Who's Your Hero?

I got a mail from a friend of mine recently. She was disappointed in the behaviour of someone she held in high regard. "She was a hero of mine, someone I looked up to..." It was an interesting comment to which I replied that it's always diappointing to find that our heroes are human and prone to failure like the rest of us. Even superheroes have, ironically, an Achilles heel, a little weakness that even they cannot overcome without outside assistance.
Now, having just finished Transcending the Levels of Consciousness by Dr. David Hawkins. It's the follow on from his first book which I can't recommend highly enough, Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behaviour. In the Transcending book, he notes that all wars, hatred and general misery derives from our ego and ego positionalities and our dualistic approach to life i.e. the difference between a flower and a weed is perception.
So where does our ego get the fuel to gain strength? From our misinterpretation of praise. As children, when we did a good deed we were praised. Mistakenly, we took the praise when in fact, it was the act that was being praised. You see, in any act the 'doer' is variable. If I help someone across the street, it is the deed that is good, I just carried it out. It could have been anyone who helped the person across the street in this scenario. The fact that it was me is incidental. Verse 34 of the Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (Perennial Classics) illustrates this:

The great Tao flows unobstructed in every direction.
All things rely on it to conceive and be born,
and it does not deny even the smallest of creation.
When it has accomplished great wonders,
it does not claim them for itself.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn’t seek to master the smallest creature.
Since it is without wants and desires,
it can be considered humble.
All of creation seeks it for refuge
yet it does not seek to master or control.
Because it does not seek greatness;
it is able to accomplish truly great things.

So it's what we see in our heroes that attracts us to them, strength of character, great conversationalist, good joke teller or intelligence. These are qualities that we tend to see as out of ourselves, possessed only by those we've chosen to lionise but this is simply not true. It make take some of us longer than others to incorporate those qualities we wish to emulate but it's possible.
There are some points implied in this post which anyone can pick up on such as "Should we praise our children?", "What goes in place of our 'ego'?" or "What can we do to surrender our ego positions?". Answers on a postcard to...
Next time you look at someone you hold in high esteem ask yourself what it is about that person that draws you to them? What are the qualities that you most admire, duplicate them and be your own hero.