How does this require a story? For me it's as simple as reading about the exploits of people like Gary Starkweather, John Carmack, Steve Wozniak, or whoever and thinking "I want to do stuff like that." And yeah, if none of those role models were guys, I'm sure I would have been affected by that.
So to take your list of people for example, someone like John Carmack. What I was looking for was what specific exploits were you talking about and why they were so inspirational to you. Maybe it was his work creating the Doom and Quake games, or his bootstrap work building id software from scratch, or his contributions to free software by releasing his engines under gpl, or his quakeworld talks, or his work with rocketry, or his new work with VR, or his general overall attitude about life, programming and everything.
I mean there had to be something special about him for you to want to be like him, and that seems like something that would be worth telling a little story about.
We might have a disagreement about the meaning of "role model," which is fine. I don't really think that's the point at all...
Edit: Thomas's "cognitively available success cases" seems like a good one to me