We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results — or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.

We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

The less people speak of their greatness, the more we think of it.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

We risk missing out on joy when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.

The same principle leads us to neglect a man of merit that induces us to admire a fool.

He feels a little better while watching the guy on TV or thinking of him. Still, he feels insignificant. He has a few heroes whom he sees on other TV shows: sports figures, a tough cop or a late-night talk show host. He lives vicariously through all of them.

I suppose the other thing too many forget is that we were all stories once, each and every one of us. And we remain stories. But too often we allow those stories to grow banal, or cruel or unconnected to each other.We allow the stories to continue, but they no longer have a heart. They no longer sustain us.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

The good we never miss we rarely prize

We tend to underestimate the small things about ourselves that are often our most valuable attributes.

Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.