The best mentors are often those who have wide knowledge and experience, and are not overly specialized in their field—they can train you to think on a higher level, and to make connections between different forms of knowledge. The paradigm for this is the Aristotle–Alexander the Great relationship. Philip II, Alexander’s father and king of Macedonia, chose Aristotle to mentor his thirteen-year-old son because the philosopher had learned and mastered so many different fields. He could thus impart to Alexander an overall love of learning, and teach him how to think and reason in any kind of situation—the greatest skill of all. This ended up working to perfection. Alexander was able to effectively apply the reasoning skills he had gained from Aristotle to politics and warfare. To the end of his life he maintained an intense curiosity for any field of knowledge, and would always gather about him experts he could learn from. Aristotle had imparted a form of wisdom that played a key role in Alexander’s success.
You will want as much personal interaction with the mentor as possible. A virtual relationship is never enough. There are cues and subtle aspects you can only pick up through a person-to-person interaction—such as a way of doing things that has evolved through much experience. These patterns of action are hard to put into words, and can only be absorbed through much personal exposure. In crafts or in sports this is more obvious. Tennis instructors, for example, can only reveal many secrets of their skills by demonstrating things before their pupils’ eyes. Instructors may not in fact be completely conscious of what makes their backhand so effective, but in watching them in action pupils can pick up the pattern and motion, exploiting the power of mirror neurons. But this process of absorption is also relevant to nonmanual skills. It was only through constant exposure to Davy’s thought process that Faraday understood the power of finding the crucial experiment to demonstrate an idea, something he would adapt later on with great success.
As the relationship progresses you can make this absorption process more conscious and direct, questioning them about the principles underlying their way of doing things. If you are clever, you can be a kind of midwife, getting them to analyze their own creativity for you, and mining all kinds of rich ideas in the process. They are often grateful for the opportunity to reveal the inner workings of their power, particularly to someone they do not perceive as a threat.
Although one mentor at a time is best, it is not always possible to find the perfect one. In such a case, an alternate strategy is to find several mentors in your immediate environment, each one filling strategic gaps in your knowledge and experience. Having more than one mentor has side benefits, giving you several connections and important allies to rely upon later on. Similarly, if your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as temporary mentors, as The Improvement of the Mind did for Faraday. In such a case you will want to convert such books and writers into living mentors as much as possible. You personalize their voice, interact with the material, taking notes or writing in the margins. You analyze what they write and try to make it come alive—the spirit and not just the letter of their work.
In a looser sense, a figure from the past or present can serve as an ideal, someone to model yourself after. Through much research and some imagination on your part, you turn them into a living presence. You ask yourself—what would they do in this situation or that? Countless generals have used Napoleon Bonaparte for just such a purpose.
Mentors have their own strengths and weaknesses. The good ones allow you to develop your own style and then to leave them when the time is right. Such types can remain lifelong friends and allies. But often the opposite will occur. They grow dependent on your services and want to keep you indentured. They envy your youth and unconsciously hinder you, or become overcritical. You must be aware of this as it develops. Your goal is to get as much out of them as possible, but at a certain point you may pay a price if you stay too long and let them subvert your confidence. Your submitting to their authority is by no means unconditional, and in fact your goal all along is eventually to find your way to independence, having internalized and adapted their wisdom.
In this respect, the mentor relationship often replays elements from our childhood. Although a mentor can be a man or a woman, he or she often assumes the form of a father figure—there to guide and help us, but sometimes trying to control too much and plot our life for us. He may take any attempt at independence, even later in the relationship, as a personal assault on his authority. You must not allow yourself to feel any guilt when the time comes to assert yourself. Instead, as Faraday did, you should feel resentful and even angry about his desire to hold you back, using such emotions to help you leave him. It is often best to set up this move earlier on so that you are emotionally prepared to make it. As the relationship progresses, you can begin to slightly distance yourself from the mentor, perhaps taking note of some of his weaknesses or character flaws, or even finding fault with his most cherished beliefs. Establishing your differences with the mentor is an important part of your self-development, whether he is of the good or bad parent type.
In Spanish they say al maestro cuchillada—to the Master goes the knife. It is a fencing expression, referring to the moment when the young and agile pupil becomes skillful enough to cut his Master. But this also refers to the fate of most mentors who inevitably experience the rebellion of their protégés, like the cut from a sword. In our culture, we tend to venerate those who seem rebellious or at least strike the pose. But rebellion has no meaning or power if it occurs without something solid and real to rebel against. The mentor, or father figure, gives you just such a standard from which you can deviate and establish your own identity. You internalize the important and relevant parts of their knowledge, and you apply the knife to what has no bearing on your life. It is the dynamic of changing generations, and sometimes the father figure has to be killed in order for the sons and daughters to have space to discover themselves.
In any event, you will probably have several mentors in your life, like stepping-stones along the way to mastery. At each phase of life you must find the appropriate teachers, getting what you want out of them, moving on, and feeling no shame for this. It is the path your own mentor probably took and it is the way of the world.
STRATEGIES FOR DEEPENING
THE MENTOR DYNAMIC
One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Although you must submit to the authority of mentors in order to learn from and absorb their power to the highest degree, this does not mean you remain passive in the process. At certain critical points, you can set and determine the dynamic, personalize it to suit your purposes. The following four strategies are designed to help you exploit the relationship to the fullest and transform the knowledge you gain into creative energy.
1. Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations
In 1888 the twenty-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was an apprentice draftsman at the prestigious Chicago firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. He had been there a year and was learning much about the business, but he was getting restless. In his mind he could already envision a totally new style of architecture that would revolutionize the field, but he lacked the experience to set up his own practice. Silsbee was a shrewd businessman who saw that his fortune was tied to staying true to the Victorian style of design that was popular with his clients. Wright cringed at what he was being asked to draw; he was learning antiquated design principles that offended him.
Then, out of the blue, he heard that the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan was looking for a draftsman to help finish the drawings for a particular building. It would be dangerous to leave Silsbee after such a short time and burn his bridge there, but working for Sullivan would be infinitely more stimulating for his personal development as an architect. Sullivan’s firm was at the forefront of designing skyscrapers, utilizing the latest advances in materials and technology.
Wright went on a charm offensive to secure the positi
on. He managed to get a personal interview and showed Sullivan some of the more interesting drawings he had done on his own; he engaged him in a conversation about art and philosophy, knowing Sullivan’s own aesthetic predilections. Sullivan hired him for the job, and a few months later made him an apprentice draftsman in his firm. Wright cultivated a personal relationship with him, eagerly playing the role of the son that Sullivan had never had. With his talent and Sullivan’s blessing, he quickly rose to the position of head draftsman in the firm. Wright became, as he put it, “the pencil in Sullivan’s hand.” In 1893 Sullivan fired him for moonlighting, but by then Wright had learned everything he could and was more than prepared to step out on his own. Sullivan had given him in those five years an education in modern architecture that no one else could have provided.
In 1906 Carl Jung was a promising thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist, renowned for his work in experimental psychology and holding an important position at the famous Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich. But despite the apparent success in his life, he felt insecure. He believed that his interest in the occult and strange psychic phenomena was a weakness he needed to work through. He was frustrated that his treatment of patients was often not effective. He worried that his work had no legitimacy and that he lacked a certain rigor. He began to correspond with the founder of the psychoanalytic field, Sigmund Freud, fifty-one years old at the time. Jung was ambivalent about Freud—he admired, even worshipped him as a pioneer in the field, but he did not like his emphasis on sex as the determining factor in neurosis. Perhaps his aversion to this aspect of Freudian psychology stemmed from his own prejudices or ignorance, and needed to be overcome by talking it out. In their correspondence they quickly developed a good rapport, and Jung was able to question the Master about matters of psychology he did not fully understand.
A year later they finally met in Vienna, and talked nonstop for thirteen hours. The younger man charmed Freud—he was so much more creative than his other acolytes. He could serve as his successor in the psychoanalytic movement. For Jung, Freud could be the father figure and mentor he so desperately needed—a grounding influence. They traveled together to the United States, saw each other on frequent visits, and corresponded incessantly. But some five years into the relationship, Jung’s initial ambivalence returned. He began to find Freud rather dictatorial. He chafed at the idea of having to follow Freudian dogma. He now clearly understood why he had initially disagreed with the emphasis on sexuality as the root of all neuroses.
By 1913 they had a definitive break, Jung forever banished from Freud’s inner circle. But through this relationship, Jung had worked out all of his doubts and sharpened certain core ideas about human psychology. In the end, the struggle had strengthened his sense of identity. Without this mentorship, he would have never come to such a clear resolution and been capable of starting his own rival school of psychoanalysis.
Sometime in the late 1960s, V. S. Ramachandran, a medical student at a college in Madras, came upon a book called Eye and Brain, written by an eminent professor of neuropsychology, Richard Gregory. (For more on Ramachandran’s early years, see here.) The book excited him—the style of writing, the anecdotes, the provocative experiments he recounted. Inspired by the book, Ramachandran did his own experiments on optics, and soon realized that he was better suited for the field than medicine. In 1974 he was admitted into the PhD Program at Cambridge University, in visual perception.
Ramachandran had been raised on stories of the great English scientists of the nineteenth century, and the almost romantic quest for truth that science seemed to represent. He loved the part that speculation played in the great theories and discoveries of men such as Faraday and Darwin. He imagined it would be somewhat similar at Cambridge, but to his surprise the students and professors tended to treat science as a kind of nine-to-five job; it was a competitive, cutthroat, almost corporate environment. He began to feel gloomy and alone in a strange country.
Then one day Richard Gregory himself, a professor at Bristol University, came to Cambridge to give a lecture. Ramachandran was mesmerized—it was like something right out of the pages of Humphry Davy. Gregory performed thought-provoking demonstrations of his ideas on stage; he had a flair for drama and a great sense of humor. This is what science should be like, Ramachandran thought. He went up after the talk and introduced himself. They had an instant rapport. He mentioned to Gregory an optical experiment he had been pondering, and the professor was intrigued. He invited Ramachandran to visit Bristol and to stay in his home, where they could try out his idea together. Ramachandran took up the offer, and from the moment he saw Gregory’s house he knew he had found his mentor—it was like something out of Sherlock Holmes, full of Victorian instruments, fossils, and skeletons. Gregory was precisely the kind of eccentric Ramachandran could identify with. Soon he was commuting to Bristol regularly experiments. He had found a lifelong mentor to inspire and guide him, and over the years he would come to adapt much of Gregory’s style of speculation and experiment.
Growing up in Japan in the late 1970s, Yoky Matsuoka felt like an outsider. As discussed in chapter 1 (here), she liked to do things her own way in a country that esteemed social cohesion and conformity above everything else. When she decided to take up tennis seriously at the age of eleven, she used the players John McEnroe and Andre Agassi as her role models, consummate rebels in what had been a very genteel sport. Later, when she moved to the United States and began attending university, she brought with her the same need to go her own way in whatever she did. If there was a field no one was studying, it excited her. Following this instinct she got into the then-esoteric field of robotics, and was admitted to the PhD program at MIT.
There, for the first time in her life, she met someone of her own temperament—Rodney Brooks, professor of robotics at MIT, and the bad boy of the department. He was bold, taking on the higher-ups in the department and arguing against some of the most entrenched ideas in the field of artificial intelligence. He had developed a completely novel approach to robotics. It excited her that a professor could get away with such an unconventional attitude. She began to spend as much time around him as possible, soaking up his style of thinking, and turning him into her de facto mentor. He was not a teacher who told you what to do; he let you find your own way, including your own mistakes, but would lend you support when you needed it. This style suited her need for independence. It was only later that she realized how much his ideas had gotten under her skin. Unconsciously following his lead, she would eventually create her own approach to robotics and pioneer a totally new field, known as neurobotics.
The choice of the right mentor is more important than you might imagine. Because so much of her future influence upon you can be deeper than you are consciously aware of, the wrong choice can have a net negative effect upon your journey to mastery. You could end up absorbing conventions and styles that don’t fit you and that will confuse you later on. If she is too domineering, you could end up becoming a lifelong imitation of the mentor, instead of a Master in your own right. People often err in this process when they choose someone who seems the most knowledgeable, has a charming personality, or has the most stature in the field—all superficial reasons. Do not simply choose the first possible mentor who crosses your path. Be prepared to put as much thought into it as possible.
In selecting a mentor, you will want to keep in mind your inclinations and Life’s Task, the future position you envision for yourself. The mentor you choose should be strategically aligned with this. If your path is in a more revolutionary direction, you will want a mentor who is open, progressive, and not domineering. If your ideal aligns more with a style that is somewhat idiosyncratic, you will want a mentor who will make you feel comfortable with this and help you transform your peculiarities into mastery, instead of trying to squelch them. If, like Jung, you are somewhat confused and ambivalent about your direction, it can be useful to choose someone who can help you gain some clarity about what you want, s
omeone important in the field who might not fit perfectly with your tastes. Sometimes part of what a mentor shows us is something we will want to avoid or actively rebel against. In this latter case, you might initially want to maintain a little more emotional distance than normally recommended, particularly if she is the domineering type. Over time you will see what to absorb and what to reject.
Remember: the Mentor Dynamic replays something of the parental or father-figure dynamic. It is a cliché that you do not get to choose the family you are born into, but you are happily free to choose your mentors. In this case, the right choice can perhaps provide what your parents didn’t give you—support, confidence, direction, space to discover things on your own. Look for mentors who can do that, and beware of falling into the opposite trap—opting for a mentor who resembles one of your parents, including all of his negative traits. You will merely repeat what hampered you in the first place.
2. Gaze deep into the mentor’s mirror
Hakuin Zenji (1685–1769) was born in a village near the town of Hara in Japan, his family on his father’s side coming from an illustrious line of samurai warriors. As a child, Hakuin had the kind of relentless energy that would seem to mark him for a life dedicated to the martial arts. But at around the age of eleven, he heard a priest deliver a sermon about the torments of hell for those who were not careful, and this talk filled the young boy with an intense anguish that nothing could extinguish. All of his tenacious energy was now directed toward doubts about his own worth, and by the age of fourteen he decided that the only way to quell his anxiety was to pursue the religious path and become a priest. He was particularly attracted to Zen Buddhism, having read stories of great Masters in China and Japan overcoming endless obstacles and suffering to reach enlightenment. The idea of passing through a phase of suffering accorded well with his innermost doubts about himself.
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