Fishing for Heroes.

I spend my time writing about heroes — how to be one, how it's wired into us, how the whole architecture of a good life runs on the Hero's Journey. My whole site is about rethinking life from that point of view.

This guy goes out and actually finds them. In the wild. And rewards them.

The last video I watched, I cried. It's that good.

His name is Zachery Dereniowski. Online he's MDMotivator. Canadian, late twenties, used to be on a track to become a doctor — failed out of the University of Windsor at 18, clawed his way back in, spent six years on pre-med, then hit a wall during COVID and pivoted. He started posting honest mental health content on TikTok in August 2020. First video went to half a million views overnight. He's now at roughly 26 million followers on TikTok and nearly 7 million YouTube subscribers. He's raised hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — for the strangers he meets.

And here's the premise, which is so clean it's almost embarrassing: he sits somewhere and pretends he needs help. Outside a grocery store. Outside a pawn shop in the rain. On a sidewalk. That's it. That's the whole setup.

Then he waits.

The Elvin Video

The one I just watched goes like this. Zach sits outside a store pretending it's his birthday and he has no friends. A guy named Elvin walks up — Puerto Rican, truck driver, lives in a shelter, has about $25 to his name. Elvin goes inside the store and buys Zach a cake, candles, and a card. Puts five bucks in the card. Comes back out and sings happy birthday to a stranger.

Then Zach tries to give him $1,000.

Elvin refuses. Twice. Tries to redirect it to a woman who'd given them two dollars earlier. Says, and I'm paraphrasing because the man said it better than I can: I might have zero dollars in my bank account and I still live like a millionaire, because I have peace.

He eventually takes it. The video hits 12 million views in days. Daniel Lubetzky — Shark Tank, founder of KIND bars — sees it. Shows up the next day with $25,000. Then the community crowdfunds another $200,000. Zach buys Elvin a truck (he'd lost his trucking company), sends him and his wife to Spain, all expenses paid.

And through all of it Elvin keeps saying the same thing:

This is my prayer. Every day I ask God for the opportunity to bless somebody.

Here's What's Wild to Me

Zach doesn't audition people. He doesn't screen. He just shows up in one spot and waits, and it doesn't take long — at all — for a real hero to walk past.

Think about that. If heroes were rare, the format wouldn't work. There wouldn't be a video. He'd sit there all day and get nothing. Instead he's built a library of thousands of these moments, one after another, year after year, in city after city, and the pattern holds: a hero shows up fast, almost every time.

So what does that tell us?

It tells us what I've been saying from the jump. The hero instinct isn't scarce. It's not a rare genetic lottery ticket. It's the default setting underneath all the performing, and the only question is whether a person is in contact with it or in contact with the other thing — the scorekeeping, the image-management, the "what's in it for me" loop that makes you walk past a guy on his birthday.

Elvin wasn't performing. He had $25 and a shelter bed and a dead mom and a dead dad he'd had to forgive, and when a stranger cried on a curb he went inside and bought a cake. That's not virtue-signaling. Nobody was watching him — he didn't know about the camera until afterward. That's just what was already running.

So What's with All the Zeros?

Here's the part that needles me. If heroes are that common — if Zach can fish them up in an hour outside any random store — then why does it feel like we live in a world of zeros?

Couple of answers.

One: the zeros are louder. A performer trying to look impressive takes up more oxygen in a room than a hero quietly handing someone their last two dollars. Our feeds, our politics, our workplaces — the performer system is engineered to amplify the performer. That's the whole game.

Two: Zach's filming the sidewalk. Most of life happens in offices, boardrooms, family dinners, Slack threads — environments where the performer system has teeth. Rewards, promotions, status. On the sidewalk the only "reward" is how you feel about yourself when you fall asleep, and that's the one metric performers aren't optimizing for. Which is exactly why heroes surface there and go quiet everywhere else.

Three — and this is the one I keep coming back to — most heroes don't know they're heroes. Elvin wasn't trying to be admirable. He was keeping a promise he'd made to God that morning. He was honoring his grandmother's voice in his head. He was doing what, to him, is just the baseline of being a person. Ask him if he's a hero and he'll laugh at you.

That's the tell. Real ones never claim it.

What Zach Is Actually Doing

He's not "rewarding heroes," although that's what it looks like. He's doing something bigger. He's proving, over and over, on camera, that the hero is the norm and the zero is the aberration. He's inverting the story we've been told about how people are.

And the reason his videos hit — the reason Elvin's went to 12 million views, the reason you cried, the reason I cried — is that some part of us already knew this and was starving to see it confirmed.

Zach's basically running a field experiment and the result is the same every time: the heroes are already here. They're driving trucks. They're bagging groceries. They're in the shelter. They're living on $25 and still trying to bless somebody.

So the real question isn't where the heroes are.

The real question is: what's keeping the rest of us from walking up to Elvin, too?

I cried and became inspired. Elvin proves we could be heroes. You may already be one too.

Share his great story.

How to Be a Hero

If Elvin's story moved you the way it moved me, here's a place to start. Ten things. None of them require money, talent, or permission.