Live the Best Story of Your Life by Bob Litwin

Author:Bob Litwin [Litwin, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57826-667-8
Publisher: Hatherleigh Press
Published: 2016-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

Mentors and Anti-Mentors

I’m Mr. Bad Example, intruder in the dirt

I like to have a good time, and I don’t care who gets hurt

I’m Mr. Bad Example, take a look at me

I’ll live to be a hundred, and go down in infamy!

—WARREN ZEVON

We all have mentors—people who inspire us. They seem to exist to show us the blueprint of who we could be if we were living our best stories. Growing up, I was a skinny kid with a lot of fears, I wanted to be courageous and strong, and my models became characters from books and TV shows like Huck Finn, Robin Hood, King Arthur, the Hardy Boys, Spin and Marty, Superman, and The Lone Ranger. This may seem silly now, but authors of kids’ books and creators of TV shows often build up a fictional character’s great qualities, so what better place to find mentors who are living your New Story, or parts of that story? Even today I aspire to be like some of my favorite protagonists, each of whom have qualities to which I aspire: Dirk Pitt, Reacher, Bob “the nail” Swagger. They are my mentors, and I role-play them. These days many of my mentors are athletes: Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Manning, Gretzky, Derek Jeter, Magic and Larry Bird.

Just knowing you admire someone isn’t enough, it’s about really picking apart what characteristics, specifically, you want to emulate (he’s patient, he doesn’t get flustered easily, he makes goals and keeps them, he’s always learning something new), studying their outlooks, reactions, and responses create a roadmap toward the New Story. Qualities that I aspire to bring into my life.

Looking at iconic, larger-than-life figures you often find a mentor was at the foundation of their success stories. Thanks to a rough-handed medical intern, a pair of forceps dragged Sly Stallone by his face into the world on July 6, 1946, severing the facial nerves in his eyelid and lips. Bullied at school he used muscular stars like Steve Reeves as role models and got into bodybuilding. Weights cost more money than he had, so he pilfered heavy automobile parts out of the local junkyard and worked out with cinderblocks attached to a pole. Later, when he went out for film roles, he used that forceps incident to his advantage (see Chapter 11: Dancing with the Beast) and that soon-to-be-famous sneer help to type cast him as a tough guy. Stallone’s used a ton of New Story tools to create a recipe of success including finding the can and spinning the story, but it all started with his use of role models to become stronger. Sully Sullenberger, who landed the US Airways flight in the Hudson River became a role model. The New York firemen and EMTs became heroic models in the face of 9/11.

As important as mentors are, the anti-mentor can be even more powerful. A few months ago a headline caught my eye: “Trainwreck Starlets Are the Anti-Role Models We Need, and Here’s Why.” The Cosmo.​com article went

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