Choose Your Prophets Wisely, Just like You Choose Your Friends
6 mentors to follow. Who you emulate will influence your success and failure.
I have a mentor for every area of my life. I choose them carefully. Most of them I’ve never met, but I take their advice in the areas where they have found success before me.
Just as the five people who you spend most of your time with greatly influence you, you are greatly influenced by the books you read, the shows you watch, the movies you see, the podcasts you listen to — junk in, junk out. Value in, value out.
Be thoughtful and intentional about what you consume; it affects how you think. It changes you in small imperceivable increments over time.
Changes in your environment
Studies show we are more influenced by our environment than we think.
If you make the right changes in your environment, you change negative habits to positive ones.
- If you want to stay healthy, don’t buy sugar and fill your cabinets with junk food.
- If you want to become a vegetarian, don’t have meat in the house.
- If you want to lose weight get your sneakers and workout clothes out the night before.
- If you want to write first thing in the morning, pull up a blank word document on your computer and close all other applications the night before.
Make your environment conducive to achieving your goals, so you have more energy for taking action.
- If you don’t want to be put down by that negative friend, you somehow have, make new friends. Changing who you spend time with — less time with people who doubt you and more time with people who support your goals — will benefit you.
Design your surroundings to make it easier for you to make good choices; this goes for the mentors you choose to listen to and the advice you choose to take.
Choose gurus who you know or those you admire from afar.
Choose carefully
I’ve been an avid consumer of self-help books since I left for college in my late teens. I love psychology, delving into the effects of childhood trauma, how our upbringing affects us, and how successful people live day to day to maximize wholehearted living.
We have one life that we know of— live it fully with heart.
I have mentors I look to for advice in the areas that are most important to me: health, fitness, love, spirituality, entrepreneurship, and productivity.
Each one serves as someone I want to emulate, to gain knowledge from what they’ve already figured out, and if I can learn from their mistakes, maybe I’ll be ahead of the game.
Successful people
Successful people usually don’t just have great ideas; they know how to execute their ideas effectively to achieve greatness.
So often, people have a great idea, but they don’t know how to execute that idea from point A to fruition.
Often, people know what they want their lives to look like; they see other people’s lives they envy but don’t know how to get there themselves.
Find a mentor/prophet/guru who you admire and do what they do.
Figure out how they live, and do that.
Learn and implement their ideas by reading their work, following them on social media, and create the habits they have mastered.
My mentors
1. Esther Perel — Love
Esther Perel is a therapist, speaker, and author of the groundbreaking books, Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity.
If you want to improve your relationships and understand the dynamic in most marriages, or any relationship that has been touched by infidelity, Esther Perel is your woman.
Esther Perel’s parents survived the Holocaust, and taught her the importance of embracing life after tragedy. Her parents didn’t allow the Holocaust to destroy their spirit or how they continued to live — wholly.
After the unimaginable horror of surviving the Holocaust, loss of family, and friends, her parents got busy living — they had children right away, lived fully, laughed fully, instead of merely existing.
They watched as other people in their community who had made it out of the Holocaust lose their lives in other ways, to sadness and depression, they walked through life barely there.
Esther Perel learned this lesson of the indelible spirit, her understanding of life and love comes through clearly in every speech she gives, and every book she writes. Perel understands marriage, the promise of love, and why we keep searching for it even after we have gone through betrayal and loss of trust.
Esther Perel has a unique and valuable take on love, marriage, divorce, and brings me closer to understanding my relationship with myself and those I love.
2. Tim Ferriss — High-performance habits
Not only is he my guru in all areas; I think I have a crush on him, simply because of the tone of his voice.
The tone of someone’s voice and the value of the content they offer up to the world is the criteria with which I choose podcasts to spend my limited time on.
Tim’s voice and the way he breaths in before asking a question is calming. It’s obvious he mediates, and I listen to his podcast while hiking.
You can’t go wrong listening to any of his more than 400 episodes, they all contain valuable content.
There are so many choices when it comes to podcasts, and Tim’s is by far the best when it comes to gaining insight into high-performance habits. He digs deep into the high-performance practices of successful giants from all walks of life. His questions are thoughtful, and he asks them with his audience in mind.
3. Jamie Kern Lima — Persistence
Jamie Kern was one of the speakers at a conference I recently attended hosted by Brendon Burchard.
Kern is the co-founder and CEO of IT Cosmetics. She was a last-minute speaker because Rachel Hollis had a family emergency and had to leave early, and Jamie stepped up in her place. It was an unexpected gift — Jamie turned out to be my favorite speaker because her story is impactful.
She spoke for over an hour about her business experience, and all the rejections she received from different leaders in the cosmetics industry.
Kern was told “no,” more times than any other entrepreneur I think I’ve ever heard tell their story, and she persisted after each “no,” but not without a lot of tears in between.
She started a cosmetics company in her one-bedroom apartment. She continued because she believed in her product. The head of QVC told her no repeatedly. Sephora told her no. She lived on her credit cards while developing every aspect of her business with her husband. She refused to give up, even though she was insulted, put down, and turned down over and over again.
One executive told her, “We are not picking up your product because we do not think women will want to buy beauty products from someone who looks like you.”
She didn’t quit, she kept going.
After many years and steely resolve, she did get her product on QVC, and the head of QVC, who had initially turned her down several times, now works for her on her board.
L’Oréal bought IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion dollars in cash, the highest price any cosmetics company has paid for another makeup line.
She refused to allow others — even though the ‘others’ were the deciders in the cosmetic industry — to dictate her success. She refused to quit because she believes in herself. Her story has been impactful on my life and I think about it often.
4. Brené Brown — Spirituality
Out of all of my prophets, Brené Brown is the one who makes me think the most and gives me the most insight into humanity.
I devour everything she writes.
Every time we choose courage, we make everyone around us a little better and the world a little braver. — Brené Brown
I’m not religious, but I believe in Universal Laws that govern our lives, that what you put out you get back. I believe everything in the Universe is connected. I think it because this theory of energy is based on physics and can be measured.
I feel like Brené Brown gets this even though she hasn’t said it explicitly.
Her writing on human behavior is firmly based in statistical data and research. Brown’s extensive research on vulnerability and shame have changed the way I think, made me more forgiving and kinder to myself, made me a better parent to my daughter, and a better lover — in every sense that world implies — to my partner.
After listening to or reading Brené Brown, I come away with hope.
5. Dr. Andrew Weil — health and nutrition.
Dr. Weil was on the forefront of integrative medicine more than 35 years ago. He believes health should not just address the body, but the mind and spirit also, and nutrition plays a large role in his practice.
Twenty years ago, his book Eight Weeks to Optimum Health sent me on a path of eating well, and I haven’t stopped learning about nutrition and diet, and how food has the power to make you healthy or sick.
I’ve been gluten-free. I’ve been dairy-free. I’ve been meat-free. And then I haven’t.
Dr. Weil has a healthy attitude about eating. I don’t know if he is a vegetarian or not, but I do know I love his recipes; they mostly align with a Mediterranean diet, which is one of the healthiest ways to eat. He doesn’t push anything except eating mostly whole foods; his books on nutrition are non-judgemental, which is probably why I don’t remember if he is a vegetarian or not.
Dr. Weil established the True Food Kitchen Restaurant, where my family eats a lot.
We like to eat healthy food even when dining out. After eating at True Kitchen we feel good, we don’t feel sluggish or bloated from too much salt, and preservatives.
Dr. Weil is someone I respect and emulate every day in my eating choices.
6. My partner — Exercise
My partner runs 100 and 200-mile races at a time.
He enjoys high-performance endurance activities. He enjoys running 100 miles at a time and doesn’t complain at all while doing it, or after, when his feet and hands swell for days, his toenails come off, and he can’t walk.
When I don’t want to do my 30-minute stint on the treadmill or elliptical, I think about him running 100 miles in the Texas humidity and heat, and I stop complaining, put on my sneakers and get my body moving.
I’m at the age where I care more about my health and less about fitting into my size two jeans. When I tell him I can no longer fit into my skinny, skinny jeans, he sincerely replies, “Just be healthy, hun.”
He loves me no matter what size jeans I currently fit into, and that, among other things, inspires me to exercise and stay healthy.
Go find prophets who resonate with you, and do what they do. They’ve done the heavy lifting for you, take their ideas and implement them into your life.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
