The Footsteps of Giants

One of the issues with moving your life in a new direction is finding the right way for you.

For example, have you, or anyone you know tried to lose weight – and failed? Maybe you’ve tried the latest fad diet, which worked for someone you know but did not work at all for you.

It is all back to the issue of how individual we all are. We all have different motivations, beliefs and ideals that have an effect on how we do things in life.

One of the most popular ways in joining a diet club, such as Weight Watchers or Slimming World. The reason these work is because of social pressure, the thought of being weighed in the group every week provides an incentive for those who go. However, if you are the type of person that really does not care about what anyone else thinks or if you are an introvert for who the thought of mixing with relative strangers once a week is an horrendous one, then diet clubs are never going to work for you. You need to find another way.

Whatever it is you want to achieve, there is rarely one best way, it depends on the type of people we are.

Similarly we deal with the problems that life throws in our faces in different ways. Think of the times you have been frustrated by something within seconds of it happening and those times when you have patiently, without complaint worked through other things in order to overcome them, or perhaps a time when you have solved something for someone else who could just not seem to get to grips with the issue.

While we have these individual approaches to the  desires  and problems of life, there are those who are similar in their approaches and closer to how we think who have already achieved, or tried to achieve, whatever it is that you want for your life. By seeking these people out and learning from them it makes our lives easier.

In others words, look for your role models and the people who inspire you. If you want to become an entrepreneur, who do you aspire to be like? Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, James Dyson, all very different people who found different ways to make their money. Perhaps you aspire to be a successful author, like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King or Agatha Christie. Again people with different styles, backgrounds and methods.

You get the idea.

The trick then is to take time to study how your role model achieved what they did and then apply that, where you can, to your life. It will not suit every situation but it will help you having a broader perspective on things, a perspective that is more in line with how you think.

Role models need not be distant celebrities, they could be people much closer to home. Where this is the case use the opportunity to speak to them, and ask them how they do what it is you admire so much. They may not be able to tell you exactly (try explaining something you do automatically!) but you can learn how they learned, how they approach life and the problems they encountered and, importantly, who inspired them.

We are most likely to choose role models because we feel we can relate to them, this is because they appear to think and behave the way we do. There will always be some differences but that does not mean we should ignore their experiences and history. If we can learn something from their successes that we can usefully apply to our lives, then we can create our own success in whatever it is we want to do.

In this wonderful multi-media world seeking the footsteps of giants is so much easier and making the time to do that right now can really make it easier to move forward in life.

An example discovered after I put out the post originally - https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/01/health/13-virtues-wisdom-project/index.html - worth a read