Hi, this is Ray.

Let me tell you about the first time I really understood what a role model does. I was 19, in college, semi-seriously interested in writing but secretly convinced it was a hobby for "real" writers, not me. I discovered a particular essayist whose work I devoured… every essay, every collection, every interview I could find. I wasn't trying to learn anything specific from him. I was just obsessed in the way you can only be obsessed when you're 19 and have time.

Then one day, reading his fourth book in a month, I had a thought that changed something in my brain: "Wait. He's a person. A person who, at some point, decided to do this. Sat down. Did the work. Got better. Published things. And now he's just... a person who writes for a living." It sounds dumb when I write it out. But until that moment, "writer" had been a kind of abstract category, a class of mythical beings who existed somewhere far from me. After that thought, "writer" was just something a person could decide to be and then become through actions. The category dissolved into specific behaviors. The mountain became a path with steps.

I started writing more seriously within weeks. Not because he'd taught me anything… I'd never met him, never communicated with him, never received a single piece of direct advice. He'd just done the thing in a way I could see, and seeing it changed what I believed was possible. That's what a role model does, and it turns out the cognitive science of this effect is genuinely fascinating. Today's newsletter is about the research on role models, why they accelerate learning in ways that simple instruction can't replicate, and how to actually use this without falling into the parasocial obsession trap. Let's get into it.

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The foundational research here comes from Albert Bandura, a psychologist who, starting in the 1960s, built one of the most influential frameworks in modern psychology around the idea that humans learn enormously through observation. Not just through experience, not just through formal instruction, but through watching what other people do and using that observation as data for shaping their own behavior.

Bandura's most famous experiment is the "Bobo doll" study, where children watched adults interact with an inflatable doll in various ways. According to research summaries, Bandura, Ross, and Ross in 1961 showed that learners copy the behaviors they see in others, and their study found that the influence of role models usually transfers to the learners' own behaviors. Children who watched adults behave aggressively toward the doll were significantly more likely to behave aggressively themselves. Children who watched calm interactions modeled those calm interactions. The kids weren't taught how to behave. They just observed it, and the observation became their template.

This finding seems obvious now because Bandura's framework has become so embedded in how we think about learning. But it was revolutionary at the time because the dominant theories (behaviorism, Freudian psychology) didn't really account for observational learning. People weren't supposed to learn complex behaviors just by watching them. According to Bandura's research, they very much do, and the implications extend far beyond aggression. As one comprehensive review noted, Social Learning Theory has major strengths when it comes to learning skills quickly. It works well for teaching tasks where students need to copy what the teacher shows them. This is particularly helpful in trades and other areas where an instructor needs to teach a specific skill or action. Observation isn't just one way of learning. For many skills, it's the primary way.

Bandura's framework breaks observational learning into four specific stages, which is useful because it tells you what's actually happening when a role model helps you learn… and where it can break down.

According to a clinical education paper applying this framework to medical training, Bandura proposed that this type of learning involved four different stages, attention, retention, reproduction and motivation. The first stage is attention whereby learners need to actually see the behaviour they want to reproduce. Secondly they need to internalise and retain what they have seen. Thirdly they need opportunity to reproduce the behaviour. Finally learners need to be motivated to enact or imitate the behaviour they have observed. Each stage has implications:

Attention. You can't learn from a role model you're not actually watching. This sounds obvious, but most people consume their role models passively… a book here, a podcast there, a vague awareness that this person exists. Real attention means active observation. What does this person actually do? How do they spend their time? What do they say no to? What does their process look like? Attention is the first multiplier. Without it, the other stages don't fire.

Retention. You need to actually internalize what you've observed. Otherwise it just passes through your mind without leaving a mark. This is where note-taking, journaling, or talking to others about what you've observed helps. Watching a great writer write doesn't teach you to write unless you actively process what they did, why, and how. Retention transforms observation into mental templates you can later draw on.

Reproduction. You have to try the behavior yourself. This is the stage where most armchair role-modeling fails. You can attend to and retain everything about your hero without ever actually trying to do what they do. The retention without reproduction is, frankly, fan culture. The reproduction is where it becomes learning. You read about their daily writing practice. You try a daily writing practice. The trying is non-optional.

Motivation. You need a reason to keep enacting the behavior over time. This is where role models do some of their most important work… they make the behavior feel possible, desirable, and worth the effort. As one summary put it, the motivation observers feel may come from many sources, including the consequences they see for the model's behaviour and the appeal of the model themselves. The motivational pull of a role model isn't just inspiration. It's the proof that the behavior leads somewhere worth going.

Here's a distinction worth getting clear. A teacher or mentor explicitly tries to teach you. A role model just... exists, doing the thing, in a way you can observe. These are different in important ways, and one of the things that makes role models so powerful is precisely that they're NOT trying to teach you.

A teacher has a curriculum. They've decided what you need to know and in what order. Their model is bounded by what they've chosen to make explicit. Often, the most valuable parts of expertise are the implicit parts… the small habits, the unstated decisions, the things experts do without realizing they're doing them. Teachers often can't teach these because they don't consciously know they have them.

A role model, observed at length, lets you absorb the implicit alongside the explicit. You see how they handle disappointment. How they decide what to work on. How they talk about their work. How they spend their unstructured time. How they react when someone challenges them. None of this is on any curriculum. All of it is part of what makes them good at what they do. And you can absorb it just by paying attention, which a teacher couldn't transmit even if they tried.

This is why people who have access to high-quality role models, even passive access, tend to develop differently than people who only have access to formal instruction. The role model fills in all the spaces between the explicit lessons, and those spaces turn out to contain a lot of what matters. As Bandura emphasized, most research showcases role model successes instead of the actionable steps taken to achieve them, but detailed behavioral scripts outlining step-by-step actions are crucial for observational learning. The valuable thing isn't seeing them succeed. It's seeing what specifically they did along the way. The "how," in detail, is the gift.

Beyond the behavioral observations, role models have measurable effects on the cognitive and motivational systems that drive learning. A few worth knowing about:

They change what feels possible. This is the effect I described from my own experience at the start. Before you see someone doing something, the thing exists as an abstract category. After you see someone doing it, the thing exists as a path that real people can walk. Your brain's model of what's available updates. The implications for what YOU might attempt become different. As research on self-efficacy noted, observing others succeed can increase one's belief in the ability to achieve similar goals, and interventions which include group exercise or buddy systems lead to higher exercise adherence than solo efforts, underscoring the power of observational learning. The seeing changes the believing changes the doing.

They calibrate your sense of effort. Most learners systematically underestimate how much work mastery requires, which causes them to quit when reality sets in. Role models, when you study them long enough, eventually reveal the actual amount of work involved. The writer wrote for 20 years before the famous book. The musician practiced 6 hours a day for a decade. The CEO had several failed companies before the one that worked. This recalibrates your expectations in a useful direction. You stop thinking the work should be easy. You start expecting it to be hard for as long as it took them.

They provide implicit permission. This is subtle but important. A lot of what holds people back from ambitious learning isn't lack of capacity. It's a vague sense that this isn't for them, or that people like them don't do this, or that wanting it is presumptuous. A role model who shares enough background features with you (same field, same demographic, same starting point) provides implicit permission to pursue the thing. They've already done it. You're not crazy for trying. This permission alone can unlock years of held-back effort.

They give you a behavioral template to compare against. When you don't know what you should be doing, you flounder. When you have a clear example of what good practice looks like, you have something to measure your own behavior against. Are you spending enough time on the work? What would your role model do at this stage? How would they react to this setback? The template doesn't tell you what to do exactly (you're not them) but it gives you a reference point that makes your own decisions more informed.

Role models aren't unambiguously good. A few real risks worth flagging.

The comparison trap. Watching someone who's brilliant at what you're trying to learn can be devastating if you compare your beginner work to their mastery work. Most people abandon difficult learning projects in the early stages when the gap between their output and the role model's output feels insurmountable. The fix is remembering that you're seeing the role model's current output, not their early work. Their early work was probably terrible too. The visible mastery hides a long history of mediocrity that you can't see.

The parasocial obsession risk. Especially with public figures, you can develop an emotional attachment that exceeds what's healthy. You start thinking you know them. You spend time consuming their content that would be better spent producing your own. The role model relationship becomes a kind of consumption habit rather than a learning relationship. The cure is to limit consumption time, increase reproduction time, and be honest with yourself about whether you're studying them or just consuming them.

Cargo cult imitation. Sometimes people copy the surface features of a role model without understanding what's actually doing the work. They imitate the morning routine, the journal style, the productivity tools… but miss the underlying habits of attention, work ethic, and judgment that actually produced the results. The visible features of someone successful are often less important than the invisible ones. Copy thoughtfully, not literally.

Role model failures. Sometimes the person you've been looking up to turns out to have feet of clay… a scandal, a moral failure, a public collapse. This can destabilize your own learning if you've built too much of your motivation on their image. The fix is to have multiple role models from multiple angles, so no single failure can derail you. And to remember that you can learn from someone's PROFESSIONAL choices without endorsing them as a complete human being.

Here's how I'd suggest practically incorporating this into your learning, after years of doing it well and badly:

Pick role models in the specific things you want to learn, not as general life icons. It's much more useful to have a role model for "how to write essays I admire" than for "how to be a successful person." Specificity makes the imitation possible. Generality makes it vague inspiration that doesn't transfer to action.

Have multiple role models per skill. If you only have one, you'll either deify them or get destabilized when they disappoint you. Three to five role models per skill area gives you a diverse set of approaches to learn from, and protects you from over-investing in any single example. You can also start to see what they have in COMMON, which is often more important than what makes each of them unique.

Study their process, not just their output. What did they do every day? How did they spend their time when nobody was watching? What did they say no to? The output is the part that's visible. The process is the part that produced the output. The process is what you actually want to learn from.

Use them for calibration on hard moments. When you're tempted to quit, when something isn't working, when you feel like you don't have what it takes… ask what your role models would have done at this stage in their own development. Often they were stuck too. Often they got through it by simply continuing. The role model becomes a kind of stabilizing presence in your head, providing perspective when your own perspective is failing.

Match yourself against them on inputs, not outputs. Don't compare your work to theirs. Compare your work HABITS to theirs. Are you doing the deliberate practice? Putting in the hours? Maintaining the focus? Those are the things you can match now. The output will follow, eventually, if the inputs are aligned. Trying to match output before matching input produces nothing but frustration.

Eventually, become a role model yourself. This is the underrated final stage. Once you've developed real competence in something, you become an implicit role model for the people coming up behind you. The way you do your work becomes a template they observe. This is a responsibility worth taking seriously. The version of you that someone else is watching is teaching them what's possible, what's normal, what's worth aspiring to. Be the role model you needed when you were starting. That's how the chain continues.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. Learning isn't just an individual cognitive activity. It's a social one. The brain you're using to learn is a brain that evolved in groups, learning enormously through watching what others did and modeling its own behavior on theirs. Trying to learn purely from textbooks, courses, and isolated practice ignores one of the most powerful learning channels you have access to: the channel that lets you absorb expertise just by paying close attention to someone who has it.

This doesn't mean you need to know your role models personally. The essayist I was reading at 19 had no idea I existed. He shaped my early development as a writer anyway, through nothing more than his published work and my willingness to actually study what he did. You can do the same with anyone you have access to… in person, through their work, through their public output, through anything that lets you observe enough of their practice to start absorbing it.

If you've been trying to learn something difficult without role models, I'd gently suggest that the missing piece might not be more techniques. It might be more time spent observing people who do this well. Find them. Watch what they do. Pay attention to the implicit alongside the explicit. Try to imitate the right things. Calibrate your own behavior against theirs. The structure of observation, retention, reproduction, and motivation that Bandura identified is doing real cognitive work, whether you've named it or not.

Frodo had Bilbo. Luke had Yoda. Every hero in every story had someone they could look at and say "that's the kind of person I might become." The stories aren't wrong about this. Real life works the same way.

Find your Bilbo. Watch carefully. Then start walking your own road.

Keep learning (and keep watching the people who've gone before),

Ray