When I was 6 years old, my uncle was my hero. He was tall, drove his own car, and had a cool cellphone. What else could someone want in life?

At 10 years old, I thought a senior at school was the coolest person alive. He played football so well, had so many friends, knew how to play the guitar, heck he even had a girlfriend. Could I be like that?

By age 12, I realized that wasn’t for me. Circumstances at home changed too much and in a lot of ways, I had to grow up early. I studied harder and became obsessed with getting the best grades. Each year, I would reach out to older kids for their notes. Those days, my heroes were those seniors who had ranked first in their classes.

At age 15, I had started coding but felt useless compared to my friend O who seemed like a programming whiz. It felt useless trying to compete against O at coding. But in a way, he was my hero at the time.

At 16, I read Steve Job’s biography and thought it was cool to ‘think different’. It sounds super cliché now but I started imitating the guy. Wearing only basic black t-shirts to save time, learning about every disparate thing so I could ‘connect the dots looking backward’, and even trying to convince myself I was adopted (!).

Over time, this too changed.

As we grow older, things change… and so do our heroes.

For one, our aspirations change.

I am not enthralled by gadgets the way I was as a kid. How much I value social acceptance (vs being comfortable with my own opinions) has changed as well. These kinds of trivial and profound changes in ourselves change what we value and who we look up to.

Besides, our heroes change too. (or god-forbid, we actually meet them)

If our heroes are still living, as a consequence of being human, they will err. Sometimes egregiously so. This may attenuate our liking of them.

And lastly, if we ever end up meeting and getting to know our heroes, we will inevitably learn of their quirks and flaws. While this may make them more relatable and endear them in our hearts, it may also sway our opinions of them.*

In a lot of ways, we outgrow our heroes.

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*The greek gods could be an interesting example of this. Superhuman, but ever so flawed and complicated. Never quite the ideal that someone like Jesus is held to be.