Heroes search for truth.
More importantly, when they find it, they do something with it.
All of us have a unique way of viewing the world. As we move through life we build our worldview on a foundation of things we believe to be true about the world. From time to time, we all come across truths that conflict with the way we’re used to seeing things. As humans, we react to this situation in two different ways:
- We bend the truth (or ignore it altogether) to fit our old reality
- We alter our old reality to accommodate the truth
Guess which option most of us prefer? The first. Why? Because it’s just so much easier. If you’ve spent your life building atop a certain set of ‘truths’, it takes a lot of work to dig down and rebuild it in order to accommodate something new. Lots of times, you have to take out something old and when you do that it throws everything out of balance for a while. It’s uncomfortable.
But heroes are willing to do this hard work because the alternative is unacceptable. It’s not just that bending the truth is a lazy way to live — bending the truth actually creates a lie. Why? Because ignoring truth never makes it go away, it just makes you go crazy trying to disguise it in order to make it less truth-y. Option #1 might make a person feel better in the short run, but in the long run, people who choose option #1 have to spend a lot of time and energy lying to themselves about the truth. Imagine what happens to the soul when you have to call the truth a lie and the lie a truth in order to keep your worldview intact. You end up creating a ‘lie bubble’ in which to live to keep the truth at bay. What’s the opposite of Disneyland? Whatever it is, that’s where people who choose option #1 eventually end up.
That’s something heroes just can’t afford to do. They have to look at the world with open eyes in order to really see the needs around them and in order to calculate the risk of taking action.