Choose Your Role Models Consciously

Imitation is not optional

"We're all imitative people. There's no way around it. That's what human beings are. That's what separates us from the animals, we're very good at imitating."¹ Ryan Petersen built the claim into a piece of career advice, drawn directly from Rene Girard's mimetic theory, recommending Luke Burgis's book Wanting as the accessible entry point. Its premise is that imitation is constitutive of human beings rather than a habit one can decline, and that language, culture, and desire itself are acquired by imitation.

From that premise Petersen draws the operative conclusion: the choice is never whether to imitate but only whom. "You will imitate someone. So you should be very conscious about who you imitate." The failure mode, in his framing, is not having role models but having accidental ones, absorbing whoever happens to be nearby, loud, or high-status, which he calls potentially "disastrous." The constructive move is to select the ideal deliberately: Petersen reads Christianity's imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ, as an illustration of the structural point, that consciously choosing someone great to imitate, even a pure ideal, beats defaulting to whatever the environment happens to supply. He adds that this need not be a single figure: "You don't have to have one role model. You can have role models for different areas of development."

The environment corollary

Because imitation is ambient rather than deliberate, Petersen treats the choice of who to be around as a decision about who one becomes. "Surround yourself with people that have similar values to the ones you want to have, that are working towards inspiring things, that are leading the type of life you want to lead, because you're going to naturally imitate those people."¹ He operationalizes this with a peer group of roughly ten CEOs that meets in person every other month, with attendance enforced by a specific rule: miss two meetings in a year and you are out.

He is specific that the entry fee is competence rather than contact. "Networking is not that useful. It doesn't help me unless they see me as a peer. The best networking tool is being insanely good at whatever the thing is that you do." On this view each level of achievement buys access to a more elevated set of models, and elite groups protect the standard, since "they're not afraid to disinvite people."

Relation to the negative case

The principle is the affirmative counterpart to mimetic competition, which holds the destructive side of the same Girardian premise: reflexive imitation of competitors collapses differentiation and inflates bubbles. Both start from the claim that mimesis cannot be switched off; this principle aims it rather than warning against it. It also connects to work with older people, a related bet that proximity to more experienced models accelerates development through the same imitative channel.

What the principle leaves open

The advice presumes a person can accurately identify which models carry the values worth absorbing, but imitation is described here as largely unconscious, which makes deliberate selection harder than the framing implies. It also risks circularity in the peer-group claim: excellence buys access to better models, and better models are said to produce excellence, with no independent account of which comes first. The principle is a directional prescription about aiming an unavoidable tendency, not a method for verifying that the chosen models are the right ones.