Choose Your Role Models

YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR ROLE MODELS

When there’s a virtue to which you aspire, you can usually name at least one role model who embodies that virtue and motivates you to embody it. An ambitious entrepreneur may remind herself of other entrepreneurs who worked eighteen-hour days, eating ramen and setting up shop in their garage, and when she’s feeling demoralized, they come to mind and inspire her to keep working. A parent who strives to be patient with their children keeps in mind an example of their own parents, grandparents, teachers, or other adults who showed admirable patience toward them when they were young.

The same is true of scout mindset. When you talk to people who are unusually good at scout mindset, they’ll very often credit a role model, a person they keep in mind for inspiration. Their stories show why scout mindset can feel exciting, meaningful, and inspiring as well as useful.

Different people are inspired by different things, and you’ll want to focus on people who embody one of the aspects of scout mindset that happens to be particularly compelling to you. Maybe that’s the ability to hold your identity lightly and focus on impact, like the citizen scientists during the AIDS crisis. I learned their story from David Coman-Hidy, then head of the Humane League, who shares it with his team as a role model for what activism should look like. “To me, that is the ultimate inspirational story,” Coman-Hidy told me. “That is the spirit that I think activists should be working in—that we’re going to have obstacles come up, we’re going to be wrong about things, we’re going to suffer defeats . . . But we just need to constantly keep a sober assessment of what can do the most good.”

Maybe what inspires you is the confidence of being comfortable with uncertainty. Julian Sanchez is a writer who, at the time of this account, was a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. When he was in college, he conducted what turned out to be the final interview with the acclaimed political philosopher Robert Nozick before Nozick’s death in 2002. The conversation made a profound impression on Sanchez.

Most philosophers Sanchez had read argued for their views in an aggressive way. Their goal was to force you to accept their conclusion by raising and then thoroughly decimating all potential objections to it. Nozick’s approach was different: “He would take you with him as he worked through an issue,” Sanchez recalled, “making no effort to hide points of doubt or confusion, often running off on intriguing tangents or raising problems only to admit he couldn’t fully resolve them.”[15] It was as if Nozick were saying: I don’t need to appear certain—because if I can’t be sure of the answer, no one can be.

That self-assured attitude toward uncertainty is what Sanchez now keeps in mind as a role model for his own writing on technology, privacy, and politics. “Nozick feeds into my aesthetic sensibility—which is the sense that it’s a sign of confidence, intellectually, to not need to be certain about everything,” he told me.

Maybe what you find most inspiring is the idea of having the courage to stare reality in the face. Steven Callahan’s story, discussed in chapter 7 of the book, offers an example: his equanimity during weeks as a castaway helped him plan for the worst and make the best choices he could when all his options were grim. One thing that helped Callahan achieve that equanimity was a role model: another shipwreck survivor named Dougal Robertson, who had managed to keep himself and his family alive at sea for over five weeks after their ship capsized in 1972.

Robertson’s memoir, Sea Survival, was one of the few possessions Callahan made sure to salvage from his ship as it sank. He hadn’t paid much for the book. But in those weeks he spent in the life raft, Sea Survival was worth “a king’s ransom” to Callahan, not just for its practical tips on survival, but for its emotional guidance.[16] Robertson emphasized how important it was to accept the reality of your new life as a castaway, rather than clinging to the hope of being rescued. Each time a ship would pass by Callahan’s raft, achingly close but still too far to spot him, Callahan would remind himself of Robertson’s maxim: Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of your survival voyage.

Personally, I find all those facets of scout mindset inspiring—the willingness to prioritize impact over identity; the confidence to be unconfident; the courage to face reality. But if I were to name one single facet I find most inspiring, it’s the idea of being intellectually honorable: wanting the truth to win out, and putting that principle above your own ego.

The example of intellectual honor I find myself thinking about most often is a story related by Richard Dawkins from his years as a student in the zoology department at Oxford.[17] At the time, there was a major controversy in biology over a cellular structure called the Golgi apparatus—was it real or an illusion created by our observational methods?

One day, a young visiting scholar from the United States came to the department and gave a talk in which he presented new and compelling evidence that the Golgi apparatus was, in fact, real. Sitting in the audience of that talk was one of Oxford’s most respected zoologists, an elderly professor who was known for his position that the Golgi apparatus was illusory. So of course, throughout the talk, everyone was stealing glances at the professor, wondering: How’s he taking this? What’s he going to say?

At the end of the talk, the elderly Oxford professor rose from his seat, walked up to the front of the lecture hall, and reached out to shake hands with the visiting scholar, saying, “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” The lecture hall burst into applause.

Dawkins says, “The memory of this incident still brings a lump to my throat.” It brings a lump to my throat, too, every time I retell that story. That’s the kind of person I want to be—and that’s often enough to inspire me to choose scout mindset, even when the temptations of soldier mindset are strong.