It’s comfortable to believe that our heroes are cut from a different cloth. They can appear to be like humanoid aliens from another planet– similar in a lot of ways, but totally different in a few fundamental ones. Consciously we all know that this isn’t true, but feeling like it is true allows us to discount our aspirations: of course HE could do that– he’s different.
When I was coming up in pickup, the guys at the top of that food chain, Mystery, Tyler, and Style, seemed to be cut from a different cloth. They gave the appearance of being nerds like I am, but they had some magical quality that allowed them to transcend to a higher level of social confidence. I admired it, emulated it, and tried to learn it, but a part of me didn’t believe that I could do it like they did.
Through a fortunate series of coincidences, I had the opportunity to live with them. I learned a lot through that experience, but maybe the biggest thing I learned was that they were normal people. They acted imperfectly, they had emotions, they made mistakes, but the succeeded in spite of all that. They were humans, not aliens.
While we lived there, Courtney Love lived with us for almost a year. She was an extreme person, but a real person nonetheless. Rivers Cuomo from Weezer came over one night and played guitar on our steps, and I remember thinking something like, “You know… he looks almost like a normal person, sitting there playing like that.”
Over time I’ve become friends with a lot of people who I considered to be heroes in blogging or entrepreneurship, people who at one time seemed larger than life in some way. They’re human, too. Impressive humans, but still human.
The more of my heroes I met, the more I realized that it’s not that they ARE something different, it’s that they DID something different. And often what they did different wasn’t all that much different from normal, either. In most cases they just worked a little bit harder, loved what they did just a little bit more, or pushed their comfort zone just a little bit further.
The danger of idolization is that it makes people who have achieved what we want to achieve seem so different that there’s no point in trying to match their success. It’s so easy to ascribe their abilities to the mysterious or genius, when really it’s just that they started in the exact same spot we did, but put in a bit more effort. When you realize they’re just the same, there are a lot less excuses to be made, and a lot more action to be taken.
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Photo is another random island (now named Phoenix Island) picture. I’m really running out of pictures, but I’m hitting up 10+ countries in the next 6 weeks, so I will replenish!
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