You ever meet someone and immediately start casting them in the lead role of your personal workplace movie? The boss who’ll finally see your brilliance. The mentor who’ll unlock your “next level.” The colleague who just gets your brand of chaos.
Cue the dramatic music: “This is it. My people have arrived.”
And just like that, we’re out here assembling marble columns in our minds, hoisting regular humans onto pedestals they never asked to stand on.
But pedestals are tricky things because they don’t come with safety rails, and they’re built from 80% projection, 10% caffeine, and 10% wishful thinking. So eventually, they wobble and likely even fall. And when they do, we’re left blinking through the dust, whispering: “How could they?”
The answer is usually simple: they didn’t change. They just stopped matching the movie you were directing in your head.
We do this at work, and in our personal lives, all the time. We mythologize leaders as saviors, teammates as ride-or-dies, new relationships as soulmates. And when they fail to meet the version we’ve storyboarded; when they miss a deadline, say no, or just reveal a normal human flaw, we feel betrayed.
I’ve done it more than once. With colleagues, friends, people I was definitely not imagining a joint podcast with, and even one person I decided was basically a walking growth opportunity wrapped in red flags.
It’s not generally deception; no one’s actually pretending. We’re just really good at filling in the blanks with the version of people we need them to be. The mentor we wanted, the ally we hoped for, the person who’d make us feel like we belong. But illusions have a terrible ROI. They never pay out the way we expect because reality is messy and people are complex, inconvenient, gloriously inconsistent.
And that’s the magic. Because once the shine wears off, you finally get to see what’s real: the colleague who admits they’re struggling, the leader who listens even when they don’t have the answers, the friend who tells you the truth you didn’t want to hear but needed anyway.
That’s where the learning happens and the work gets honest. That’s where you grow.
So maybe the goal isn’t to stop putting people on pedestals—it’s to stop pushing people off when they don’t meet your projections. Let them be flawed. Let yourself be too. Then build something together that’s less cinematic, but infinitely more real.
What about you? Ever built a whole narrative around someone who didn’t actually audition for the part? Drop your fallen-pedestal stories in the comments. I’ll be down here, polishing my sense of humor and learning to love the view from ground level.
