When I was about eleven years old, sitting under a takamaka tree somewhere between a beach and the family kitchen, I finished reading a novel and immediately told my mother I wanted to invite the main character to dinner. She laughed, but not unkindly. “Set an extra plate,” she said, “and tell me what you’d talk about.”
I never forgot that. Not because it was wise — she was probably just busy and trying to redirect my energy — but because it worked. I sat down and actually thought about it. What would I ask? What did I want to know? It turned a passive act of reading into an active exercise in thinking.
Twenty-odd years and a few continents later, I still think it’s one of the most revealing questions you can ask someone. Not who your hero is. Not which TED Talk changed your life. But: if you could sit across a dinner table from any fictional character — no rules, no constraints — who would it be, and what would you want from the conversation?
My answer, and I’ve refined it over the years: Atticus Finch, from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
PART ONE
Why a Fictional Lawyer from Alabama, of All People?
I know. It’s not the flashiest choice. People have said Sherlock Holmes (for the problem-solving), or Don Quixote (for the audacity), or even Hermione Granger (for the competence). I understand the appeal. But Atticus Finch does something rarer than being brilliant or brave. He stays consistent when it costs him something.
That, in my experience, is the one quality almost nobody talks about in professional development circles — and the one most visibly absent when things get difficult.
I’ve worked across industries and enough time zones to notice the pattern. When it’s easy to do the right thing, most people do it. When it gets complicated — when there’s a business case for looking the other way, when the client is too valuable to confront, when the team will suffer for your honesty — that’s where the gap between values and behavior becomes visible. You see it in meeting rooms in Mumbai. You see it on Zoom calls from Geneva. You see it in every culture, at every level of seniority.
Atticus Finch walks into that gap and holds his line. In a town that doesn’t want him to. For a client no one expects him to defend well. With his children watching, which somehow makes it both harder and more necessary.
I’d want to understand how he does that without collapsing inward.
“Atticus does something rarer than being brilliant or brave. He stays consistent when it costs him something.”
PART TWO
What I’d Actually Ask Him Over Dinner
I’ve thought about this more than I probably should admit. The menu would be secondary — though I’d want something slow-cooked, the kind of meal that earns a long conversation. On Mahé we’d call for something from the sea, caught that morning, with breadfruit on the side. Anywhere else, just something that isn’t rushed.
I wouldn’t start with the trial. Everyone starts with the trial. I’d start with the mornings — how he gets up and does the ordinary parts of his job when he knows the extraordinary pressure is coming. There’s something in that gap between knowing a hard thing is ahead and actually arriving at it. Most of us are useless in that gap. We catastrophise, or we distract ourselves, or we postpone. I’d want to know what he does with it.
I’d ask about his daughters’ question. The moment when Scout, his young daughter, asks him point-blank why he’s doing this when everyone else thinks it’s wrong. His answer to her is simple, almost too simple: because he couldn’t tell her to do one thing and do the opposite himself. I’ve quoted that logic in more than a few difficult conversations with colleagues. I’d want to know if he had any doubt in the moment, or if the clarity really did come that easily.
“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.”
That line. In thirty years of professional life, I haven’t found a better framework for making decisions under pressure. Not a mission statement, not a values framework, not a leadership model. Just that.
PART THREE
The Professional Relevance Nobody Mentions
Here’s what I think is actually at stake in this exercise, for working professionals specifically.
We are very good, collectively, at talking about the leaders we admire. We benchmark against real companies and real case studies. We do 360-degree reviews. We listen to podcasts where successful people explain, in retrospect, why their best decisions were obvious. But fictional characters offer something real people can’t: they hold still. Their choices don’t get revised in interviews. Their motives don’t get reinterpreted after a bad quarter. What they did, they did, permanently, on the page.
That makes them unusually useful as mirrors.
When I was navigating a restructuring a few years back — the kind that required telling people things they didn’t want to hear, in multiple languages, across offices in three countries — I found myself returning to the Atticus framework almost involuntarily. Not as a moral performance. More as a calibration. Would I be able to explain this to someone I respected, without flinching? If not, something in the plan needed to change.
It worked better than most of the actual management frameworks I was offered at the time.
PART FOUR
What the Question Itself Teaches You
I’ve started asking this question in interviews. Not as a trick — I don’t believe in trick questions, they tell you more about the interviewer than the candidate — but as a genuine window. The choice of character is interesting. What people say they’d ask is more interesting. But what’s most revealing is whether they’ve thought about it at all, or whether they treat it as a throwaway question and reach for the first safe answer.
Elizabeth Bennet is popular, usually for the wrong reasons. Yoda appears more often than you’d think. Occasionally someone says Raskolnikov, which either signals a remarkable self-awareness or a very different kind of problem.
The best answers I’ve heard share a quality: the person isn’t just admiring the character, they’re trying to borrow something specific. A framework. A habit. A way of being under pressure. That specificity — that precision about what you actually lack and want — is itself a signal about how someone thinks about their own development.
CONCLUSION
Set an Extra Plate
I sometimes think about that child under the takamaka tree, earnestly planning a dinner party for someone who didn’t exist. There was something right about it that I couldn’t articulate then. The characters we’d choose to sit with are, in a sense, the people we’re trying to become — or at least the qualities we’re trying to get better at.
Atticus Finch wouldn’t offer me efficiency tips or a morning routine. He wouldn’t have a newsletter or a podcast. He’d probably ask quiet questions and listen more than he spoke, which is, I suspect, exactly what I’d need.
So: who’s at your table? And more importantly — what are you hoping to take home from the conversation?
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