We are often asked about who our role model is. A typical expectation is to get a name and what inspires us to follow them. And that is it.

However, I have always had a different view on this question. I do not have ‘the role model’, per se. I can not like and follow ‘the personality’. However, I admire and get inspired by various personalities from time to time. Be it an actor, a director, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a working professional, a commoner, a C-suite leader, a creative or a historical figure. I admire their spirit of not giving up, taking up challenges in life – head on and continuing the journey of learning, unlearning and relearning. They are there to amaze you with their intriguing stories that may seem very common yet highly uncommon.

I believe that every person has a story to tell. It is their approach to life that makes them stand apart in the crowd. They are out there in the broad, large world. Living, surviving. I love to listen to those who have lived a life with a massive bundle of narratives and experiences to unfold over the years. Try it someday. Listening to a lived experience is enough to motivate any disheartened soul. Their unwavering spirit of not giving up and flowing with the flow, like the zigzagged, curvey river, flows. The river knows and aims to reach the sea without much concern about the path it will have to traverse, be it dense forest or the most extended desert, a stony rough patch or a hilly mountain to cross. It just flows.

Imagine a river sitting down with a map to reach the sea. Don’t you think it would never dare set out on the path, seeing the challenges ahead? Instead, it just flows. Don’t you think life will become easier if we also learn to, just flow? Take one step at a time. Fall, cry, get our knees hurt, bleed, but get back on our feet, once again to fall one more time.

I like to live and lead like a river. I do not follow ‘the personality’ to get inspiration but believe in getting out there, on the road, to meet and greet wonderful people, see them, learn from them, and let the inspiration flow like a river, continuously. I also take halts, pauses, many times longer than I thought, but soon I will be reminded of the fact, as Robert Frost would describe in the poem “The Road Not Taken”,

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

You can also share what or who inspires you, why, and how. This would be an interesting thread for all of us to inspire and get inspiration from.