Your Hero Is Ten Years Away

A few years ago, I watched an acceptance speech by Matthew McConaughey that has stayed with me ever since. He spoke about being asked a simple question as a teenager: “Who’s your hero?” After thinking for a moment, he replied, “Me in ten years.” When the same person asked him the question again a decade later, he gave exactly the same answer. He had not become his hero because his hero had moved ten years further ahead. The beauty of the story is that he never expected to catch his hero. The hero was always just beyond reach, encouraging him to keep moving forward.

It is a powerful idea because most of us spend our lives measuring ourselves against other people. We compare incomes, businesses, houses, holidays and property portfolios. The trouble is that there will always be somebody ahead of us and somebody behind us. If our measure of success is another person, we are destined to spend our lives either feeling inadequate or feeling superior. Neither is a particularly healthy place to be. What if, instead, the only person we compared ourselves to was the person we could become?

When I look back over my own life, I can see many different versions of Tim. The young man traveling between Pakistan, England, Germany, the Bahamas and Czechoslovakia. The casino employee working long hours. The journalist chasing stories. The businessman involved in regeneration projects. The property investor building a portfolio. The husband, father and grandfather. Each version thought he had things figured out. Each version also had lessons still to learn. That, I think, is the point. Growth never really stops. There is always another skill to develop, another mistake to learn from and another challenge to overcome. The danger comes when we believe we have arrived.

These days, however, I find myself answering the question slightly differently. If somebody asked me who my hero is, I would not point to a celebrity, a billionaire or a social media influencer. I would probably say: the man my grandchildren remember when I’m gone. Will they remember someone who simply accumulated property? Or will they remember someone who taught them integrity, resilience and kindness? Will they remember the size of my portfolio? Or the size of my contribution to their lives?

The older I get, the more I realise that wealth matters, but legacy matters more. Money can provide opportunities and property can create freedom, but character is what survives us. Long after the valuations, refinances and business plans have been forgotten, people remember how we treated them, what we stood for and whether we left them better than we found them. My faith teaches the concept of Sadaqah Jariyah, a continuous charity whose benefits live on after we are gone. It might be a well, a school, a mosque, knowledge passed to others or values passed from one generation to the next. The principle is simple: the greatest legacy is not what we leave behind, but what continues to benefit others because we were here.

Perhaps that is why McConaughey’s answer resonates so strongly with me. Your hero does not need to be someone famous. Your hero can simply be the person you are becoming. Not perfect, not finished, just a little wiser, a little kinder and a little more capable than you are today. And if your hero remains ten years ahead of you, perhaps that is exactly where he or she should stay, because it means you are still moving forward.