I’d like to start a list and corresponding series of posts highlighting people who have influenced me.
A while back, I did Profiles. These are people I know well who are important in my life. The Influences will be different.
The Influences list will mostly include people I don’t know but who I’ve studied or learned from. I typically won’t agree with all or even most of what these people share. But I will have learned from their world of thinking or feeling.
I got the idea for the list from James Clear. He calls his a Thank You page. I like that. It reminds me of the acknowledgements in a book, thanking certain people for their, perhaps unknowing, contribution to the work.
I’m thinking to combine the list idea with my previous style of writing profiles. This has the added benefit of limiting my influences list. It would be impossible to list everyone, so rather than start out with some giant list, I’d like to only include people on my list after I write a post about them. They won’t be long posts. They’ll follow a similar format for each one. I’m still working on what that will be. But I’ll only include people on the list after I’ve written the post about them.
For now, I’m going to commit to writing three posts like this, publishing them this month. If I get the first three published, and it’s stupid or just a pain to write or whatever, we’ll scrap it. Otherwise, I’m hoping from there to add to the list little by little.
Over time, I think seeing the list along with what I share about each of them, there will be moments like, “Oh, I see where Marshall’s coming from now. That makes more sense why he’s like that.”
I kind of wish everyone had a list like this, to get inside how their thinking works, why they are the way they are.
So what about you? Who are some of your influences? What have you learned or seen from them?
Lastly, I’ll end with the quote on James’s Thank You page:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” -Isaac Newton
