Take three minutes and do this:
Make a mental list of the top 5 or 10 people in your life. Close friends, acquaintances, family members, co-workers, the lady behind the counter that you pay at the coffee shop every morning, but who has such a warm purposeful smile and never fails to leave you with a kind word along with your bagel. The first five or ten people who come into your mind.
Now, one by one, go down the list and for each person, consider what about them might make you say "I need to be more like them in this way or that"? For one, it may be the incredible patience you see them exhibit on a regular basis. Or maybe how it is that this one is always reading a new book on some intriguing topic. It may be their amazing ability to endure criticism, or just a general sense of how their very presence in your life just simply makes you smile.
On the other hand, maybe for a particular person you instead see something that you definitely do not wish to emulate. In fact, when considering the people in your life from a perspective of character, about some you may even question the wisdom in having them that close to you at all.
Appreciate the people in your life that make you better than you would ever be without them. Emulate the good, and eschew the evil. But make it a point to know which is which.
And that's all I have to say about that.
