What You Hand Over When You Look for a Mentor

Introduction: The Advice That Has Become Common Sense

Find a mentor you can trust. If you want to succeed, go and stand near someone who already has. This advice is now spoken as something close to common sense.

How to choose a good mentor, and how to carry yourself while being taught, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the question in front of that. Where is the answer to “who should I take as a model” being supplied from?

Here is the conclusion first. Learning from others is not the problem at all. The dividing line is not whether you learn, but whether the reins that finally decide who you become are held by you or handed to someone outside. And there is a fixed sequence to the scene in which those reins quietly change hands.

The Answer to “Who Should I Become” Has Been Made a Product

The menu of successful people held up as models is startlingly uniform. A particular industry, a particular generation, a particular career. The ideal image we picture as “I want to be like that” has, in most cases, not welled up naturally from inside us.

It was supplied in advance by markets and media as “this is what a successful human being looks like.” Believing we are drawing the self we want to become, we are in fact selecting from a catalogue already prepared.

And supplying that catalogue of ideal images has become an industry in itself. A market that sells, as a product, the answer to who you should model and what kind of person you should aim to be, sits quietly upstream of our desires.

This structure has an ingenious way of hiding. By placing the cause of success firmly inside the individual, it makes its own presence invisible.

The more the explanation “you are not wealthy because of your thinking” spreads, the more people’s line of sight turns towards their own interior. And while the gaze is turned inward, nobody looks back at the market supplying the ideal image. Shrinking the cause down to the individual’s mind is also a way of pushing the market that sells to that mind out of view.

Ignite the Anxiety First, Slide the Hope in After

When people move towards imitation of their own accord, the discourse pushing them from behind has a fixed sequence: stir anxiety and a sense of lack first, and hold out hope on top of it.

Unpick it. Most pitches open like this. “You have not yet obtained the wealth you should rightfully have.” “The people around you have already moved ahead.” These words call up in the listener a particular feeling: I am short, I am behind, this cannot go on.

Then, at exactly the moment the mind is filled with that unease, the second line slides in. “But rest assured. Learn this method and you too can have it.” Into the wound opened by anxiety, a hope of precisely matching shape is pressed.

Manufacture the thirst first, then hold out your own product as the water that quenches it. The production of thirst and its commodification have been made into one continuous motion.

The skill of this handling lies in the fact that the material used to stir the anxiety is often true. “At this rate, later life will be hard” is not an outright lie. That is exactly why people accept it.

But stirring a genuine anxiety and showing the correct way to resolve it are entirely different things. It may well be true that the provision is thin. Yet the bridge from there to “so copy how successful people think” is not a bridge of logic but of feeling. Correctness at the entrance, substitution at the exit — that combination is what carries the effect of this way of speaking.

▸ Why the thirst does not end even after arrival is taken up in why the thirst does not end even for a billionaire.

Not Making a Villain of the Speaker

A careful note. This is not a claim that every speaker is deceiving people with ill intent. Most of them believe what they are conveying, and in some cases they genuinely help someone.

What is being looked at is something else. In a market, only what spreads well survives. The sequence “ignite the anxiety, then sell the hope” moves people far more than a plain statement of fact, and spreads far more widely. So whatever the speaker intends, over long stretches of time the market selects and retains only the discourse carrying that sequence.

The problem is not the conscience of individual speakers but the structure: the very form that makes the ignition of anxiety and the sale of hope continuous has survived selection and is everywhere around us.

Those Most Cornered Are Caught Most Deeply

This structure has a cruel property. It captures most deeply those with the least room.

One reason is that being cornered narrows a person’s field of view. Pressed by daily payments, a person has no margin of mind for calmly analysing structures or reworking, over long stretches, what they actually want. What is demanded is hope that works immediately.

And imitation holds out exactly that immediate hope, at the lowest price. “Just change how you think” — almost no capital, no qualification, no time required. For someone cornered, no hope is easier to reach.

Here is an asymmetry. Someone who already holds capital, contacts and a safety net takes only a small hit if it does not work, and can recover by another road. For someone holding nothing, the same outlay cuts into thin savings. The promise that changing your thinking will make anyone wealthy — apparently equal and full of hope — in practice works to widen an existing gap out of sight.

And the objection that nobody forced them, that they chose and paid themselves, is correct. That is precisely where the ingenuity of the mechanism lies. Nobody is compelling anyone. If anything, the person advances with the forward-looking sense of “improving my own life by my own hand.” Compelled obedience gets resisted eventually. A posture you believe you chose leaves nothing to resist.

Where the Line Runs Between Learning and Obedience

So should we stop learning from others? No. People live by learning from others and being influenced by them. That cannot be severed, and there is no need to sever it.

The line runs not through learning but through where the reins sit.

Reading the same book, hearing the same talk, there are two ways of receiving it. Take it as “I will remake myself as this person instructs,” and you have handed the reins to the other party. Take it as “what in this person’s experience is usable for my own goal?”, selecting and discarding as you go, and the reins remain in your hands.

The information received is identical. Whether you judge it, or it judges you — that difference in posture separates learning from obedience.

So taking the reins back does not necessarily require changing what you read or who you meet. What has to change is which chair you are sitting in while you are there.

Conclusion: Turn the Question from Inward to Upstream

While the question is “how should I change my thinking?”, the gaze stays nailed to the interior. Ask instead “where did this image of the self I want to become come from, and who supplies it?” and only then does the line of sight turn from the interior towards the structure supplying it.

There is something strange here when you look. A person explaining a successful figure’s habits has not necessarily succeeded by practising those habits. In most cases they gain attention and income by explaining them. The revenue source of a success method being sold lies not in practising it but in selling it.

Once that is seen, the ground under imitation begins to move. The model to be traced not only came from outside you; it may have been an image prepared by someone for the purpose of having it traced.

If the reins are in your hands, keep learning from excellent people as before. What changes is only this: whether that learning serves your own goal as a tool, or whether you serve someone else’s ideal image.

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. “A Dark Side of the American Dream: Correlates of Financial Success as a Central Life Aspiration” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2) (1993)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• McGuire, W. J. “Inducing Resistance to Persuasion: Some Contemporary Approaches” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1 (1964)