the people out in front of you, think of all the ones behind you - Seneca

In the context of what we are talking about, this can resonate as - while you may still have somewhere to aspire to, take time to reflect on how far you have already come.

Examples for me

So this whole subject got me to think about who my role models are.

Now I watch a few people on YouTube, especially some sailing channels. Now interestingly I wouldn’t consider those people role models, and while they are living great lives - it’s just not the life I want.

So who inspires me?

The first is Casey Neistat. I’ve mentioned him to a bunch of people and they’ve never heard of him, which totally shocked me. But he’s a successful YouTuber, often regarded as the OG of YouTube. But also, he set up a tech company and sold it for $25m.

But the thing that really inspires me…

He had/has a fun life, he travelled the world, did exciting things and documented the process along the way.

But that’s the outcome, right? What characteristics does he have?

On 25th March 2015, he started his daily vlog, and it is estimated he did it for 800 days. And I watched a lot of them, and the 3 things that jumped out - hard work, creativity and fun.

Hopefully, you got a sense from my previous posts that I work hard. I worked evenings and weekends on my MSc and MBA while working full-time and making sure I had plenty of family time. Well, that is nothing compared to what Casey did making a video every day for over 2 years. And I admire that. I think people can achieve a lot if they put the effort in, and Casey shows that.

And that is just the hard work aspect. In terms of creativity, he did that every day. Finding content for a 10-minute video every day is challenging but rewarding. I write a newsletter once a week and sometimes do the odd post on social media. And yeah, being creative is rewarding - I love it, and I wish I could do more. So I admire him for that.

The second person is Alastair Humphreys. I’ve talked about this guy before, you know the guy who biked around the world and now makes a living off giving talks, writing books, etc.

So what do I admire?

The first is the obvious, he makes a living without being stuck in the 9-5 like most of us. This is a huge deal for me, I’m inspired by the fact he has written several books, and he gets paid to talk in front of people. And also that he has fun while doing it and doesn’t take things too seriously (I love the bad reviews he reads out).

But the other thing is how he manages to do micro-adventures. If he has a public appearance in a different town, instead of booking a hotel he’ll just wild camp.

I bought a 1 man tent 2 years ago to try that and never did. But I will one day.

Summary

So, in summary. Role models can be all around us, they can be ordinary people or they can be people we only see on TV or read about.

Role models can help us grow, but in order to do that you need to first identify the characteristics you admire and then see how you compare, you might be closer than you think. Then finally figure out your own growth areas and do something about it.

Fin.

Every week I finish these with the same thought - I hope this is helpful.

I appreciate not every topic will resonate with everyone. I also appreciate that I might not articulate the topic clearly enough.

But every week I do try to write something useful to you, or something to get you thinking.

Wishing you all a great weekend.

John