There’s a peculiar disappointment that comes with discovering who your heroes admire. You’d think it would be exciting, like getting a reading list from someone whose taste you trust implicitly. But more often than not, you find yourself staring at their influences with a creeping sense of confusion, or worse, genuine dismay.
I first experienced this when I learned that a novelist whose prose felt like revelation had spent years obsessed with a writer I found numbingly pretentious. The disconnect was jarring. How could someone who crafted such clear, emotionally honest sentences revere work that seemed designed to obscure rather than illuminate? It felt like discovering your eloquent friend’s favorite movie was actually a rambling, self-indulgent mess.
The pattern repeats itself across every field. The musician who moves you to tears cites influences that sound derivative to your ears. The filmmaker whose work feels bracingly original names directors whose movies strike you as tedious. The thinker who clarified your understanding of the world learned everything from someone whose ideas seem muddled or outdated or, most troublingly, wrong.Part of the problem is timing. Your idol encountered their idol at a different moment, both in history and in their own development. What felt revolutionary in 1987 might feel obvious in 2026. What spoke to a confused twenty-two-year-old might not resonate with you at thirty-five. Influence is contextual, and we’re always arriving too late to the original scene, missing the spark that made the connection catch fire.
But there’s something deeper at work too. We assume that because someone excels at something, they must have impeccable judgment about that domain. This is rarely true. Taste is fragmented and contradictory. Someone can be brilliant at their craft while having utterly baffling opinions about their craft. They can create work that transcends their influences precisely because they misunderstood those influences, took the wrong lessons, or inadvertently rebelled against what they thought they were emulating.
Sometimes your idol’s idol did influence them, but only as a negative example, a demonstration of what not to do. Sometimes they’re paying homage to someone who helped them personally, regardless of the work’s quality. Sometimes they’re being diplomatic or strategic. And sometimes they genuinely love something that, to your eyes, contradicts everything they’ve built.
The disappointment cuts deeper when the influence isn’t just aesthetically puzzling but morally troubling. When you discover that the person whose ethics seemed so clear drew inspiration from someone with reprehensible views. When the progressive voice you trusted learned their rhetoric from someone reactionary. You’re forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that good work can emerge from poisoned wells, that people contain contradictions, that admiration doesn’t require wholesale adoption.This is where things get complicated. Do you downgrade your idol because of their idol’s failings? Do you try to separate the student from the teacher, even when the teacher’s fingerprints are all over the student’s work? Do you excavate the influence yourself, looking for whatever kernel your hero extracted and polished into something better?The most unsettling realization is that this chain extends infinitely in both directions. Your idol is probably disappointed by who their idol looked up to. And if you ever become someone’s idol, they’ll likely be baffled or dismayed by your influences. We’re all standing on shoulders we find uncomfortably rickety, inheriting legacies we’d prefer to disown, carrying forward traditions we only half believe in.
Maybe this is part of how progress happens. Each generation takes what they need from the previous one and discards the rest, often not even realizing which parts they’ve kept. The great novelist absorbed their predecessor’s attention to psychological detail while rejecting their bloated sentences. The musician kept the emotional intensity but ditched the pompous arrangements. Culture moves forward through selective misremembering and strategic betrayal.
Or maybe there’s a humbler lesson here about the nature of admiration itself. We project onto our idols a completeness they don’t possess. We imagine them as people of unified vision, consistent judgment, coherent worldview. But they’re just people, assembling their work from whatever materials came to hand, influenced by accidents of exposure and timing, carrying forward their own unexamined assumptions and blind spots.
The disappointment, then, might actually be useful. It reminds us that influence is not endorsement, that learning from someone doesn’t mean becoming them, that even our most trusted guides are navigating with faulty maps. It suggests that we should trust our own judgment more than we think, that if something doesn’t work for us, it doesn’t matter who loved it.
Your idol’s idol will probably always disappoint you. But perhaps that disappointment is itself a kind of inheritance, permission to be just as selective and just as contradictory as everyone who came before. Permission to admire imperfectly, to take what serves you and leave the rest, to become someone else’s disappointing influence someday.
