Life Actually: Birth of a Role Model

I believe a role model is a person you can draw inspiration from, a person whose chosen walk of life is one you admire and one you wish to model your life after. I do not have a role model, largely because I have spent the last twenty plus years going with the flow of where life took me. Naturally I took classes that were of particular interest: philosophy of education, digital media convergence, quest for wholeness (by far my favorite course); but, never once did I envision the type of life I ultimately would want to lead.

Everything seemed to always work itself out: honor student in grade school and middle school, accepted to three different high schools and graduated with honors, accepted to various colleges, spent a year in NY before realizing it was not the college experience I desired and transferred to a more suitable collegiate environment (#LongLiveElon). I became a member of the greatest fraternity, and then went onto law school. I became very involved in law school, and graduated on time. Took the bar exam, passed on the second time and spent less than a year doing odd jobs before being hired at my current place of employment. Sure I have suffered ups and downs, a fair share of which I thought I might mot recover from, but I never really stopped to think about where my life was headed and the path I had traversed so far.

It is only quite recently with the introduction of new people in my life that I have begun to see some shape to what that life may look like. Due to my fondness for people and my curiosity into human behavior, I rather enjoy social experiments, and my most recent undertaking has exposed me to a culture and community that oddly enough made me learn more about myself and the type of man I want to be more than anything else. While I do not implore everyone to run social experiments, especially without some consent or agreements, I can honestly state that in leaving your comfort zone you can learn so much more about yourself then you would in continuing to lead your life uninterrupted.

How do I describe an experience you would need to live to capture? I cannot. In fact, isn't that the point? Similar to skydiving I can only tell you how awesome it was, but I cannot supply the information for you to experience it vicariously. You sometimes have to pull the brakes and catch your breath so you can experience life actually. Sometimes you have to experience a different sort of life in order to understand the type of life you have or the type of life you want. Become your own role model by doing something different and outside your normal walk of life.