What Are You Handing Over When You Seek a Role Model?

Introduction: Every Decision Is Yours, and None of Them Are Light

Some time after going independent, most people arrive at the same place. Everything is now yours to decide, and not one of those decisions is light. Should I take this job or decline it? Is this price reasonable? Is this the right direction? Without knowing the right answer, the choices pile up day after day. At moments like these, the words of someone further along ring strikingly attractive.

How to find a role model, and whom to look to, are already well documented. What this article takes up sits before that. Why is it that those who have supposedly obtained freedom are the ones who start looking for someone to follow?

Here is the conclusion first. Freedom appears as a weight before it appears as a gift. And to escape that weight, people willingly offer up the sovereignty over decisions they have only just acquired.

“Decide Everything Yourself” Is Also the Loss of Lightness

To decide is to take on responsibility. Choose one road and the outcome of the road not taken stays unknown forever. And if the road chosen produces a bad result, the whole of that responsibility returns to the one who decided.

As an employee, many decisions were handed down by a manager, or by the organisation. Confining as that was, it carried a certain lightness. Not having to decide also meant not having to carry the weight of deciding.

On going independent, a person loses that lightness. Countless decisions rise up daily, each demanding a choice while the right answer stays unknown. And if the result is bad, there is nobody to blame. You are the one who decided.

What makes this weight troublesome is that it forces a wearing-down that is hard to see. Bodily fatigue from long hours is visible. Mental fatigue from unceasing decisions is not. Deeper still is this: there is no outside authority anywhere to lean on. Nothing finally guarantees whether your decisions are right. This absence of grounding places a person inside a continuous uncertainty.

Those Who Cannot Bear the Weight of Freedom Turn Towards Authority

There is a classic that gives deep insight into this structure: the tale of the Grand Inquisitor set inside Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

What is told there is a startling reading. Human beings seek freedom and yet cannot bear its weight. To decide good and evil for yourself, to choose your own road, to carry your own responsibility — this complete freedom is unbearably heavy. So to escape that weight, people willingly try to hand their freedom over to someone. The one they hand it to is whoever supplies “bread,” “miracle” and “authority”: who guarantees food, who displays an unquestionable certainty, who reigns as an authority to be followed.

The core of this parable applies directly to the perfectly ordinary experience of the independent person. You went independent seeking freedom. Yet the “freedom to decide everything” you obtained was also an unbearable weight. When that weight becomes too much, people willingly offer up their own freedom to a new authority.

What the Playbook Sells Is Certainty

In the world of independence this authority appears in several concrete forms. The successful person’s playbook. The ideal image of what an entrepreneur ought to be. Expensive places of learning, and membership circles.

Let me identify what these are really selling. A playbook sells “certainty”: with this method it will work, for sure. An ideal image sells “a correct self-image”: successful people think this way and act this way. A place of learning sells “belonging to an authority”: belong here and you are walking in the right direction. All of these hold out, as products, the certainty and the grounding that are craved inside the weight of freedom.

But in drawing close to them, a person hands over something important. The sovereignty of judging for oneself. In following the playbook, a person stops thinking in terms of their own situation and fits themselves to another’s template. In following the ideal image, they stop asking how they wish to be and trace over the image supplied.

▸ Why the pressure to “just push harder” never ends is taken up in having too much to do is not a problem of scheduling.

The Line Between Learning and Surrendering Sovereignty

There is something to distinguish carefully here. Learning from others and looking to excellent practice are not bad things. They are sensible.

The problem lies at the line between learning and surrendering sovereignty. Use another’s practice as material for your own judgement and it is learning. Entrust your judgement itself, whole, to another’s practice and it is submission. In the former, sovereignty over decisions remains in your hands. In the latter, sovereignty moves to the authority’s side.

Someone who cannot bear the weight of freedom crosses this line easily. Intending to learn, they have somewhere along the way handed over sovereignty. The comfort of the shelter covers the crossing over.

You can notice the crossing by a certain unease. Following the authority’s guidance does not make things easier; instead there is a sense of hollowing out. The more you fit yourself to another’s template, the less you know what you actually want to do. If what you have gained after escaping the weight is not calm but a thinning of yourself, then you are not on the side of learning.

Conclusion: Learn While Keeping Sovereignty in Your Own Hands

Looking for a role model is not, in itself, a problem. What is cut is not the action but the shape of the relationship that draws off your sovereignty of judgement in exchange for carrying the weight of freedom.

What is needed is to swap the question. Not “whom should I look to?” but “am I receiving this as material, or entrusting the judgement along with it?” Hold that question while you learn, and other people’s practice will not thin your sovereignty.

The whole picture is gathered in why starting a business does not free you from masters. Has the road you started in search of freedom quietly turned into the road of handing freedom over? The vantage point for checking that is here.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Dostoevsky, F. M. The Brothers Karamazov (1880) — “The Grand Inquisitor”