When I was in college I had a phase of hanging pretty much everything on my walls.

I printed off hundreds of pictures of memories with friends from my camera role and hung them in the kitchen. I pulled apart an old State Farm Road Atlas wallpapered my bedroom ceiling with my favorite states. I had posters on every other inch beyond that:

Later I printed off pictures of all my “role models” and hung them up on the bathroom wall. It was weird, and I can’t really explain it looking back - maybe I just thought it was cool, or maybe there was something about having these people externalized in my space to watch over me.

Once I moved out of my college apartment the hall of role models came with me, in different format. I took them off the wall and taped them to the underside of the glass drafting desk I’ve carried with me from place to place. They’re still there looking up at me to this day, keeping me honest throughout my workday routines:

Recently I was looking over the pictures with some renewed focus. It’s a bit funny now, looking at them 6 years since I curated them, like a glimpse through twenty-year-old me’s eyes at the people I idolized in that moment in time.

Now that I’m older things have changed a bit — some role models I don’t admire as much anymore, some that are even more powerful influences than before, others I’ve lost interest in completely, and many new ones that aren’t in the collage at all.

So I decided it might be nice to create a remastered list of my role models, by sitting down right now and just thinking of as many as I can in stream-of-thought fashion:

My Role Models (April 2025)

These are the ones that come to mind, individuals that have an admirable quality or two, people that have had some material influence on my life and have shaped my perspective in some way or another. Surely there are others I’m missing, maybe I’ll revisit in the future.

I know none of these people are perfect; I’m not endorsing or exonerating any character flaws that may come to mind as you glance through them. It’s vulnerable to share who has made an impact on you, but I think it’s kind of beautiful.

Looking at this list it’s also fun to think about how they relate to each other. The themes, the overlap, the dissonance, the circles of expertise.

Which ones may have known each other? Which ones never met but might’ve gotten along well in another lifetime? I dream of getting them all into the same room and just listening to them interact. I suppose in a way they live in my head like that - a little mental cocktail party of role models. That’s a nice thought.

Maybe some other day it would be fun to put this list into ChatGPT and ask it to guess a bit about who I am — I bet you can learn a lot about a person by the people they look up to. It would also be cool to have ChatGPT build a little knowledge graph of them and their interelations. I’d like to do that some time.

For now, that’s all I got. My question for you: who are your role models? Any in common or any that I might like? Share them with me :-)

Alrighty, peace out
Ramsey