All Humans Make Mistakes

“...To remind us that all humans make mistakes and all leaders are but human” Leto II, Children of Dune

It is human nature to put people we admire on a pedestal. Sometimes we idolize them or even deify them.

We do this all the time with celebrities, sports figures, politicians, parents, spouses and occasionally, even writers.

Many years ago I attended a seminar. I don’t remember what the seminar was about, but I do remember an analogy that the speaker used to describe human nature: When you watch a child play with building blocks what do you see? The child stacks one block on top of another until there are no blocks left. What does the child do when there are no blocks left? The child smashes down the stack of blocks and starts over again.

We do this with people all the time…we build them up and then we tear them down.

But is it that simple?

As humans we have a tendency to cherry pick the things we admire or find attractive about a person and selectively ignore the things that we don’t like about them. Then one day we are shocked…shocked to discover that the individual is not the person we thought they were! :-o

It is kind of like living our lives through rose colored glasses.

Many times this pattern starts with our parents. We grow up admiring them with the belief that they were all knowing. Then one day, usually when we are teenagers, we discover that our parents do not know everything and they are not perfect.

But we cherry pick our data sets again when we start dating. We build our pretty picture of romance by selectively ignoring the traits that don’t fit our idea of who this perfect person should be. Then one day we say to them, “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

When it comes to our heroes or icons, of the past and present, we forget that they are (or were) simply human beings…with all the beautiful flaws and idiosyncrasies that go with being human.

We put them on a pedestal and project onto them all the traits that we want them to embody.

But these heroes and icons are just normal people that were put into extraordinary circumstances…and rose to the occasion. It is the memory of time and the media that turns them into icons.

Instead of being worshipped or deified, heroes and icons should provide us all with inspiration. The inspiration that any of us, when put to the test, will have the character to rise to the occasion to do what must be done.

Embrace the message not the messenger.