Comparison is the thief of joy. It’s great to it’s great to have mentors. But where things can get tricky is when we put those mentors so far up on a pedestal that we tend to think that they are inherently different than us—almost not human.
The fundamental problem is we are seeing them well on their way. When we compare our chapter 1 with their chapter 9, it’s easy to get discouraged.
But what if there were a way to make them feel more human?
Well, there is. And on this blog post, I want to share two exercises you can to do bring your heroes back down to earth. It’s finding content on them “back in time” when they were earlier in their journey.
- Search for YouTube videos, and sort by “oldest first.” You can see how raw they really were.
- Archive.org — this is one of my favorite resources. Instead of looking at your idol’s website today, what if you could go back in time and see what it looked like many years ago? Well, you can! On this website, there’s a tool at the top of the page called “WaybackMachine.” Simple enter in the website that you wish to see from many years ago and hit go.
These 2 exercises humanize our idols. Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine getting to where they are now. But we don’t have to get where they are now. All we have to do is hot their starting point, and when we can do that, it increases our belief that we really can become the person of our dreams.