Local Heroes

Do we idolise the wrong people?

It takes a lot to get to the top, whether it be sports, entertainment, or leadership. And if you are at the top, you get most of the attention — essentially a winner-takes-all scenario.

And if you are one of these individuals who get most of the attention, you are likely going to be the most admired and looked up to.

People will study you and try to emulate your work ethic in hopes of reaching similar success.

Social media and our access to information have only exasperated this. We begin to idolise these individuals (I am guilty of it).

But instead, can’t we just look at your peers or at the people around you, locally? They may not be achieving great things (or may be they are) when measured through the lens of the internet.

But they are just as admirable as any famous individual.

It comes down to what we measure as success. For example, if we had a pool of athletes and ranked them on their abilities. Then, the difference between the 1st and the 100th isn’t going to be much in terms of skill, but in terms of attention and measure of success, it’s disproportionally greater.

If we take this same logic and scale it to the world, there will be people in your local community, and because they aren’t a CEO of a famous company or part of a popular sport aren’t perceived as “successful”, but are just as or if not more hard-working than those in the aforementioned positions; they just don’t get the credit they deserve or a platform to get noticed.

The same could apply to artists. Can we just enjoy local talent? And imagine if you knew these people as people and they knew you too, instead of this insane one-to-many relationship most famous people have.

You are surrounded by local heroes. Go and appreciate them.