It starts as a tingle. You see someone—maybe a colleague who handles high-pressure pitches with total grace, or an athlete who pushes through a literal broken bone—and something in your chest just tightens. That's admiration. It is one of the most misunderstood emotions in the human repertoire. Most people confuse it with envy or simple liking, but it's much more visceral than that. It is a social signal. It tells us who we want to be.
Honestly, we don't talk enough about how painful it can feel sometimes.
The Science of Looking Up
When you admire someone, your brain isn't just "being nice." It's working. Research led by neuroscientists like Mary Helen Immordino-Yang has shown that feeling admiration for virtue or skill actually triggers activity in the posteromedial cortex. That’s a deep, central part of your brain involved in your sense of self. Basically, when you see excellence in others, your brain tries to map that excellence onto your own identity. It’s a biological "copy-paste" mechanism.
But there is a catch.
There is a massive difference between "skill admiration" and "virtue admiration." If you admire a coder because they can ship 500 lines of clean Python in an hour, your brain treats it like a technical puzzle. It's cool, but it doesn't change your soul. However, when you admire someone’s courage—like Malala Yousafzai standing up for education—it triggers a physical response in your body. Your heart rate might shift. You might feel "moved."
This is what researchers call "elevation." It’s that warm, glowing feeling in the chest that makes you want to be a better person. It’s the literal opposite of the "sinking feeling" you get with envy.
Why Admiration Isn't Just "Liking" Someone
We use the word loosely. "Oh, I admire your shoes." No, you don't. You like the shoes. You might even envy the shoes. To truly admire, there has to be an element of excellence that feels slightly out of reach but still inspirational.
If you're better than someone at a task, you can’t admire them for it. You can respect them, sure. You can appreciate their effort. But the specific cocktail of neurochemicals that defines admiration requires a power imbalance. You are looking up. This is why the Greeks obsessed over arête (excellence). They understood that society stays together because we collectively agree on what is worth looking up to.
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The Toxic Flip Side: When Inspiration Becomes Envy
We have to be real here: the line between admiration and envy is paper-thin.
Psychologist Niels van de Ven at Tilburg University has done some fascinating work on this. He distinguishes between "benign envy" and "malicious envy."
- Benign envy is actually just admiration with a bit of a sting. It makes you want to level up.
- Malicious envy makes you want to pull the other person down to your level.
If you find yourself constantly checking a "hero’s" social media just to see if they’ve messed up yet, you aren't admiring them. You're stuck in a comparative loop. It’s exhausting. It’s also incredibly common in the age of the "hustle culture" LinkedIn post. We are constantly bombarded with people to admire, but we lack the proximity to see their flaws.
That's the danger.
True, healthy admiration usually requires a bit of distance, but too much distance turns a human being into a statue. And you can't learn anything from a statue. You can only feel inferior to it.
The "Moral Beauty" Effect
There's this concept of "moral beauty." Think about a time you saw someone do something genuinely selfless. Not for the 'gram. Just a quiet, decent act. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, has spent years studying this. He found that witnessing these acts causes a release of oxytocin.
It makes us more prosocial. It makes us want to help others.
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In a sense, admiration is the fuel for civilization. If we didn't have the capacity to be moved by the greatness of others, we’d still be living in caves, mostly concerned with who has the biggest club. Instead, we see someone build a cathedral, or solve a mathematical proof, or lead a non-violent protest, and we think: Oh. That is possible. I want to be part of a species that does that.
How to Use This Without Losing Your Mind
If you want to actually benefit from the people you look up to, you have to stop "fandom-ing" them. Fandom is passive. Admiration should be active.
Look at Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. People admire her wealth, sure. But if you actually look at her journey, the thing to admire is her relationship with failure. Her dad used to ask her at the dinner table what she failed at that week. If she didn't have an answer, he was disappointed. That is a specific, admirable trait you can actually study and mimic.
Don't admire the "person." Admire the habit.
The Proximity Principle
It’s easy to admire a celebrity. It costs you nothing. They aren't real.
The real growth happens when you find someone in your immediate circle—maybe two steps ahead of you in their career or personal life—and you study their "moves."
- Identify the specific trait. Is it their patience? Their ability to say "no" without being a jerk? Their attention to detail?
- Acknowledge the cost. Everything admirable has a price. That person who is incredibly fit? They miss out on a lot of late-night pizza. The person who is a "natural" leader? They probably spend hours in awkward conversations you’d rather avoid.
- Bridge the gap. Ask them a specific question. Not "how are you so successful?" but "how do you handle it when a client yells at you?"
The Downside of Being the One Admired
We rarely talk about the pressure of being the object of admiration. It’s a pedestal. And pedestals are narrow.
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When people admire you, they often strip away your humanity. They stop seeing your struggles and start seeing a finished product. This is why high achievers often feel like frauds (the classic Imposter Syndrome). They know the messy reality behind the "admirable" facade.
If you find yourself being looked up to, the best thing you can do is be honest about the mess. It actually makes you more admirable, not less. It makes the excellence feel attainable to others.
Actionable Steps for Cultivating Healthy Admiration
Stop scrolling and start analyzing. If you want to use this emotion as a tool for growth rather than a source of "not-enoughness," try this:
Audit your influences. Take ten minutes. Write down three people you genuinely admire. Now, next to their names, write the one specific virtue they have that you lack. If you just wrote "they are cool," try again. Dig deeper. Is it resilience? Is it intellectual honesty?
Watch for the 'stings'. Next time you feel that prickle of jealousy toward someone successful, stop. Ask yourself: "What do they have that I actually want?" Often, we realize we don't want their life; we just admire their discipline. That realization kills the jealousy and turns it back into fuel.
Express it. This is the big one. Send a short, non-creepy note to someone you admire. Tell them specifically what trait of theirs has impacted you. "I’ve always admired how you handle disagreements in meetings; it’s helped me stay calmer in my own." This reinforces the "elevation" in you and builds a bridge instead of a wall.
Deconstruct the 'Magic'. Nothing is magic. If someone is an admirable public speaker, they probably have 1,000 hours of practice. If someone is an admirable parent, they’ve probably read twenty books on child psychology. Find the labor behind the talent.
Admiration shouldn't be a spectator sport. It is an invitation to participate in your own evolution. When you see something great in someone else, it's just your brain's way of whispering, "Hey, you have the hardware to do that, too. Let's get to work."
Next Steps for You:
Choose one person you work with or know personally who does one thing better than you. Tomorrow, observe them doing that thing. Don't judge yourself. Just watch the mechanics of it. Then, try to replicate one small part of that behavior in your next task. See how it feels to wear that trait for an hour.