Everyone Can Do Something

Real Heroes Exist

Superman had the power to fly and shoot lasers from his eyes. Cute. Gandhi had the power to actually exist. Fictional heroes’ actual exploits are limited to selling comics, books, movies, video games, action figures, bedsheets, lunchboxes and other assorted product lines.

Whereas Superman battled imaginary evil with "man of steel" violence, Gandhi rescued a real nation in distress and defeated the supervillainous British empire by non-violently changing people's minds. Compared to comic book superheroes, real ones win by default. Real people are infinitely more inspiring than fiction.

The most impressive superpower any hero can have is to matter in the real world, not imaginary ones filled with amusing fictional characters.

Our media paints a disturbing picture for our entertainment that is hardly worthy of our emulation. The role models provided for the youth exemplify a warped version of heroism glorifying sex, violence, power, ego and anti-intellectualism. Most of the characters who are portrayed as highly intelligent and self-motivated are the villainous "evil masterminds" whose grandiose plots are foiled by rugged, simplistic anti-heroes.

Where are the real heroes who have really changed the world again and again to give us everything we take for granted now? Surely we can turn our creative abilities towards promoting real role-models with the respect and attention they deserve.

Children should be growing up playing with action figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, not the stars of vacuous cartoons and video games exploiting the lure of consequence-free violence to sell toys for profit.

Will The Heroes Please Stand Up?

All of us have the choice to live a heroic life that makes a difference. It does not take a superhuman to make an impact; heroism is not something only other people are capable of.

From reading a history book, you might get the impression that a handful of great leaders determined history. But the leaders of movements were ultimately figureheads for the thousands of committed participants who accomplished the day-to-day actions that made everything happen.

Less Spectators, More Contributors

People love heroes because they simplify things. With a hero in charge, everyone else can watch as spectators. Studies show that during emergencies the more people who are in a crowd, the less responsible each one feels for doing something about it.

It is common sense that for any given task, the more people who help, the less effort each person needs to contribute. There's no reason to stand around waiting for a hero to handle everything when we can all do something heroic. We can all change the world and together we will.

‘The One’ We’ve Been Waiting Is Everyone

“You look like you’re waiting for something… Being the one is like being in love. No one can tell you you’re in love, you just know it.”

—The Oracle, The Matrix

Many movies, games and books talk about ‘the one’ in hushed tones of reverence, a messiah who saves the powerless people from their own weakness and delivers them from injustice. ‘The one’ is a painful cliche and a heroic figure of our collective imagination, an archetypal champion we root for again and again through all the challenges they overcome.

Anyone can be ‘the one’ and what we really need to do to change the world is to wake ourselves up to this fact. Each of us is ‘the one’ and relying on somebody else to save oneself is crazy. Self-reliance is a virtue that enables one to take responsibility for making one’s way in life. If one is confronted with challenges, one must overcome them courageously and ask for help when it is needed, not run away from learning experiences (the phenomenon formerly known as impossibly scary things) in the hopes that they will go away or someone else will do it for us.

The Beatles Were Just A Band

“What is possible for me is possible for you.”

—Frederick Douglass

“It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain to that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon.”

—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure

Elevating celebrities to mythical status makes them seem different from us which excuses us from doing as they've done. We have to stop glorifying heroes as being apart from us.

All the towering historical figures had their share of flaws and experienced the same trepidation before they did what they did.

What gave Gahndi or Martin Luther King the power to change the world? There was no magic to it. They were as human as anyone, with much the same abilities, skills and frailties. Their power was in their ideas. Everything that made them do what they did and say what they said was motivated by their ideas, which anyone can live by.

“I put my pants on like the rest of you, one leg at a time. Except that once my pants are on, I make gold records!”

—Christopher Walken on SNL: More Cowbell

It's In Your Hands

Contrary to popular belief, authors don’t spend years writing for ego’s sake. The author is almost totally irrelevent. This book is written for you, the reader in the hope that you’ll find it worthwile and enjoyable. It’s what you think of it and do with it that matters. Books are just ink, paper and glue until you bring them to life by your own choices. Every one of us matters to the world. It is said that you can judge the thinking of a society by the books it is reading. The reverse is also true: this book can be judged by the society that reads it. Best-sellers are irrelevent. What matters are best readers like you.

You’re important to yourself for obvious reasons. And you’re important to every person in the world because you have the opportunity to change each and every life on earth with your choices.

Believe in yourself. Find out what you are capable of. Have fun. Surprise yourself. You have more power over your life in your ability to choose than the “system” or “society” or the rest of the human race combined. Understanding how the world works just reminds us of that. If changing your own life necessitates changing the whole world to suit you, so much the better.

Towards An All-Leader Culture

The best way to avoid being a cult leader seems simple: don’t start a cult. Given that virtually every organized group exhibits cultish behavior, that’s harder than it sounds if you want to mobilize an effective movement.

In many people’s minds, leaders shouldn’t be human. They are supposed to be perfect heroic figures. They never are, except in the sense of heroism that we can all embody when we empower ourselves and make a difference. A ‘hero’ has one real purpose: to inspire the heroism within everyone. Self-aggrandizing ‘Heroes’ who disempower others are just bums.

Empowerment can't have a leader because either everyone who is empowered is a leader unto themself or they aren’t really empowered at all. That’s a neat trick of escape artistry, but it also happens to be true. Think for yourself may be an ironic imperative but you choose to do something because you think it is a good idea, not because you are told. As self-contradictory as it sounds, you don’t need leaders because you can learn to lead yourself.

Leadership doesn’t start with about getting other people to follow your lead. First it is about getting clear with yourself. It is not really about mobilizing against enemies. Our capacity for self-sabotage is more dangerous to our dreams than any outside boogeyman. 

The "E Pluribus Unum" Fallacy, or Everyone is the One

Up untill 1956 the official motto of the United States was 'E pluribus unum', latin for 'From many, one.' This is traditionally interpreted as describing how the original 13 colonies became one country. However, it is useful for our purposes in that it describes a prevailing philosophy of our time. The idea that heroes and great leaders are rare and have inherent special qualities that set them apart from the majority. The reality is that these people exhibit the same qualities as the rest of us, they just had the insight to follow through with their own lives, they were empowered.

It is easy to step back and wonder at the heroes and heroines, and ascribe their nature to something inherent in their genes, their spirit, their faith. But it is far more amazing to realize that these people who have shaped history are not one FROM many, they are one IN many.