Finding The Right Mentors

The Daily Stoic for 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

I didn’t choose my parents, but if I had, I would probably had chosen the same ones. They could not give me a high status or social position, neither a business or money to live comfortably without needing to work.

However, they give me some things that are better in my mind: love, and knowledge.

Finding The Right Mentors

We live in an age where we can instantly access any source of information imaginable with just some clicks. Internet, the Wikipedia, Social media, Google, open source, free music, forums, blogs, magazines… Everything’s there for us.

While it’s easy to just get what we are offered, we now have a real choice for listening to music we’d have never been able to access in the 80s or 90s, or read thousands of books that are currently out of print. Don’t just open Netflix and passively consume what you are served.

Read, explore, listen, experiment, watch, share.

Today’s stoic excerpt affirms:

“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”

While I don’t agree we owe anything to someone just because this person decided to write a book, compose a symphony or paint an amazing picture, that knowledge is there. Enjoying it is one of the true benefits of our time. And it’s real freedom.

Conclusion

Today’s Daily Stoic, “Finding The Right Mentors”, discusses how in today’s world, we have access to a vast source of knowledge thanks to technology. The author suggests, and I concur, that we should be taking advantage of that. Indeed, a massive world of knowledge lies at the tip of our fingertips. We would be fools to stick to Justin Bieber and 40 Shades of Gray.