what’s gooder than a good role model?

posted oct 2025

I’ve nay had an original thought in my life. Everything I’ve ever done was probably either consciously or unconsciously inspired by someone else. Trailblazers probably exist, but at best I make do with polishing their maps.

This is why I think role models are important!¹

good role models are good

A good role model is someone who you believe to have positive qualities. Maybe you actively wanted these positive qualities, so you sought out such a person. Or maybe you discovered them by chance. Either way, these are pretty good for you!

One of the best things about good role models is that they are pretty easy to both find and emulate. If I want to get <cool job>², I can just go look for people on LinkedIn who have <cool job>, and I can go backtrack and figure out the cool things they did to get the cool job because it’s probably also public. They don’t even need to know that I exist!

sad good role models are gooder

A common failure mode of having many good role models is that a natural strategy to maximize one’s goodness is to attempt to emulate the goodness of the union of all your good role models. But this is hard, so you burn out. Alternatively, you spin around in analysis paralysis and someone writes a blogpost to tell you to just do literally anything please omg.

Suppose you have some goodness you wish to pursue. Adding another happy good role model isn’t particularly helpful since their happiness confirms the goodness of the good quality that you already thought was good.

A sad good role model can help reveal the trade-offs that aren’t obvious from the highlight reel. You might look at a sad good role model and think: “I don’t mind being that kind of sad.” Or, more helpfully: “Ah, that kind of sad is not for me!”.

You start noticing that many good traits have bad twins. Empathy slides into exhaustion. Discipline rots into rigidity. Drive curdles into compulsion.

These people help you develop better taste in your pursuit of goodness. But they’re harder to find! People don’t usually advertise their sadness. So you probably have to get to know your good role models, and at some point they’re comfortable enough with you to share their struggles.

less-sad bad role models are the goodest

Consider a role model who is less sad (maybe even happy!), and also possesses qualities that you’d believe to be “bad” based on whatever value system is ingrained in you. Wat?

I don’t really know how to explain this. But it’s simply true that many recent confusingly-but-overwhelmingly-positive learnings have come from various people of this shape. So this is my opinion now.

While sad good role models illuminate the trade-offs of goodness, awareness is not the same as action! It’s one thing to understand, abstractly, that e.g. unrelenting selflessness leads to burnout; it’s another to watch someone you respect set a boundary that feels “selfish” and then seem happier for it. They make the forbidden trade visible and emotionally viable.

Maybe one wrinkle here is that “twinning” is a symmetric relation, so surely bad traits have good twins too. Pettiness necessitates a precision with emotion. Jealousy follows an honesty of one’s desires. Laziness can be a healthy sense of enough!

I think that updating your beliefs about “bad” qualities is hard and non-obvious. And having a trusted role model who has a previously-believed-to-be-bad quality is probably one of the few ways I’d be able to update my beliefs and act on them. Even with people I really trust, it can take days for some of this to sink in – after all, they’re up against a ~lifetime of conditioning towards <some value system>, and an army of faceless good role models.

Needless to say, these people are even harder to find. I think I’ve only ever lucked into meeting any of them.