Word: heroic
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...times, a bull's-eye. In Burma, a nation where so many suffer, the 29-year-old Briton's willing decision to add his pain to the mix can seem self-indulgent and quixotic. And yet, ultimately, Mawdsley comes across, like Don Quixote, as sympathetic, even a touch heroic. His heart is in the right place, even if the rest of him never seems...
...shed their quaint affection for the one-size-fits-all welfare state, which he argued cannot deliver services that satisfy voters raised in an era of consumer choice. Without saying much of anything about how he planned to reform services, he painted his quest to do so as heroic: "The radical decision is usually the right one. The right decision is usually the hardest one. And the hardest decisions are often the least popular at the time. We are at our best when at our boldest." His basic message: I will do what I think best. Illogically, it brought...
...getting off the career-overtime-promotion hamster wheel; not, God forbid, living each day as if it might be our last. Because who would spend that day in an airless cubicle or on the 8:30 to Denver? We needed to believe that civilian, commuter-consumer life is heroic. And Flight 93--a weekday flight carrying largely business travelers--rendered the term "road warrior" literal...
...Flight 93 may have saved hundreds of lives. But it seems we want still more from them. We want inspiration, yes, but validation too. We want them to convince us that the qualities we so greatly valued on Sept. 10 (entrepreneurialism, ambition, stick-to-itiveness) are relevant, necessary, even heroic now. We want them to make us believe--for the sake of the Todd Beamers still reluctantly catching flights--that "re-evaluating our priorities" and "doing business as usual" are, despite everything our gut tells us, really the same thing...
...most important lesson I’ve learned from my heroes this summer is that I’d never want to be one. Their greatness is their curse. They are constantly being called upon to be heroic. Kim has to go to Tokyo, Paris and Wisconsin on school nights; Hercules is on call whenever someone in ancient Greece has a problem; and due to the incompetence of the royal guards, Aladdin has to single handedly keep danger out of all of Agrabah...