I love heroes. We all love heroes.

Those people who do the extradentary, who come in and save the day, who lead us into a brave new world of peace and prosperity. But they aren’t real. Life isn’t like that.

You can’t have arms and legs without a heart. You can’t have a heart without a brain, a mind to drive it. You can’t have a mind without a heart to supply it with what it needs. And you can’t have just one person making a difference, you have people making a difference.

Every advance, every achievement in the history of the human race is the result of people working together, people building on the work of others, people doing what they have since the dawn of time, being a family, a tribe, a society, a people.  

Heroes are the myths we tell ourselves to make things simpler, easier to tell around the campfire, but they aren’t the work that goes into truly getting things done, creating the future, building the world we want for ourselves and our children.

Look around you, look at the people in your life, in your street, your town, your city, your country, your world. These are the people that make your life liveable, that make the world go on everyday like it has before today and will long after.

Heroes are the simple dreams we tell ourselves, when its easier than looking at the billions of people in our world, that contribute in so many ways, that each play a part in the complex interplay of our day to day lives. We cannot do it without them, as they cannot do it without you.

Together, united, as the human race, we can do more than any hero, and myth or story, can ever do. That is the truth of our world, our lives, our very society.

Those who would have you believe otherwise, are blind or ignorant to who you, to we all are, as a living breathing society.

Zainab Carver  - Speech at Young Leaders Symposium