A Good Hero Propels Your Life Forward and Upward

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In life, you should know about a good hero to learn from and move forward in your goals and dreams. Learning from the ones who’ve already done the things you want to do is a good path to take. Whether your goals are in fitness, money, relationships, and the above, make sure to pick a good hero to learn from. The wrong person can harm you.

There are countless people who have done anything and everything that you’ve ever hoped to accomplish and then some. These people have a lot that they could teach in the areas you want to excel at. They aren’t a necessary part of life. You can easily get to where you want to be by yourself without depending on others.

Heroes just have a faster way of helping you get to your destination.

First, we have to get something out of the way. It’s a given your parents are good heroes, provided you grew up in a loving and supportive household. They have great life experiences and wisdom to impart onto you. However, it’s unlikely that they are experts in the things that you want to do well in.

Neither of my parents became millionaires in their 30s. Neither of my parents quit the rat race in order to work for themselves. While they have taught me good life mantras to live by, they haven’t taught me entrepreneurship nor any ideas of passive income. I still do look up to them.

However, I’ve looked for other role models in order to get to where I want to be. That’s how you should approach, as well. Look for a good hero to emulate and copy their success while avoiding the bad ones that can easily set you back years, if not decades.

Who Makes a Good Hero?

A good hero is someone who’s doing what you want to do. A huge characteristic is that they have unique and useful set of skills and strengths. They are highly competent in the field that they are in that separates them from everyone else.

They’re not the folksy heroes that you read about in tales who demonstrate high levels of heroism and heroic acts. They don’t need to slay a dragon. What they do need is to be wildly better than you.

For me personally, a huge part of my goals is entrepreneurship, personal finance, and having freedom. I would religiously follow Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal back when I was interested in tennis. I used to think tennis was tennis, it doesn’t matter how they hit the ball a certain way, it just matters whether it goes over to the other side.

However, there were small details that I noticed while watching them play. I incorporated some of them into my own game to use against opponents. That was a wake up call that the ones who are very good at what they do are because of the small details they incorporate into their game.

Not because of big picture items but the accumulation of the small differences over someone who hasn’t achieved success.

You would be a good hero of mine if you take the time to SMASH that social share button to your favorite social network for the Google algorithm! Your friends’ lives could monumentally improve if they follow a good hero that they want to emulate as well. Let’s spread the information.

In all seriousness, in picking who is a good hero to learn from, keep in mind that there are different types of good heroes to learn from. Let’s explore them.

Types of Good Heroes

One type of a good hero is realistic while the other type is high reaching. There’s a wide range of people to choose from that you can ask what they would do in a particular situation.

You need to have people in both categories because you’re going to be progressing through at different times in your life. One day, you may even realize you’ve surpassed some of the people you’ve looked up to for so long. That’s when you know you’re progressing through.

Happiness is achieved through progress. There’s nothing more frustrating than being stuck in a standstill with no way forward or backward. When you feel like you are standing still, you can look to what others have or are doing in order to move forward.

You don’t have to go through it alone. With the invention of the internet, you don’t have to borrow or buy a book to learn. You can just log onto the internet and read about them at the touch of a button. All from the comfort of your bed.

Let’s explore the different types of good heroes even further.

Realistic Heroes

These are the heroes that are very ahead of you but are still within reach. You could be at 10% of reaching your goals while they are at 80% of reaching your goals, for example. These types of heroes are good because you can’t expect to get to the top in a short amount of time. Wherever you want to get to, there’s someone else working harder than you to get to the same place.

That’s why it’s good to have a middle ground between where you want to finish and where you are currently. Otherwise, you will try to go too big too soon. Risk is good but too much risk and literally wipe you out forever out of the game.

These are the types of heroes whose actions you want to copy the most. Their ideologies, thinking, and perspective will impact your life the most and is the most relevant to your life.

High Reaching Heroes

On the other end of the spectrum, high reaching heroes are the ones that are so far ahead, that it’s almost impossible for you to reach them without a ton of sacrifices, time, or some luck. These are the people you want to get to over the long-term.

The ones who are at where you want to end up at. Actually, it may come to light that you couldn’t even reach their levels of success by the end of your life. That’s completely ok. You should always aim to reach too high instead of too low.

One of the people who comes to mind is the CFO I worked for at one of my internships. After meeting him and hearing him talk, I could tell why he moved up so quickly at a young age.

These are good heroes whose actions you want to copy but want to keep on the back of your mind. Not the front of your mind. They are the long-term thinkers and long-term heroes. While their actions are useful to learn from, they are so far ahead of the game that it’s not applicable to you.

Getting ahead of yourself is a bad thing to do.

Who are Good Heroes in Business and Personal Finance?

Good hero in business.
I hope to start a business one day

So now let’s get down to the meat and the crux of the matter. Who exactly are the good heroes to follow?

Good Realistic Heroes

The number of good realistic heroes that I personally follow and look up to are:

The first thing you should do when you read a personal finance blog is to read their about page and learn who they are. With any article you read, you should read their about page and find out who they are. That way you get to understand their incentives and viewpoints in life and whether it aligns with your beliefs.

Most of the personal finance articles written by huge media corporations weren’t written from a personal perspective. It was written from an SEO perspective and how it can drive the most clicks.

I read a blog post encouraging employees to not sue their employer. The blog post was written by an attorney who represents employers. Yikes!

Be very careful who you get advice from. If they don’t have firsthand experience and knowledge, it’s difficult to trust their advice as genuine. Their advice may have been true in the end, but the risk of their advice is now transferred over to you. While they benefit from your time and attention reading their articles for free, you may lose time, money, and energy in the meantime if their advice turns out to be incorrect.

If you want to be a millionaire, you listen from a millionaire on how to be one. If you want to start a business, you listen from an actual entrepreneur who is in the industry you want to be in. Take careful considerations.

Good Heroes that Are High Reaching

The heroes that are very far ahead in the personal finance and business world are:

  • Jeff Bezos
  • Mark Cuban
  • Barbara Corcoran
  • Kevin O’Leary
  • Daymond John
  • Lori Greiner
  • Donald Trump
  • Warren Buffett
  • Bill Gates
  • Elon Musk
  • Larry Ellison
  • John Paul Dejoria.

These are the people who I want to end up at in my life in one way or another. It may be the entrepreneurship bias that comes with living in America. Entrepreneurs are glorified here. Or it may be because I love entrepreneurship too much. When I was 6 years old, I would buy 10 packs of gum and sell it to my classmates for $0.10. Whatever the reason is, I strive and take steps in order to get there.

The people above are good heroes to learn from and get better. You can easily search for them on wikipedia and see when they started in business, where they ended up at a certain age, etc. Their biographies are open books and easily accessible.

The stories from the list of people above are inspirational and will motivate you to move further in life. If you don’t end up where they ended up, that’s OK too. It will still give you inspiration to keep going and live to fight another day.

Finding A Good Hero is Not Limited to Business

A good hero can exist anywhere in your field of interest. It can be in sports such as Roger Federer, Tom Brady, Novak Djokovic, Michael Phelps, and more. Or it can be in e-sports such as Jaedong, Kim Taek Yong, etc. For chess, you want to follow Paul Morphy, Bobby Fischer, or Magnus Carlsen.

Whoever the hero is, find out what you care about. Chances are, there’s already someone dominating in that area already.

Remember, a good hero is just someone who is highly qualified and respected in their field. There’s an infinite number of people in an infinite number of industries that you can learn and take notes from. They are just one quick google search away.

If they check the boxes of what makes a good hero, then they are a good person to follow. One of the things that I want to do is to vlog on Youtube. One day, I will open up a Youtube channel. Before I’m doing so, I’m following Youtubers who are doing exactly what I want to do.

I’m taking notes on what makes them successful. Is it their editing, their voice, their personalities, etc. One day I will open my own channel. For the sake of anonymity and privacy though, I am refraining for the time being.

There are new interests popping up every single day. Technology has changed our lives drastically and so quickly. Whatever you’re into, there’s someone out there who’s into the exact same thing. Even for obscure interests such as underwater basketweaving.

Heroes are available everywhere!

A Good Hero is Extremely Helpful

A good hero can make the difference for your success. If you don’t pick the right hero to emulate, you’re going to go down a very dangerous path. Just like with anything that you do, you can win or lose. As a result of their high influence, a bad hero has the potential to make your life worse.

A good hero should be vetted.
Exercise caution when picking good mentors

Always remember to learn who you’re getting advice from. The most important thing to do in any human interaction is to understand their incentive. Understand where they are coming from. A job recruiter told me, “you don’t want to accept your old company’s counteroffer”. I learned the hard way that he told me that because he wanted to earn a commission.

Not because he actually truly cared about my long term career prospects. I ended up taking my old employer’s counter offer. It worked out amazingly with no problems by the time that I left. Always know who you’re conversing with. Their incentives can be misaligned with yours.

Jamie Dimon’s mentor fired him because Jamie Dimon wanted to move up more quickly. A good hero doesn’t feel threatened when you start moving upwards. They celebrate it. If they do get jealous and threatened, it means they are your enemies. Not your ally.

I’ve outlined a number of heroes that you can emulate and learn from. I personally follow all of them and remember their stories quite well. It’s given me inspiration and motivation to save money path when I’ve needed it the most. The will to keep going and to keep achieving my hopes and dreams.

There’s no reason why it won’t have the same effects for you. Find a good hero to learn from and propel your life forward and upward.

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4 Replies to “A Good Hero Propels Your Life Forward and Upward”

  1. Love your list of realistic heroes and celebrity heroes! I look up to the same people! It’s good to have high achieving heroes because they do motivate you to do your best in life! Great article!

    1. That’s awesome! Must be why we both have personal finance blogs? 😉 I like to separate the two because I realized one set is so far out of reach that they’re entertaining to watch and learn from on television but I don’t think I’ll ever get there or reach it.

      If others have done it, we can as well!

  2. I’d take issue with Financial Samurai as a hero. He is wildly out of touch — even more so these days with some of his click-bait articles for Bankrate (I think it’s Bankrate, but I’m a little hazy) and I also know multiple people on Twitter who say they’ve discovered him trolling their site after they said something publicly negative (either on the site or social media). They said they used IP addresses to determine this, so it’s not a stab in the dark.

    But the idea of having both a more approachable/attainable hero to help you with short-term progress and an overarching one as a bigger goal is a great idea. You need smaller milestones to hit to keep you motivated and feeling like you’re making progress — in debt reduction or FI.

    I don’t have any heroes right now per se. But in a sort-of-related sense, I’ve gained some weight and have had a hard time getting back into my old routine that would take it off. So I started with a very attainable goal: get more active. Once that was starting to work, it was: go to the gym once. After I did that two times in two weeks (I had other activities as well), I am now at lose 1 lb/week. My bigger goal is to get back down to what I consider my base weight, which means hopefully I’ll move up to losing 2 lbs/week at some point.

    But for now, I lost my first 1lb since I’ve started weighing myself again, and now that it’s fresh strawberry season (so candy doesn’t have to be my go-to source for sugar), I’m starting to get back closer to my old diet. As I make each milestone — however small it may seem to someone else — the negativity in my head gets a little quieter and I feel more capable of pushing further. I think a hero does the same for a lot of people: the more attainable hero lets you know you can (probably) do it too, the bigger figure keeps you hustling (either to get out of debt or reach FI) for a big dream future.

    1. I have heard that there are some controversies surrounding FS.

      Yes!! 99% of people aren’t born into wealth so we have to climb mountains after mountains to get to where we want to go. We have to achieve success in steps otherwise we take too big of a leap and end up in a not so ideal place. It’s hard to become a millionaire overnight.

      Exactly!! Hey, even if 1 lb doesn’t seem like a lot to some other people who can easily lose 10 pounds in a matter of weeks, it’s a great accomplishment in and of itself. I weigh myself every morning and every time that I see a 1 pound difference from the day before, I get happy and elated. These days, that hasn’t happened as often as I would like it to happen.

      I made a goal of losing 7 pounds that I thought I would achieve in a month but every day, I crave something delicious so I end up right back to where I started. As soon as I start to make some progress, I come back to the exact same place. I lose 2 pounds one week and gain two pounds the next week 🙁

      However, as long as we are both taking baby steps and showing results on some days instead of failing every single day, we should be happy at the progress that we know we can make!

      Strawberry season for the win. I’ve been craving ice cream and wanting to balance the salty foods I eat with some sweetness and I’ve sadly seen my weight scale go up more times than I would like to admit. Maybe I should mirror your footsteps and buy some fruits to satisfy the sweet tooth craving. It’s a lot healthier and buying grocery foods is a lot cheaper as well. It’s pretty difficult to find a good hero in weight loss, there’s a lot of people who’ll encourage weight loss tips just because they want to sell you something.

      In either case, here’s to both of us reaching our health goals at least by the end of the year!

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