THINKDROP 14: Choose your Heroes
- Pierre Stanghellini
- Aug 31
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 1
Because Who You Admire Is Who You Become!
🎤 From Me to You
“We don’t just admire. We absorb.”
Entrepreneurship is lonely. Not just because you’re doing something difficult—but because no one can fully understand why you're doing it.
The market doesn’t care. Most people don’t get it. And even those who love you can't help you think like a founder.
That’s why who you admire matters more than you think!
Because when the pressure’s on and your confidence shakes, you reach—consciously or not—for your invisible mentors.
The thinkers. The builders. The rebels. The exiles.
The people who show you how to keep going—not by giving advice, but by existing in your mind as reference points.
For me, these three men in the photo—Raymond Loewy, Pierre-Georges Latécoère, and Charles De Gaulle—are my invisible mentors. You might not recognize them at first glance, but for me, they are three of the most important French figures of the 20th century.
Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design in the United States— a Frenchman who taught America how to fall in love with progress. From the Shell logo to the NASA Skylab interior, his work shaped modern taste.
Pierre-Georges Latécoère, an aviation pioneer who built hydroplanes with luxury cabins that carried passengers from Bordeaux to Argentina before World War II. He didn't wait for permission—he designed the future.
Charles De Gaulle, the General, the strategist, the stubborn architect of modern France. His leadership laid the foundation for the country we know today.
These are my heroes—long before Steve Jobs, luxury billionaires, or digital gurus.
Not because they were famous—but because they were foundational.
This week, we explore the idea that choosing your heroes isn’t just a personal preference—it’s a strategic act. The right invisible mentors sharpen your decision-making, fuel your creative resilience, and help you hold the line when the world pushes back.
So this isn’t just about inspiration. It’s about navigation.
Let’s talk about how to follow better invisible mentors—and how to become one in the process.
Pierre Stanghellini -
HARi.wtf founder
P.S. I’ve read Raymond Loewy’s autobiography “Never Leave Well Enough Alone” at least twelve times. In French, it's called La Laideur se vend mal (“Ugliness doesn’t sell”).
It lives permanently on my nightstand—for moments when I need inspiration or escape.
I highly recommend it.
1. 🧭 Your Heroes Are Proxies for Your Future
Every person you admire is a subtle decision about who you're willing to become.
The trap? Most people inherit their heroes passively—celebrity founders, VC hotshots, hustlefluencers. But real evolution starts when you choose your invisible mentors deliberately.
Raymond Loewy believed everything could be improved—not just aesthetically, but strategically: make it better, more beautiful, more functional, and simpler to produce. Over five decades, he applied this across trains, refrigerators, spacecraft interiors, logos, cigarette packs, and the look of the entire American industrial age.
If Loewy is in your mentor stack, you're not just choosing elegance—you're choosing applied vision that scales across industries and time.
Prompt: Who would Future You admire? Start there.
2. 🚪 Your Heroes Expand the Edges of What You Think Is Possible
Sometimes, we’re not held back by reality—but by what we believe is realistic.
The right hero doesn't just inspire you—they expand your personal ceiling.
They act like a crowbar to pry open your assumptions about what’s achievable, what’s worth attempting, and what risks are noble enough to take.
Pierre-Georges Latécoère imagined luxury aviation before people believed long-distance commercial flight was even viable. He wasn’t solving a problem—he was building a future no one asked for yet. If Latécoère is in your mentor stack, you're not just dreaming bigger—you’re redesigning the map entirely.
Prompt: Who’s someone whose existence stretches your sense of what’s possible?Now: what would they say about the thing you’re currently afraid to try?
3. 🧱 Invisible Mentors Reveal Your Hidden Values
The traits you admire are mirrors. Ask yourself: do you praise visibility or vision? Flash or durability? Scale or substance?
Your hero list is a reflection of your deepest aspirations—not the ones you say out loud, but the ones you act on. Do you follow people who win by speed, or by precision? Are you admiring cleverness... or character?
De Gaulle didn’t chase popularity. He chased sovereignty, clarity, and long-term alignment—even when it meant isolation.If he’s on your list, maybe you value conviction over consensus—and you’re okay with being misunderstood.
The more clearly you see your invisible mentors, the more clearly you’ll see yourself.
Prompt: Audit your current mentor list. What values does it reveal?Now ask: are those the values you want driving your decisions 10 years from now?
4. 🧬 Your Mentor Stack Should Evolve With You
The same way your product evolves, so should your influences. Early-stage needs courage. Mid-stage needs clarity. Later-stage needs restraint. Too many people stick with the same 2–3 invisible mentors long after their season has passed.
Build a Mentor Stack:
3 people you admire
3 traits you extract from each
1 weakness you want to outgrow
Tip: You don’t need perfect mentors. You need composite ones.
5. 🔎 Unfollow Mentors That Keep You Stuck
Some icons once pulled you forward—and now they hold you back.
Comfort mentors aren’t bad... until they become excuses. Worse, some people you admire were built by PR machines, not principles.
It’s easy to follow whoever’s trending, polished, or “inspirational” on LinkedIn.
But reputation is not reality. A curated Instagram doesn’t equal substance.
When you choose your heroes, you’re programming your internal compass—so don’t let hype hijack your direction.
Take time to research deeply—past the TED talk, past the book deal, past the social media presence. Some of the most powerful invisible mentors are hidden in the footnotes of history, in obscure interviews, or in work that speaks louder than their personal brand ever could.
Just because someone is loud doesn’t mean they’re right. And just because someone is quiet doesn’t mean they’re small.
Exercise: This week, replace one fashionable hero with one underrated builder. Look past the politically correct, the trendy, or the “safe.” Find someone who’s operating with depth—and integrity—off the radar.
🪞 FOOD FOR THOUGHT
“Your invisible mentors are shaping your architecture.”
The icons you choose to follow—especially the ones you never question—are not just aesthetic preferences. They are decision filters. Behavioral blueprints. Emotional scaffolding.
Every time you admire someone, you're installing a small piece of them in your psyche. And over time, those pieces accumulate. They shape how you lead, how you design, how you respond to setbacks, and how you define success.
So ask yourself:
Are your heroes expanding your courage—or feeding your comfort?
Are they sharpening your originality—or pulling you into conformity?
Are they icons of hype—or of hidden mastery?
There’s nothing wrong with admiring tech billionaires, TED talkers, or bold disruptors.
But don’t let visibility substitute for value.
Quiet greatness often hides in the archives, in old books, in grainy black-and-white photos—just like the three men who shaped my imagination more than any modern business celebrity.
Curate your invisible mentors the way you would curate your team, your investors, your tools. Because admiration, like architecture, is destiny.
And if someone were to quietly choose you as their invisible mentor—what would you want them to inherit?
Choose wisely. Someone out there is watching the way you move.
Pierre Stanghellini
→ Let’s connect at www.hari.wtf or drop me a line directly at pierre@hari.wtf .
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About the Creator
Pierre Stanghellini is a creative strategist, systems thinker, and curator of mental rabbit holes. He created Thinkdrop Weekly to feed the brains that don’t want the same old Business advice. If you’re building something bold, beautiful, or strange—this is your corner of the internet.
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About HARi.wtf
HARi.wtf is a creative strategy studio for businesses that hate business-as-usual.
Born in Hong Kong in 2017, we work with restless founders, operators, and teams who’d rather break things thoughtfully than grow them blandly. We don’t do generic decks or bloated strategies—we build clarity, guts, and traction.
From street-level restaurants to global brands, from Asia to Europe, we help shape ideas that move fast when it matters, and slow when it counts.
→ Explore more at hari.wtf
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