Year Six — The Grand Finale

Year Six — The Grand Finale

They say you should never meet your heroes.

The origin of the adage is debated, but for what little historiography I am capable of, I can provide a PageRank’d provenance to the prose of Gustave Flaubert who, in his Madame Bovary, opined “Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains” — otherwise read, in my inspired interpretation: hold loosely your idols, for their golden sheen is cheaply gilded.

I consider myself truly unfortunate, then, to have met and been disappointed by so very many of them in just a few short decades.

Impatient though I am, I implore you to believe me when I say I did my best to look to those around me as torches in the dark abyss. Yet, though I do so cherish the community that created me, within it I can scarcely recall a character who was a hero worth holding dear.

My work life provided fewer leads still. While I undoubtedly learned lessons from figureheads fastened with death grips to the bow of their ships, I look back today to see more wreckage than winning war stories.

Even among the corporate “champion’s league” did I find myself starved for a savant of servant leadership. Instead, I found only once-strong individual contributors who had been punished by the Peter Principle or worse yet the weaker still simply deluded by Dilbert’s.

Saddest of all, that dearth of worthwhile idolatry spread to the industry ideologues I was hired to interact with.

One such scenario saw six months of struggle cast asunder with a prideful boast of plans to spend on planes an amount a thousand- thousands larger than the proposal, only to have the clear-cut case for change, and its big benefit to their bottom line (in stark multiples to ours), closed lost.

It was no surprise then when, months later, the lack of leadership ran the once family-run Canadian company into the ground, where it now lays at rest on the bottom line of its competitor’s balance sheet, headlines of stranded travelers’ curses its epitaph and our deepest regrets for bringing them our romance as revenue its eulogy.

Those weak men created the hard times of Hopf’s now-present prophecy, and although I am one of those who remain, I lie in my life adrift on a raft atop the waters stirred tsunamic—

“Wait, you can’t write that,” she yelped from across the room as I pre-read aloud to her.

I huffed in response. “What do you mean?”

“This is just way too negative. You’re being negative. No one is going to want to read that. You’re supposed to be a leader now. Positivity and optimism is critical for morale. And you had no good role models? Don’t be stupid.”

She continued, reloading her breath as bullets. “What about Dave? Paul? Ian? Cam? Jeff? Pablo? Rachel? Bobby? Peter or Matt? Jeremy? Stormpath Alex? Sean? Matt and Zak? Eric and Jacqui?”

As was oft the case, her words singed the ears with a potentency most painful, though to a prideful palette they tasted slightly of hypocrisy.

She was right, of course, as she quite often was. I grinned and grimaced to myself as I muttered nothings with the muted agitation of anguished agreement before I returned to my writing.

But as pen once again met page, I paused in profound realization.

It was six years ago today that I found myself in a dimly-lit Spanish bar, rapt with jamon while me enamo with the only hero I would ever need.