so for much of my life finding a role model was nearly impossible until I figured out that actually everybody is a potential role model and that awareness changed my life for the better well why does this matter well whether we realize it or not every day we're all checking in with role models unconsciously or consciously we're looking for people that we approve of we disapprove of something they did that we liked something they did that we didn't like it's just how we roll whether you're a teenager whether you're an alleged adult that's just what we do but we live in a culture that makes it hard to find role models now don't we I mean we live in a culture of outrage and teardown and even the good people get covered with slime once in a while or people who we thought were good can get revealed to be have some sort of terrible secret and when that happens if you invested a lot into them it can be personally devastating I know it has been for me over the last few years so where can you look for guidance well I created a little thing I call hashtag role model but I'll get back to that I was raised by a single mom with two older siblings who were much older ten years older and 13 years older and that meant I spent a lot of time alone so my role models as a kid were characters on TV or characters that I read about in fact my top three characters were role models were spider-man a nerdy teenager who turns into a great superhero yeah I can get behind that and I've been looking for a radioactive spider most of my life Captain Kirk because he was just straight-up awesome he was brave loyal to his friends never quit and he's pretty good with the ladies and in my third one fourth third whatever what Rob Petri Dick Van Dyke and here's why he's a guy who could sing he could dance he was a good friend he was a comedy writer and he had a stable family life that was something I could get behind the problem with these role models though was that they're fictitious so in some ways that makes them kind of terrible as they're impossible so I looked around in the were looking for people I could emulate people I could latch on to and I ran into another problem there is that everybody seems perfect except they're not really they're perfection was a creation of the media or a presentation in history books or maybe my own self-imposed expectations and that left me looking at them not as guideposts but his stop signs and every time I failed to live up to their perfection my self-esteem would drop just a little more so what was I looking for anyway well I was looking for people who reflected values and ethics that I wanted and I wanted people who could be trailblazers that could lead me into a life that I wanted to live and not a life that I accepted as a default option hmm ie coming said it takes great courage to grow up and become who you really are I first read this quote about 10 years ago and it really changed my life and it's something I've tried to adopt I don't know that I'm always courageous I definitely don't think I'm always grown-up but it has worked for me to kind of embrace my inherent gymnast and I didn't know that but somebody gave me a gift a long time ago and I'm gonna share that with you about 25 years ago I worked on this very stage as part of the Barnstable summer family theater I wrote directed produced and acted in shows that included entire families from small children to teenagers and their parents it was a select slice of time usually July and August and outside of that I was up at school living a crazy life but at the end of one summer one of the moms came up took me aside and said thank you for being a role model to my son and I was kind of blown away because I heard what she was saying and I accepted it graciously in the moment but my inside voice the guy who actually knew me said you're not a good role model you're pretty terrible at college you're a really bad boyfriend you party too much and you definitely don't have a sense of direction in your life so this really gracious comment this gifts that she was giving me hid my consciousness the way a grain of sand lands in an oyster it irritated me it actually hurt but I worked on it for a very long time and eventually I turned it into a pearl see I'd been wrong about role models all along they don't have to be perfect how on earth could they be perfect they're people terrible people just like me yay the fact was if I could be a good role model for this slice of time well then maybe all my role models could be perfect or role model rific in slices of time I didn't need to adopt a worshiped miss for their entire life I could accept an achievement or an attitude or words they wrote or pictures they drew I could just take that one aspect and let that be my guidepost see my previous mindset had been wrong as well I was chasing perfection and falling short than beating myself up for doing so does that sound familiar to anybody more than two hands really nobody okay thank you but the problem with chasing perfection is you're never going to catch it and it holds you back because you're living in fear fear of failure fear of humiliation and fear of being found out as a fraud which brings us back to my hashtag role model plan so I found my way to a better healthier attitude and I decided that if I could recognize aspects of people strangers why couldn't I do that with people I know in real life so we're in social media time now and I hang out maybe too much on Facebook and Twitter but when I would see my friends people I know people I know who are imperfect but people I know who are also pretty awesome at times say something that they had done instead of just clicking like or favorite or retweeting I would give a little hashtag role model with no explanation it was there did you did you finish the first draft of your book were you a good parent today did you sail telefone joke that made me laugh did you change the world in some modest way role model role model role model mother bleep and role model I was on board recognizing that real people had these actions that could be modeled let me off the hook of perfection and that was a gift to myself but tagging people was important for three reasons for one it let me note an action or a value that I appreciated too it was an act of generosity to let them know that they were appreciated and it was an act of vulnerability on my part to to kind of open up about a real feeling and I don't know about you but generosity and vulnerability are not my go-to moves I'm really more sarcastic in glib the third thing that came out though and this really surprised me was that by sort of cataloguing these actions and ethics and values of developing habla I was discovering I was creating a data set of things I actually valued versus what I thought I might value there's a subtle difference there when we start a project whether it's the project of our lives or whether it's a short-term goal whatever it is we have an idea of how things are gonna go we have expectations and then reality hits and things change well if you try to live with that early expectation instead of the reality you're gonna live with turbulence in your life and cognitive dissonance things that just don't add up right and that'll make you unhappy so what I did with this role model sort of database I could start aligning my life with the things I really cared about I started doing that about ten years ago when I stopped being a full-time designer and started becoming a designer and a writer and has made all the difference in the world to me the other thing it does is that by noting these things that I value it gives me a tool tools to be resilient when I screw up and I do screw up and I will screw up again I'll probably screw up later this afternoon because that's what we do as people we fail over and over and over again so now I had a way to correct my course when I did that Samuel Beckett says ever tried ever failed no matter try again fail again fail better you've probably heard that quote it's become very popular in the last 10 years or so it's big in Silicon Valley and entrepreneurialism but you can adopt it in your own life to fail better you're going to fail fail better but how do you do that how do you fail better if you don't know what you're trying to achieve in the first place well that's where the role model database comes from I've comes into play and here's my last quote when I became a man I put away childish things including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown-up that's CS Lewis it was childish of me to expect perfection from myself and from other people that's just nuts I eventually managed to put that away though it takes some vigilance not to fall into old habits of expectation what the role model tags have done for me though is it given me tools for awareness to see that what I really want what I really want in life is a life of silliness joy and absurdity coupled with deep thoughts and meaningful actions in my community so that's what I've learned by hashtagging role model maybe you can try it maybe it'll help you - thank you very much