I'm not sure Heinlein was necessarily his own model of a man, nor was it necessarily within his domain to be one due to the fact that he suffered from health issues for pretty much all of his adult life. But he did do more than just write, which the Wikipedia page discusses some of [1], and there's definitely some other stuff that I know he did that does not show up there. For instance, in Expanded Universe there's a rather lengthy travelogue about a trip to the USSR, with what were at the time penetrating insights past the propaganda screen that would have been considered controversial at the time, and we now know to have been true. (There's a lot of lessons in that bit applicable to the world we live in today, albeit not necessarily the same bits of the world, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)
I'd also personally question whether Heinlein really "really" believed that quote, or if it was an idealized version of an ideal, to coin a phrase.
I once heard a lecture by Joe Haldeman, an author who was a close friend of a Heinlein. IIRC, he said that Heinlein liked to play by taking ideas to their logical extremes and much of what he wrote should be taken as "a modest proposal" instead of perfectly reflective of his personal beliefs.
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I'm not sure Heinlein was necessarily his own model of a man, nor was it necessarily within his domain to be one due to the fact that he suffered from health issues for pretty much all of his adult life. But he did do more than just write, which the Wikipedia page discusses some of [1], and there's definitely some other stuff that I know he did that does not show up there. For instance, in Expanded Universe there's a rather lengthy travelogue about a trip to the USSR, with what were at the time penetrating insights past the propaganda screen that would have been considered controversial at the time, and we now know to have been true. (There's a lot of lessons in that bit applicable to the world we live in today, albeit not necessarily the same bits of the world, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)
I'd also personally question whether Heinlein really "really" believed that quote, or if it was an idealized version of an ideal, to coin a phrase.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Heinlein
I once heard a lecture by Joe Haldeman, an author who was a close friend of a Heinlein. IIRC, he said that Heinlein liked to play by taking ideas to their logical extremes and much of what he wrote should be taken as "a modest proposal" instead of perfectly reflective of his personal beliefs.