idols and heroes

I was about ten when we did a school activity, something like choosing a “beacon,” an “example” to follow. Everyone else seemed to have a name instantly; their parents, a football player, a teacher. I remember sitting there, with nothing in mind. Thinking hard about why I didn't have my decision made and what I was missing.

That moment pushed me to go looking. I started searching for people I could become like, people I could chase. And I point that out because it's easy to lose that feeling as you grow up. You become more "mature", more "realistic", and you slowly start to keep your admiration at a safe distance, paying more attention to what's wrong with them than what's right with them.

That's why you need idols.

Not someone you're merely "interested in". Idols. Heroes. People who make you feel genuinely excited, truly inspired. Most people never feel that way about anyone. They'll follow someone, read them, watch them, listen to them, but from far away. Just for consumption. They keep it comfortable. They keep it safe.

But the whole point is proximity. You need to live closer to it. You need to feel it enough that become an obsession. And usually, that will make you start comparing yourself to them.

Comparison is the most powerful discomfort you can inflict on your own mediocrity. It stings, and that sting is productive. It pushes you to move, to change, to do something different with your finite life. The crowd will never create that feeling for you, because the crowd, by definition, is average. It's a careful "not too much" of everything; safe opinions, soft edges. You can't feel challenged by something that isn't meaningfully different.

Idols matter because we need innovation, we need changes, we need to be different. That is something that the best individuals empower to be possible, not a group of people that have no path than just follow each other. Collective consciousness is nothing if you get rid of the few individuals who actually stretched reality first.

An idol is a statistical anomaly, someone who bent the curve, who falls outside it. Someone who's life doesn't fit neatly into the normal distribution of human behavior. Find one you can admire. Find one who makes you think, "I want to be that person".

Having idols means doing whatever you can to beat them. And then years go by, and you realize you're not even close. That's the dangerous moment, the moment you reach for the "mature" exit lines. "Nobody is that great", "But they did this or that wrong". It sounds balanced. It sounds reasonable. But balance is average. Balance lives in the middle.

Admiring someone gives you a rare kind of fascination, almost a euphoria, that you can't get from polite consensus. It happens when you see a person break your model of what's possible for the world. Not when you hear a general idea, or a softened agreement among many.

That's why I don't want to learn only from "the market", "the community", "the ecosystem". That's flat. It doesn't generate the energy you need. If you don't have heroes, your standard of greatness is probably too easy to hit.

You need idols.