You can be brilliant in some ways while being useless or a POS in other ways.
Steve Jobs was an excellent salesman and marketer. He was an awful father and thought that a fruit-only diet would cure pancreatic cancer. Then, when he realised his curable cancer became incurable because of inaction, he jumped the organ donor queue (because apparently in the US money lets you do that), which not only didn’t help him, but also likely killed someone else who it could’ve saved.
Richard Stallman is an excellent steward of open source software and user freedom in software, and he has been very prescient of the shit that would ultimately come from proprietary software. But he is also a major creep to women and a staunch defender of paedophilia and bestiality.
Someone I knew, before she passed away, was enormously selfless. Gave everything she had to others, fostered a lot of children who all grew up to be great people. Lived with almost no money because she preferred to spend it helping other people, was a big pusher of LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s, helped run a centre that helped HIV victims, never spoke up about the good she was doing because she preferred to keep it a secret… was (astounding to me) enormously racist.
People are complicated.
None of us is wholly good, none wholly bad, but all of us can strive to be better, to be kinder, to improve.
Kill your heroes. Not because everyone is evil, and not because there is nobody worth following, but because nobody is worth following blindly. Nobody deserves to be idolized. Strive to be better, look to others as inspiration, look to the past as inspiration even, but remember that just because you do or don’t see someone’s flaws doesn’t mean they don’t have any or that they don’t have anything but those flaws
That last one speaks to how some people try and redeem themselves despite their flaws. We’re not all cut and dry. You can still be a good person, even if you’re flawed, provided the good you do outweighs the the bad. I would also throw a caveat in there, in that you’re actively trying to address your faults, too. Doesn’t do much good if you’re burning crosses and houses to the ground, and then taking in the resulting foster children lol.
