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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.