Mentors

I ran across an old Chinese story I’d like to share.

A man was looking for a mentor. He found one who offered to help him.

As the man was shadowing the mentor, he noticed the mentor was having an affair with another woman while he was married. Furious, the man left to find another mentor.

When the second mentor asking the man why he left the first mentor, he responded,

“That guy was having an affair with another woman so I left him and found you.”

The second mentor, thought for a second, then said, “did you learn from the other mentor?”

The man responded, “yes I did. What I learned from him in a month is more than I I learned in a year.”

The second mentor then replied, ” then you are wrong for leaving him. You were there to learn what will help you in life. What he does with his personal life is not your concern.”

This story hit hard because of recent current events with certain people. There’s a lot of positive information to be learned from someone, yet people tend to leave to seek a mentor elsewhere over life styles, political views, or other personal decisions they don’t agree with.

One thing to keep in mind – everyone has a dark side, everyone has skeletons in their closet, and in extreme cases multiple personalities. We are all human at the end of the day.

Here’s a list of some mentors I learned from in the past and present:

Bob Ross

Ken Kutaragi

Shigeru Miamoto

Linus Torvalds

Bill Cosby

My parents

Mr. T

Capcom

Namco

Robert Greene

Sage Sundi

Gabe Newell

Martin Lawrence

There’s others but those are the ones I remember either the names or companies.