Role models do ordinary things in extraordinary ways

Find your role model, someone you admire who can serve as a guide for your life. Then use that person as a guide for yourself, even though you may not always measure up to that person as your life mentor.

My earliest role model was a fourth-grade teacher who encouraged me after I relocated from an experimental city school to a more traditional suburban one. I found it difficult to cope with all the changes, but she noticed I had a gift for telling stories and encouraged me. She showed what a good teacher really does — help students learn or lead them out of ignorance toward knowledge. After all, the Latin word for education is educare, which means to lead out.

The great question for anyone assessing a person’s character is this one: Would I want my child to grow up to be like this person? How you respond to this question reveals not only the character of the the person you are considering but also what you value.

I thought about a person I knew, a small-town lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who could have stayed in Boston and earned a great deal more money that he did in the small town he chose. His priority was serving people not making money. In fact, I witnessed him helping people in need, often without even telling them who he was. Not particularly outwardly religious, he would say that the golden rule was his religion.

He also was a man who loved to learn. His house was full of books on many subjects, but he seemed especially interested in science, especially how or even whether the universe had a beginning. He was most upset about how our planet was being destroyed by abuse and neglect. My favorite photo of him is him standing with a crowd, mostly young people, protesting the building of a nuclear power plant nearby.

He was also a spontaneous man who enjoyed life and collected stories as if they were his most precious possessions. Like Socrates of old, he would wander around town engaging people wherever he was, sharing his stories and listening to theirs.

Another of my role models was a postal carrier who day after day in all kinds of weather delivered the mail. There were snowy, freezing days when he was so bundled up it was hard to see anything but his eyes peering out from a face mask. When I once asked him how he could do this, he responded: “Somebody has to do it,” a comment that spoke to his character.

You can either be a role model or find one to follow, possibly do both in one lifetime. A real role model doesn’t need to boast about themselves. They go about doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways. They are the glue that keeps society from falling apart.

The great question for anyone assessing a person’s character is this one: Would I want my child to grow up to be like this person?