The heroes of our time.

Everyone has a hero. But the closer you look, their heroism and lustre fades away to reveal an individual who had to make false promises and cut corners to achieve the heroic feat.

There is this person you admired and considered your role model. You want to emulate their lifestyle and achieve what they achieved, at-least try to, in your own modest way.

So you set out to study their life, the hardships they faced and the challenges they overcame, and chances are you won’t like everything that you find. As you learn more about their life, through podcasts or books, their life tends to lose some lustre. They are no longer the hero you envisioned them to be. They had to cut corners and often do a shady thing or two to get where they are today. This has been the repetitive theme among many people that I followed.

Silly me, I expected perfect heroes to survive in an imperfect world. Hero entrepreneurs, in many cases had to resort to illegal activities to keep their companies afloat. Hero artists, in many cases, took credit for work done by someone else. Perhaps the image of a perfect hero only exists in comic books, someone who is just and does right by everyone. After all, they are imperfect humans living in an unfair world.

But there is one thing to take away from my readings, one common theme that runs across all the great individuals. No matter how hard they got hit, how many people stood in their way, they always found a way to get what they want. Sometimes in nice ways, in other cases — not so nice. But these are people that do not give up, you can destroy their work, oust them from the companies they created but they will find a way to claw back, a way to claim back what they believe is truly theirs.

There are a lot of heroes and inventors that have created masterpieces but still not being remembered for it because they gave up thinking they would not succeed. In most cases someone else adapted their work and simply persisted until it was a success. So then, there is just one quality that sets all our heroes apart — PERSISTENCE.

Pick one thing. Stick with it.

That is pretty much the only way to do it :)

Stanly is a software engineer at a Blockchain startup. You can follow him here.