Role models – when the veil drops our heroes are just human!

“If you can’t find a good role model, be one!” – Gale Anne Hurd

As kids we look up to our parents, we fight with other children trying to prove our parents are the best. Most of the time kids want to become like their father or mother when they grow up, so we have sometimes entire generations of lawyers, actors or doctors, and for some time our parents are our role models. We keep some things for that period, the framework which hold the picture of our live is built in that period and the base of who we become comes from the period when we looked up to our parents.

            After a while we discover super-heroes, athletes, singers and sometimes even our teachers thus our parents seize to be our role models. We want to be them or at least like them but not always based on objective reasons. Our teen minds see the glamour and the fame and want it even if we are not talented or have super powers, it’s just a flame and we are a moth. When I was playing basketball we didn’t have a uniform offered by the school so we brought our own t-shirts. No one put their own name on the back, maximum a nickname; we were a team of Kobe, Jordan and Rodman. At that age I truly believe we thought that playing with number 23 on our backs will make us dunk like Jordan, but sometimes it would back fire. None of us from that team ended up playing professional basketball, but for a period of 4-5 years we were dreaming of that and we were convinced we were that good.

            Years pass, we decide on a career or field of interest and start on that path. Sometimes we find out that the roads often traveled are easier to pass so some of us look up to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and start working in IT, others want to reach heights in banking and maybe choose to follow on the footsteps of J.P Morgan and many others. Sometimes people struggle all their lives to become as good as their heroes, I say they should only fight to become the best version of themselves.

            I had my fair share of heroes, my father when I was as a child, playing war games and always being a captain because my father was in the army. Sport heroes when I was playing in the basketball team and a good number of role models in different fields I was interested in. Sooner or later I changed them or was disappointed by them, because they were human too, they were not those perfect pictures I was looking up too, all of them had also a lot of elements in their human construction I did not agree with so at one moment I just naturally stopped and understood a role model should give you inspiration at one point, help you find your way. Don’t look behind the curtains because there is a good opportunity you will not like what you find there and when your hero disappoints you it hurts that much harder.

            After some time I become aware of the fact that I only have to look up to myself, I need to make the person looking back from the mirror proud of what I accomplished. I understood that in order to have something of your own you have to travel on less traveled paths, if you follow on someone else’s footsteps you will only achieve the same results and sometimes even worse results. This year Matthew McConaughey had one of the best acceptance speeches at the Oscars and he said that when he was 15 years old someone asked him who his hero was, after a while he said his hero was him ten years from now. After ten years that same person asked how it does feel to have become his hero and his answer was, hey my hero is me at 35. We will never become our heroes, most of the time we will have the misfortune to see them as the normal human beings they are, so why not be our own heroes.

            A hero role is not to give you the path but the place and motivation to start, to inspire and motivate you to try and not to give you a map to follow to your success. Don’t put them on a pedestal just try and learn as much as possible from them and after that follow your instinct and write your own story and become your own hero that others want to be inspired by.

*Artworks by Andy Warhol