Living the Admirable Life

How do you lead a good and admirable life, even if you are never going to be famous? Perhaps a good idea would be to search for and identify people who are widely admired and to try to follow their example.

With this in mind I went to the Wikipedia list of the 18 most widely admired people of the 20^th Century. The full list includes: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Henry Ford, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed these are all admirable people, but immediately I run into a problem. Most of these people don’t look like me. Five are women, and three definitely have darker skin. Three have far more hair, Eisenhower has less, and Einstein’s hair – well. That certainly narrows down my options.

Maybe instead of being admired it would be better to be significant. Again there’s a list for that, this time from the Smithsonian. They have several different categories. As a Rebel or Resistor I have slim chances when I see names like Martin Luther King Jr., Robert E. Lee, Thomas Paine, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, W.E.B. Du Bois, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Malcolm X. How many of these people look like me?

The rest of the categories were equally discouraging, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln (?) and especially where, listed under the athletes category I found Secretariat!

Not to be deterred, I look for a role model under “25 Most Influential People In History By Attribute.” Bruce Lee, I don’t think so. Washington (again) was followed by Walt Disney, Louis Pasteur and Marilyn Monroe. I stopped reading. I can see this will be another dead end. Few if any of them look like me!

Yes, this essay has gotten a little silly, but it’s only to point out how silly people are to handicap themselves by believing their role models must be someone who “looks like me” to be valid. None of the originals had any role models at all. They just had to behave their way to success. We could learn a lot from them just by looking at their words and actions, yet we hear the looks-like-me mantra all the time on the news and in sports. The absence of a role model who looked like me is a favorite complaint. It seems like another excuse to portray oneself as victim, often by people who have been successful enough to be given a platform in the first place. That a role model must look like me is a limiting, negative and discouraging message to give to any child. It’s a shame that it has become such a common theme.

On a related note, one of the most influential and admired people in my life is having a birthday today. Happy birthday, Marilyn. Cheers!