Exactly. It’s fine to build up flawless versions of people in your mind and to try to emulate those imaginary heroes or draw inspiration from their strengths.
Just be aware of the fact that you’ve created a fiction. Don’t treat real humans like you would their hero image. They say to never meet your heroes, but you can’t anyway: your heroes don’t exist in reality. And that’s ok.
That said, many really really awesome people do exist. They may not be perfect, but they’re arguably better than that: they’re good and they’re real. You would be lucky to know them. I think one issue is that far too often our heroes are famous, and that is not a group that generally selects on the basis of quality of character. Many famous people are good at something and we mistakenly take that as proxy for being a good person. It probably helps that we mostly see them doing the thing they’re good at.
Exactly. It’s fine to build up flawless versions of people in your mind and to try to emulate those imaginary heroes or draw inspiration from their strengths.
Just be aware of the fact that you’ve created a fiction. Don’t treat real humans like you would their hero image. They say to never meet your heroes, but you can’t anyway: your heroes don’t exist in reality. And that’s ok.
That said, many really really awesome people do exist. They may not be perfect, but they’re arguably better than that: they’re good and they’re real. You would be lucky to know them. I think one issue is that far too often our heroes are famous, and that is not a group that generally selects on the basis of quality of character. Many famous people are good at something and we mistakenly take that as proxy for being a good person. It probably helps that we mostly see them doing the thing they’re good at.