Peter Keating or Howard Roark

Howard Roark and Peter Keating are two of the key characters in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. They are a great contrast in approaches to the world.

Roark a creator and first principles thinker, he does what he thinks is right, regardless of the opinions of others.

Keating is the opposite. He does what he thinks others will think is good. He copies and steals and concerns himself with the opinion of others over the facts of reality.

Getting to know Keating and Roark helps you look at your life and your choices from a new perspective.

Modeling others–looking at how others live their lives and pulling what works and doesn’t work–is one of the best ways to learn. That is what makes apprenticeships such powerful learning tools. But you don’t need to limit your modeling to real life people.

Characters in stories are powerful learning tools and these two characters are particularly powerful for modeling (Roark) and anti-modeling (Keating).

Each time I reacquaint myself with them it helps me to see my own actions and motivations through a lens of Roark vs. Keating.

In our work and lives, we all face the decision to be more like Peter Keating or more like Howard Roark on a daily basis. We can choose to think, or we can choose to take the thoughts of others. We can choose to blindly follow an instruction or pause to consider if we agree with it first.

As we see from Roark and Keating, the small moments when you choose to follow along instead of acting on what you think is right lead to massively different consequences in the long-term.

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There is a great Wait But Why article on this idea from a different angle about what makes Elon Musk special. They use the analogy of the cook vs. the chef to draw out the same idea as Rand does from the creator vs. the second-hander.

The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce