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June    7th

FINDING THE RIGHT   MENTORS

“We like    to  say that    we  don’t   get to  choose  our parents,    that    they    were    given   by  chance—yet  we

can truly   choose  whose   children    we’d    like    to  be.”

—SENECA,    ON  THE BREVITY OF  LIFE,   15.3a

e are fortunate enough that some of the greatest men and women in history have recorded their
wisdom (and folly) in books and journals. Many others have had their lives chronicled by a careful
biographer—from Plutarch to Boswell to Robert Caro. The literature available at your average library
amounts to millions of pages and thousands of years of knowledge, insight, and experience.
Maybe your parents were poor role models, or you lacked a great mentor. Yet if we choose to, we can
easily access the wisdom of those who came before us—those whom we aspire to be like.
We not only owe it to ourselves to seek out this hard-won knowledge, we owe it to the people who
took the time to record their experiences to try to carry on the traditions and follow their examples—to be
the promising children of these noble parents.