What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew welcome back to founder's journal

My personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools. You need to think better in order to build better

Whether that's building a business a team or a new product today. I am reflecting on 2021 with seven of my biggest takeaways

Let's hop into it

Number one

Expanding my aperture of role models is incredibly important

Here's what I mean for the longest time my role models were always business people

Elon Musk Jeff Bezos other super successful entrepreneurs or CEOs of banks and

It kind of makes sense because for the longest time career has taken up such a big space in my mind

Basically since high school when I decided that I wanted to work on Wall Street because that's what my family did

But it's becoming clear to me that career isn't the only thing that matters to me

I care about family. I care about being happy. I care about being a good generous person

And when I think about it my role models who are great people to follow for their

entrepreneurial spirit or

Being incredible operators or having great business acumen

They aren't necessarily the best people to follow for these other needs that I have like being a loving kind person or caring a ton about family

And so this reflection has opened my eyes to the fact that I need to spend time moving forward

Building out a more holistic portfolio of role models in my life

Sure, I can have a few business people

But say I have 10 role models in my life

Maybe only three of them are in the world of business and entrepreneurship

Take away number two

...