Pick Up the Trail: Learn from Your Role Models

We are pulled in every direction, but we are led in only one. This reality prevails at every level, including the story you are born into. It is the setting for your calling. For, your story picks up the trail of those who have gone before you. Now it’s your turn to blaze.

But most of us do not know this. We tend to find ourselves on one of two poles, both equally confusing. On the one pole is the well-marketed mantra, “You can be anything you want. You can do anything you want. Dream! Dream! There are no limits!” The other pole is, “Nothing matters. A hundred years from now, no one, including you, will care. So follow your impulses and do what you want.”

Sure, there are endless possibilities, and sure, a century from now our strife will cease; but these are the edges of the map of life and not the map itself. And these are half-truths concealing the treasure of your own unique role as an uncopyable, irreproducible person. What is more, these statements turn out to be outright lies when we consider the fact that you have been entrusted with the gift of being a uniquely qualified encourager, influencer, and mentor in the lives of others, a role informed not by your credentials or titles but by the conversion of your joys and sorrows into self-giving love and life-giving words. 

Let us demolish the two statements even more. To say, “You can be anything and you can do everything” is a declaration of confusion, for our very nature—both our spirit and our DNA—is wired with a homing device, a subconscious question as deeply embedded in us as any Monarch butterfly destined for the forests of the Michoacán:  “Where am I and where do I go?” Therefore, to tell me I can go in any of 360 degrees in my identity and activity is the same as spinning me in place with a blindfold, taking it off, and cheering me on in my stupor. 

And let us swing the wrecking ball a final time at the opposite thought, that “nothing matters, therefore follow your impulses.” Is this not the same declaration of confusion, but with the clothing of despair instead of delusion? And even if it were true that, for you, nothing really matters, it remains rock solidly true that who you become and what you do profoundly affects those you love, those you lead, and those you live among. These three circles are a trust, a test, and a treasure. You will either enrich or deplete these circles through your choices. There is no other way. 

We are not born into a vacuum, nor do we show up out of context. No, we are born into a story, a coherent (if not always elegant) sequence of events. And that story is comprised of people who have made choices. People whose successes, setbacks, and start-overs inform the terrain we show up in.

It is people in our proximity—family, country—but it is also people across the breadth of history and the breadth of the earth. 

Therefore, we have a task before us: to assess the trail behind us and the uncharted territory of life before us.

Here is where we choose role models, study the sources they drew from, and incorporate the fruitful elements of their values and practices.

Become a voracious reader and researcher of the men and women whom you aspire to model your own life after. Trace the roots of their influences and identify where they left off in their own application thereof when they departed this life. Choose what to pick up from where they left off.

Read the autobiography, memoir, or trustworthy biography(ies) of a person whose life you aspire to model a portion of your own after. Trace their influences back to original sources. Incorporate what you can from all that you absorb. Identify how you can contribute to the “tradition” they were a part of.  Do something after the manner of the role model and attempt to take it further “in the flavor of you.”

It is your turn to set up the successors. It is your turn to blaze. 

© Kurt Mähler

Here is Kurt’s video instruction on identifying role models.

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