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Never meet your heroes.
10 years ago, I read an article in a dentist’s office, and it’s been bothering me ever since.
Now you get to hear about it.
In 2016, the American roots rock duo Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney of The Black Keys inducted Steve Miller into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
If you don’t know Steve Miller, you may remember him from the time he took the money and ran, presumably while smoking the green.
Steve Miller is a legend.
Yet, the guys from The Black Keys said they had one regret from the ceremony.
Steve Miller was rude to them.
They were so excited to meet one of their heroes and tell him how he helped inspire their own musical journey. In response, Miller basically said he had no idea who they were. He was completely dismissive.
Now, The Black Keys aren’t as famous as Steve Miller, but they’ve won some fame, including 6 Grammys. They aren’t nobodies.
After accepting his award, Miller launched into a rant backstage. Later, in other interviews, he said the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was just a bunch of “crooks and gangsters.”
After the event, Auerbach and Carney said they deeply regretted participating and that Miller had ruined the experience for them.
I’m not saying that Steve Miller is a bad guy. Maybe it just wasn’t his best moment. I have no idea what he’s like in real life. So, I can’t comment on whether this was just his typical personality or a low moment.
But I do know, there’s nothing like meeting someone in real life and realizing they don’t live up to the expectations in your head.
And it’s even worse when that person is the one looking at you in the mirror.
The hero with two faces.
How many faces do you have? Does anyone know your real one?
When I managed an online education startup, I was known for being extremely calm, almost unreasonably calm.
People would call us and yell at us. People would threaten to sue us. Students would make threatening jokes to their teachers. Students would make each other uncomfortable with the messages they sent.
It was everything you’d expect would happen at a school, just online.
And my staff would oscillate between being unnerved by or laughing at how stoic I seemed.
I had to be. The buck stopped with me.
But at night, I’d go home and be a bit different.
I’d lie awake from 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. almost every night for years. I’d get into fights with my family. In short, I wasn’t easy to be around.
To be honest, I’m still not easy to be around.
I’d like to think I’m working on it.
It’s not easy to be the same person at work as you are at home.
It’s even more difficult to be the same person in real life that people think you are on paper.
Imperfect class acts.
Perhaps other people struggle with this.
I think maybe a lot of leaders know how to be calm in front of their subordinates and struggle in private moments. Two of my favorite examples of this are William Sherman and Ulysses Grant in the American Civil War.
Now, if you’re from the South, you may remember these two gentlemen as the guys who ordered the burning of many of the farms in Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley.
Or, if you’re from the North, you might remember them as the two generals who helped finally put an end to slavery in the U.S. and preserved the nation.
As a native Californian, that’s what I like to remember. But wars are complicated.
Just like people.
Though I spent my childhood obsessively studying the American Civil War, it’s not always the battles and heroic exploits that first come to mind when I think of these men.
It’s their character and their inner life.
You see, Sherman struggled with crippling depression and suicidal thoughts. Grant struggled with alcohol.
Grant’s officers knew that after an especially brutal battle, even if his army won, Grant would disappear for 2 or 3 days. He’d keep it together and stay stone-cold sober during the lead-up and the fight itself. Then, he’d go off on his own and get drunk for a couple of days.
Or at least, that’s the rumor.
It’s difficult to know the truth. Maybe it was something his critics said to make him look bad.
But we do know Grant struggled with drinking, so the truth is likely that Grant was something like this:
A hero in public. A struggling man in private.
Despite their struggles, Sherman and Grant were both strong colleagues and fast friends. Sherman himself is quoted as saying,
“Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”
To his credit, though Grant was known for his unrelenting energy and uncompromising approach to war, he was a gentleman when it came to the important moments.
For example, when Lee’s army of Northern Virginia finally surrendered to Grant in the spring of 1865, some people claimed that Lee’s soldiers were living on 1 tablespoon of rice or flour a day.
Whether this figure is exaggerated, it’s clear Lee’s army was in bad shape.
So, when Grant accepted this surrender, he fed Lee’s army, ordering 25,000 rations to be sent to Lee’s men.
I’m not condoning the South or slavery. It was a good thing that the Confederacy lost. And I like my states united.
But I appreciate that Grant understood that your enemies are still human beings, and you don’t let people starve.
Like I said, war is complicated. Being a leader is tough. But Grant was a class act.
All filters are half-off between 4:00 and 6:00.
In my own life, I’ve had a range of leaders with varying levels of authenticity.
I’ve had bosses who were unashamed about their Christian faith and their love of motorcycles.
I’ve had bosses who told me in our first meeting how they came out to their parents as teenagers.
I’ve had bosses who admitted their own mistakes and stood up for me when I made mistakes.
And I’ve had bosses who lied to me about little things, like whether or not they liked doing PowerPoint decks.
In all of these cases, I found that I cared a lot less about whether I agreed with my bosses on everything and a lot more about whether they were trustworthy and consistent.
Find me a boss who’s honest, and I’ll follow that person through a hurricane.
When I think about one of my old bosses from the bank, I appreciate the fact that I saw him in so many contexts. Zoom calls, team meetings, mini-conferences, one-on-one lunches, long Uber rides through NYC, and group happy hours. Though we didn’t agree on much of anything personally, I was so grateful that he was the same in every context and always treated me with respect.
Mixing alcohol and work relationships can be an odd thing. But maybe it’s useful to be able to assess your coworkers in multiple contexts. If your boss treats you with respect at both work and the bar, that’s probably a good sign they’re a decent person.
In other words, the fewer faces someone has, the better.
The first rule of book club.
But enough about bosses. We started with heroes, and I think we should end with that.
I’ve had the chance to meet a few of my heroes over the years. I haven’t met anyone too big. Mostly a few authors and musicians. But I’m happy to say that for the few heroes I’ve met, I felt like I saw the real deal.
One moment that stands out in particular was back in 2022. On a cool April evening in D.C., my sister and I got to meet Mikel Jollett, the founder and lead singer of The Airborne Toxic Event.
Mikel’s an interesting guy.
He grew up in a real, no-joke cult called Synanon in California and was then later raised by his dad, who was both an ex-heroin addict and an ex-jailbird.
Then, he went to Stanford and was a state champion runner. Things were looking up.
But, as life would have it, he chose the wrong career. Upon graduation, he pursued the well-worn path of corporate business. Over the next few years, as he describes it, he got fat, old before his time, and miserable.
After years of feeling like he was losing himself, he finally had an awakening.
You might find what happens next a bit juvenile, but it’s a true story. And I like it.
Mikel spent a week watching Fight Club multiple nights in a row at a movie theater. After this, he quit his job, began running and working out obsessively, started working construction, wrote for a music magazine, and slogged his way through a winding 10-year path to becoming a musician.
It’s a wild story filled with moments like Mikel and Robert Smith of The Cure wandering drunk around NYC’s Central Park, a conversation that finally tipped Mikel over the edge and inspired him to start a band.
Sixteen years after this, and a decade after seeing him in concert for the first time, I finally met Mikel Jollett at a small book signing for his memoir Hollywood Park.
Having seen him in concert so many times, I thought I knew what to expect.
I was really happy to find out my expectations were right.
He was exactly the same at a book signing event attended by 30 people as he was at the rock concert later that night attended by 2,000. Ok, slightly quieter. But still, he wore the same face.
I remember telling him, “Hey, that essay you wrote about watching Fight Club and quitting your job is what inspired me to go to grad school.”
Instead of acting self-important or snobbish at all about it, he just quietly said something to the effect of…
“Oh wow. That’s super cool. Did you know some people have told me their professors used that essay to teach narrative nonfiction writing at their colleges? Isn’t that crazy?”
Remember, this was a guy with a niche but decently successful band, who had just published a bestselling memoir. When his book first came out, Oprah listed it as one of the 30 most anticipated books of 2020.
Yet, here he was, totally humble and surprised about the fact that a college professor might use an old magazine essay of his as an example.
He’s not a perfect guy. I’ve read about his low moments.
But the man on paper matched the man in reality. And that was really cool.
The hero with one (imperfect) face.
Nobody is perfect. Not Grant. Not Sherman. Not Steve Miller. Not Mikel Jollett. Not my old bosses. Not me.
None of us can live up to our ideals perfectly. And really, none of us will ever be as kind, calm, or likeable in person as we may seem on paper.
But, we can try.
My sister once said that only people with ideals can be hypocrites. What she meant by this is that you can only really fall short of a standard if you actually take a stand. When someone has no standards at all, it’s pretty hard to criticize them for not living up to them.
I think my sister has a good point, but maybe it’s not quite the right wording.
Maybe what makes people hypocritical is not when they fail, but when they hold their own values in contempt. When they have two faces and know it.
In short, when they stop trying at all.
I think we’ve all seen enough charlatans on TV to come up with a few examples on our own.
As we wind this down, I don’t want to make anyone feel bad about themselves. I’m not perfect, and I don’t expect anyone else to be either. But I think the key is that you can’t stop trying to live up to your standards, even if you don’t really do it very well.
To quote John Steinbeck,
“Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
We can’t share every aspect of our personalities in every situation. There will always be different sides we show when we’re at work, hanging out with friends, or spending time with family.
But, ideally, when it comes to faces, I think we should all just have one.
There’s an old saying that you should never meet your heroes. To that I say, maybe you should just get better ones.
But let’s not be too quick to judge. Maybe the problem isn’t our heroes after all. Maybe it’s us.
Perhaps we all have those moments when we look in the mirror and don’t feel like we can live up to our own standards.
Maybe like Grant and Sherman, we can stick with each other through that too.
Want to read more like this?
Here’s a few of my favorites.
So much from this article resonates, but my comment will focus on the relationship with coworkers and bosses. I am loyal to a fault in the workplace and yet this last chapter of my working life before I retire has me questioning the fifth manager I report to in five years every day (there is much shifting in my place of work). I know she is a good person but our work values don't align and my loyalty is fading. I'm dealing with those feelings and I find it quite challenging. I like to lead by example but in the words of one of my past managers, "not everyone works the same, Holly."
I often find reading a difficult process, my mind feels like it takes time to read and takecit in, I can't skim like others do as I feel guilty and then need to start at thd beginning if I find my my wanders...yet this piece was easy to read, I was absorbed and enjoyed the concept...I worked in Corporate, it had taken me years to get there, only to find it not as I expected...it let me down in so many ways and ended my love of accountancy, you see accountancy to me was meeting teams, gathering real data, and ensuring a business was doing great, yet at a Corporate the people were not like the sme's [small medium sized enterprises]I had worked most of my accounting career, where everyone had a role to play, they showed up, they did their best thd accounts balanced and the audits confirmed their truth. The teams carried each other through tight deadlines, and thd culture within was professional, upbeat all steering jn the same direction, everyone had their role to play from the janitor to the Top Bosses.
However never did I feel like Corporate people, made me feel...never did I feel alone, deserted at times of need.
You see Corporate has no heart, no soul and lacks the cameraderie a SME can bring to your heart...
Talk about how many faces and has, I discovered I could not BE myself in those kind of spaces, all were like a breed that ran you dry...so When my contract expired I didn't want to re apply...no more and although it took me some time, I found myself again through art and refined my design skills by getting trained...my accounting is z skill I'll always have yet now I am an Artist and Designer being myself with other likeminded creatives I feel at peace with accepting me for who I am. CORPORATE was like my hero and I was disappointed when I realised if was fake and false and full of many characters that preferred to be lazy and hide behind their titles, use others to shield their failings and hurt them without a care, cos they somehow were given the power infact they had no power cos itherz above them were calling thd shots and had their minions in a grip of entrapment to say the least...I'm glad I had not stayed and glad to be free and be myself again.