The Power of Spending Time with People Who Inspire You

Today, I wanted to talk about the power of spending time with mentors and spending time with people who inspire you or are experts in something you're passionate about.

This reminds me of a story about a couple of decades back.

I had casually gotten into road biking.

When I started at one of my first real software engineering jobs, I was telling one of the people there about my new passion and they said, you have to talk to this guy Bruce!

So I went over and started talking to him about what I was doing…casual riding on the weekends, etc.

Then he told me what he was doing.

🔅 He was riding 3x-4x a week doing 250 miles of riding.

🔅 He was the membership chair of the local cycling club.

🔅 He led a Double Century ride every year - that’s 208 miles in one day!

Then he started to bring up some pictures of his bikes and then he started to bring up a spreadsheet with the gear ratios of the cassettes that he liked to use and different kinds of riding.

I remember thinking to myself, this guy is off the deep end. He's out there.

And I realized that the judgment I was using there was separating myself from him.

I don't know that I necessarily thought that I wanted to be like him.

But I couldn't even entertain the idea of being an athlete like that, who was into a sport that I really was kind of fallen in love with.

So I wound up spending a lot of time with him.

I kept learning and absorbing and becoming more passionate about the sport and got into great shape.

Fast forward two years later.

🔅 I upgraded my bike.

🔅 I was doing a similar amount of mileage a week.

🔅 I joined the cycling club, began doing service there and became the membership chair.

🔅 I did a couple of double centuries and yes, I had a spreadsheet with my gear ratios in it.

This was a great lesson for me that I continue to use.

When I’m looking to level up or learn something new, I seek out people who inspire me.

I avoid an inner dialog of separating myself from them and change the frame from:

“I could never learn/do that?”

to

“If they can do it, so can I”.

You can do this on your own by reading, online courses, videos, etc.

But you’ll get there a lot faster with people who have already been there.

Never underestimate the power of spending time with people who really inspire you.

Seek them out.

It will change your life.

Have a great day!

#Leadership

#TeamBuilding

#Motivation

#BusinessStrategy

#ExecutiveCoaching