I’ve started furrowing my brows and questioning mentors. When I say mentors, I mean those I admire but haven’t spoken to. They are great because they become everything I want them to be. 

It’s why I think some answers to the question “If you could have dinner with one person alive or dead who would it be?” are silly. It’s not that I don’t think I can learn from a dinner with brilliant people. It’s that I’m fine with parsing through their work to think about what they might do in various scenarios pertaining to my life. 

If I met them in real life, they wouldn’t know how to apply their solutions to my life. There is no way they would be able to understand the context of my life in a single dinner. I’m flawed so I’m going to default to asking them for some silver bullet answer to my problem—even if know they don’t exist. Whatever answer they give I’ll accept it as true and go off to fight the internal conflict when it inevitably goes against what I wanted the answer to be. 

Keep in mind, this view isn’t prescriptive to all. I just think if I’m seated in front of people I admire, I’ll fail to question everything they say in the moment. I’m a slow thinker and I want people I like to like me. That desire would make encounters with mentors a difficult situation. 

But, I’ve started questioning what these mentors say more and more. I’ve gone back to my notes and started questioning what I once understood as sacrosanct. It’s probably because I’ve changed and these writings have stayed the same. That means the only thing that has changed is my interpretation and application of these words and ultimately, the meaning I give to them. 

This has been a wonderful development. It may have gone on for longer but I’ve consciously noticed myself writing notes questioning what these mentors have been saying.

Now, maybe it isn’t that I never want to meet my idols. But that I would rather wait until questioning their written words gets easier. 

That is, until I am confident in my ability to decide for myself. It’s something I have to practice over and over again. Like anything I practice, I imagine I’ll get better at it over time. Hopefully, to a point when I meet someone I admire and they spiff off a piece of advice and I can respond “What the fuck are you saying?”