It's cool to meet your idols. It's a good opportunity to travel.

On Meeting One’s Idols and the Journey of Becoming

In the quiet yet powerful simplicity of her words, Meg White, drummer of The White Stripes, spoke a truth that resonates far beyond the music stage: “It’s cool to meet your idols. It’s a good opportunity to travel. Those kinds of things are good.” Though spoken with modest grace, these words carry within them an ancient rhythm — a hymn to gratitude, humility, and the journey of discovery. They remind us that life, in all its grandness, is not only about conquering heights, but about encountering the lights that first showed us the way.

When Meg White says, “It’s cool to meet your idols,” she honors the lineage of inspiration — the unbroken chain that binds one creator to another, one dreamer to the next. To meet an idol is not merely to stand before fame or greatness; it is to stand before the mirror of your own beginnings. For every artist, every thinker, every soul who dares to create, begins as an admirer. To meet those who inspired us is to return to the fountain from which our own courage first flowed. It is a sacred moment of acknowledgment — not of worship, but of connection.

And when she adds, “It’s a good opportunity to travel,” she widens the meaning. Travel, here, is both the physical act of journeying across lands and the inner pilgrimage that reshapes the spirit. For to travel is to grow. To leave the comfort of home and wander among other hearts, other cultures, other ways of being — this is how the soul expands. The ancient Greeks spoke of paideia, the education of the whole self through experience. Meg White’s travels, though through the world of music, echo that same truth: that to encounter others is to better understand oneself.

Consider the story of the young Leonardo da Vinci, who left his small Tuscan village to apprentice under Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. There, he met his idols — painters, sculptors, thinkers whose names glowed with glory. Yet he did not meet them to imitate, but to learn, to see, to question. From them he inherited not their style, but their fire — and through that fire, he became his own light. Meeting one’s idols, then, is not the end of the path; it is the awakening to one’s own destiny.

But there is also humility in Meg White’s tone — a rare gentleness that the ancients would have called sophrosyne, the virtue of balance. She does not boast of fame, nor claim grandeur in her journeys. She simply says, “Those kinds of things are good.” In her calm understatement lies deep wisdom: that life’s blessings — to meet heroes, to travel, to live one’s dream — need no ornament of pride. They are to be received with quiet thankfulness, for they are gifts of the road.

In this way, her words remind us of a timeless truth: that goodness is not always in the grand or the dramatic, but in the simple moments of joy — in seeing the world, in meeting those who shaped us, in feeling awe rather than envy. To live well is to remain a student, no matter how high one climbs. The moment we lose wonder, we lose the pulse of creation itself.

The lesson, then, is clear and eternal: seek out your idols, not to worship them, but to understand your own reflection within them. Travel — not merely through distance, but through life’s endless possibilities. Let every encounter, every journey, every humble “good thing” enrich your soul. And when success finds you, speak as Meg White did — with simplicity, gratitude, and quiet joy.

For the wise know this: greatness is not found in the noise of self-congratulation, but in the serene appreciation of the path. To meet one’s idols, to journey far, to taste the world’s wonder — these are not trophies, but blessings. Receive them well, walk onward, and let your own life become the inspiration that future travelers will one day be glad to meet.