The Person That Influenced Me Most
Person who has influenced me most of all
Most people writing about people who have influenced them will choose someone they admire, a mentor or other important person who has been a role model for them over the course of their lives. My description, on the contrary, will aim to describe someone who influenced me in a totally opposite way: by being an anti-role model, someone I would not like to resemble, if only for some minor points. He is not in any way an extreme villain or anybody with strongly deficient ethics. He is just a person who, in my mind, is going to fail in most life situations.
We first met when I took a part-time job as a content writer for an Internet project. I was not particularly impressed with the outlook for this business, but took the job as a way to get my first experience and learn more about the particular sphere on which I was writing. Alex was a relatively young marketing manager, in his late 20s, and being of more or less the same age compared to the rest of the team, we began to communicate a lot. He seemed a highly professional person with great expertise in his area, but his ways of dealing with colleagues struck me as in some way completely wrong. He simply reacted to innocent criticisms with a lot of aggression so that people would pull back, scared by the strength of his reaction. Our boss was a good-natured elderly man, not much from the point of view of knowledge, but comfortable in what was probably his last job and nice to employees. Alex immediately saw an enemy in him and reacted to his comments with some anger for which I had little understanding.
It was no surprise that Alex’s harshness and what I would call a peculiar sense of humor evoked widespread resistance. People began to shun him in everyday interactions, negatively respond to his comments during meetings, and evade him on the company’s shuttle bus and in the café. The boss for a long time took his behavior in stride, but was extremely displeased with his
Most people writing about people who have influenced them will choose someone they admire, a mentor or other important person who has been a role model for them over the course of their lives. My description, on the contrary, will aim to describe someone who influenced me in a totally opposite way: by being an anti-role model, someone I would not like to resemble, if only for some minor points. He is not in any way an extreme villain or anybody with strongly deficient ethics. He is just a person who, in my mind, is going to fail in most life situations.
We first met when I took a part-time job as a content writer for an Internet project. I was not particularly impressed with the outlook for this business, but took the job as a way to get my first experience and learn more about the particular sphere on which I was writing. Alex was a relatively young marketing manager, in his late 20s, and being of more or less the same age compared to the rest of the team, we began to communicate a lot. He seemed a highly professional person with great expertise in his area, but his ways of dealing with colleagues struck me as in some way completely wrong. He simply reacted to innocent criticisms with a lot of aggression so that people would pull back, scared by the strength of his reaction. Our boss was a good-natured elderly man, not much from the point of view of knowledge, but comfortable in what was probably his last job and nice to employees. Alex immediately saw an enemy in him and reacted to his comments with some anger for which I had little understanding.
It was no surprise that Alex’s harshness and what I would call a peculiar sense of humor evoked widespread resistance. People began to shun him in everyday interactions, negatively respond to his comments during meetings, and evade him on the company’s shuttle bus and in the café. The boss for a long time took his behavior in stride, but was extremely displeased with his