#74: Role models, relatability, and the aftermath of the four-minute mile.
Admitting my success is scarier than admitting my vulnerability... but it's worth it.
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“Why are you hiding your success?”
I can't remember if these exact words came out of Leona’s mouth or if my brain just heard the veiled question under what she was saying.
I shrugged sheepishly. “I’m worried people won’t take me seriously when I talk about loss and hardship if other parts of my life are actually pretty damn great. Like somehow the good things in my life forfeit my ‘hardship credibility’... Maybe it’s that I don’t want to seem un-relatable. I don’t want to make people feel bad for the hand they’ve been dealt. I want to inspire them to believe that ‘things will be great again’, even if they’re not so great right now.”
Growing up, humbleness was not only my family’s reality but also one of our core values.
Victory laps, showboating, flaunting, bragging, attention-grabbing — anything that could be perceived as other than meager modesty was deemed unacceptable arrogance. Tall poppy syndrome kept our stalks short.
But now I have the time and means to go to idea festivals, take writing workshops, visit the kids in exotic locales, walk across Scandinavia for thirty days. I try not to rub it in anyone’s face, but I’m here every week writing about my life. It’s hard to hide my daily reality.
Which has me wondering… Do people want to hear what I have to say if I expose how much I love my life?
Is exposing the high highs doing much good in a world where so many people are suffering from low lows?
In 1954, Roger Bannister was the first human being recorded running a mile in less than four minutes.
People had been seriously attempting the feat for over 50 years, yet as more people tried and failed, some began to think it just wasn't humanly possible.
But it wasn’t Bannister’s success that caught my eye in the Harvard Business Review article that Leona sent me a day after our conversation. It was what came next.
As Bill Taylor describes, “Just 46 days after Bannister's feat, John Landy, an Australian runner, not only broke the barrier again, [but broke Bannister’s record], with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds. Then, just a year later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race. Over the last half century, more than a thousand runners have conquered a barrier that had once been considered hopelessly out of reach.”
It’s not that everyone suddenly got faster from eating wheat bran or wearing Nikes. It’s because they saw it could be done. With a role model, they were able to believe they could do it too.
Taylor sums it up by saying, “great leaders don’t just out-perform their rivals. They transform the sense of what’s possible.”
It’s important that our role models be relatable.
We don’t want them to seem like otherworldly gods, to whom we could never hope to compare. But we don’t want them to play small either. Then they wouldn’t be role models. They wouldn’t show us what was possible, what we too are capable of.
I was a quiet kid from a dying Pennsylvania steel town once.
Then I was kicking ass in business school, dating a total dreamboat, and confidently building a future that looked nothing like my childhood.
Then I was a new mother, getting news that her minutes-old son might not survive the night.
Then I was half of an enviable American couple, making business deals between driving the kids to soccer and swim practice.
Then I was a widow, wiping away my children’s’ tears in the dark hours of endless nights. (No pics of that one…)
In other words, my high highs have always been side by side with low lows. This is life. I put my lows on display to help readers know that they aren’t alone, that others have come through this hellscape before them, and survived.
But the world needs my highs too. Not to make anyone feel bad for their circumstances, their efforts, or their choices. But to prove that the seemingly impossible is possible. To prove that society’s expectations, and sometimes even our own expectations, can be dead wrong.
Because even though my husband died decades before his time, my life is full of love. Even though sometimes I spend the evening weeping on my bathroom floor, I also regularly experience electrifying joy and excitement. Even though society believes widows like me live small lives, my life is a grand, world-spanning adventure.
To the point that sometimes I even feel larger than life. Crackling with energy. Transcendent.
A part of me winces in reaction to that last sentence.
“You are going to make people feel bad! Quit showing off! Keep this under wraps, you doofus! Keep your big, happy, vibrant life on the down-low. Go ahead and live like you want, but edit it for public consumption. Shut up already about the ‘well this weekend I was in New Orleans, next, London.’ Take it down a notch. Appear small.”
But letting that inner gremlin silence me means that I’m buying its bullshit. Instead, I’m going to stick my neck out, rewrite the expectations of life after loss, and generally be big, loud, and joyful. All in hopes that my success blows up some invisible limit and makes it easier for others to succeed along side me.
Because, lets get real. My success is not my own.
It's a product of all the people who wove their hands together into a net, to catch me and to launch me into the sky — talking me down when I’m ready to set all the piles of death paperwork on fire; absolutely insisting I quit grief shopping and apply for a new job instead; pumping me up before my vulnerable interview with the Wall Street Journal.
People who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. So let me do the same for you:
You have your own version of crackling energy inside of you. Your own version of playing big. Your own version of being the hero, role model, the four-minute-miler.
It all starts with expanding your sense of what’s possible.
So as comfortable as it would be to play humble and meager and modest, I won’t. It would be a disservice to everyone who has helped me get here, and everyone I want to help launch into the sky.
Celebrating success,
The most remarkable aspect of the human experience, the AND. There will be sorrow and joy, grief and awe, love and pain…please share it all. Your words arrive just as they are needed, showing a life well lived and well loved.
I was cheering by the end of this, Sue! I’m so glad you’re living a big, transcendent, ambitious life and taking us along for the ride. 👏 More, not less, of this please!