Mastery (22 page)

The story of Michael Faraday is the ultimate illustration of this alchemical process. His life seemed to progress almost through magic—falling into the one job where he could read books, learn about science, and impress exactly the right person with his notes, leading to a connection to the ultimate mentor, Humphry Davy. But there was a logic behind all of this apparent magic and good fortune. As a young man he possessed an intense energy and hunger for knowledge. A kind of inner radar directed him to the one bookshop in the area. Although it was pure luck that the book
Improvement of the Mind
fell into his hands, it took someone with such focus to recognize immediately its worth and exploit it fully. Under Watt’s guidance, his knowledge became more practical. But that same radar that directed him to the shop and to this book now pointed him somewhere else. The knowledge he had
gained was still too diffused and disconnected. He intuited that the only way to transform it into something useful was to find a living mentor.

Once he secured Davy as his man, he threw himself into the relationship with the same focus that he had brought to everything else. Serving under Davy, Faraday learned all of the secrets of chemistry and electricity that the Master had gleaned throughout his life. He practiced with these ideas in the laboratory—mixing chemicals for Davy and doing his own experiments. In the process, he absorbed Davy’s patterns of thinking, of approaching chemical analysis and experimentation. His knowledge became increasingly active.

After eight years, this interactive dynamic yielded one of the great discoveries of science—the uncovering of the secret of electromagnetism. Faraday’s own studies and what he had learned from Davy became transformed into creative energy, a form of gold. If he had stayed on the path of self-apprenticeship out of fear or insecurity, he would have remained a bookbinder—miserable and unfulfilled. Through the alchemy of intense mentorship he transformed himself into one of the most creative scientists in history.

Certainly religion played an important role in Faraday’s education. Because he believed that everything in the universe was alive with God’s presence, he tended to animate whatever he encountered, including the books he read and the phenomenon of electricity itself. Since he saw these things as alive, he engaged with them on a deeper level, which intensified the learning process. This way of looking at the world, however, transcends religion and contains great power for all of us in our apprenticeships. We too can see the subjects that we study as possessing a kind of vital spirit with which we must interact, and which we must understand from the inside out. As with Faraday, this attitude will intensify our level of engagement with what we are learning.

To initially entice the right Master to serve as your mentor, you will want to mix in a strong element of self-interest. You have something tangible and practical to offer them, in addition to your youth and energy. Before he had ever met him, Davy was aware of Faraday’s work ethic and organizational skills. That alone made him a desirable assistant. Considering this, you may not want to go in search of mentors until you have acquired some elementary skills and discipline that you can rely upon to interest them.

Almost all Masters and people of power suffer from too many demands on their time and too much information to absorb. If you can demonstrate the ability to help them organize themselves on these fronts to a degree that others cannot, it will be much easier to get their attention and interest them in the relationship. Do not shy away from anything menial or secretarial. You want person-to-person access, however you can get it. Once you
establish a relationship, you will find other ways to continually hook them through their self-interest. Try to see the world through their eyes and ask the simple question of what it is they need most. Keeping their self-interest involved will only enhance any emotional connection they feel toward you.

If you work on yourself first, as Faraday did, developing a solid work ethic and organizational skills, eventually the right teacher will appear in your life. Word will spread through the proper channels of your efficiency and your hunger to learn, and opportunities will come your way. In any event, you should not feel timid in approaching Masters, no matter how elevated their position. You will be frequently surprised at how open they can be to serving as a mentor, if the fit is right and you have something to offer. The ability to transfer their experience and knowledge to someone younger often provides them with a great pleasure, akin to parenting.

The best mentors are often those who have wide knowledge and experience, and are not overly specialized in their field—they can train you to think on a higher level, and to make connections between different forms of knowledge. The paradigm for this is the Aristotle–Alexander the Great relationship. Philip II, Alexander’s father and king of Macedonia, chose Aristotle to mentor his thirteen-year-old son because the philosopher had learned and mastered so many different fields. He could thus impart to Alexander an overall love of learning, and teach him how to think and reason in any kind of situation—the greatest skill of all. This ended up working to perfection. Alexander was able to effectively apply the reasoning skills he had gained from Aristotle to politics and warfare. To the end of his life he maintained an intense curiosity for any field of knowledge, and would always gather about him experts he could learn from. Aristotle had imparted a form of wisdom that played a key role in Alexander’s success.

You will want as much personal interaction with the mentor as possible. A virtual relationship is never enough. There are cues and subtle aspects you can only pick up through a person-to-person interaction—such as a way of doing things that has evolved through much experience. These patterns of action are hard to put into words, and can only be absorbed through much personal exposure. In crafts or in sports this is more obvious. Tennis instructors, for example, can only reveal many secrets of their skills by demonstrating things before their pupils’ eyes. Instructors may not in fact be completely conscious of what makes their backhand so effective, but in watching them in action pupils can pick up the pattern and motion, exploiting the power of mirror neurons. But this process of absorption is also relevant to nonmanual skills. It was only through constant exposure to Davy’s thought process that Faraday understood the power of finding the crucial
experiment to demonstrate an idea, something he would adapt later on with great success.

As the relationship progresses you can make this absorption process more conscious and direct, questioning them about the principles underlying their way of doing things. If you are clever, you can be a kind of midwife, getting them to analyze their own creativity for you, and mining all kinds of rich ideas in the process. They are often grateful for the opportunity to reveal the inner workings of their power, particularly to someone they do not perceive as a threat.

Although one mentor at a time is best, it is not always possible to find the perfect one. In such a case, an alternate strategy is to find several mentors in your immediate environment, each one filling strategic gaps in your knowledge and experience. Having more than one mentor has side benefits, giving you several connections and important allies to rely upon later on. Similarly, if your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as temporary mentors, as
The Improvement of the Mind
did for Faraday. In such a case you will want to convert such books and writers into living mentors as much as possible. You personalize their voice, interact with the material, taking notes or writing in the margins. You analyze what they write and try to make it come alive—the spirit and not just the letter of their work.

In a looser sense, a figure from the past or present can serve as an ideal, someone to model yourself after. Through much research and some imagination on your part, you turn them into a living presence. You ask yourself—what would they do in this situation or that? Countless generals have used Napoleon Bonaparte for just such a purpose.

Mentors have their own strengths and weaknesses. The good ones allow you to develop your own style and then to leave them when the time is right. Such types can remain lifelong friends and allies. But often the opposite will occur. They grow dependent on your services and want to keep you indentured. They envy your youth and unconsciously hinder you, or become overcritical. You must be aware of this as it develops. Your goal is to get as much out of them as possible, but at a certain point you may pay a price if you stay too long and let them subvert your confidence. Your submitting to their authority is by no means unconditional, and in fact your goal all along is eventually to find your way to independence, having internalized and adapted their wisdom.

In this respect, the mentor relationship often replays elements from our childhood. Although a mentor can be a man or a woman, he or she often assumes the form of a father figure—there to guide and help us, but sometimes trying to control too much and plot our life for us. He may take any attempt at independence, even later in the relationship, as a personal assault on his
authority. You must not allow yourself to feel any guilt when the time comes to assert yourself. Instead, as Faraday did, you should feel resentful and even angry about his desire to hold you back, using such emotions to help you leave him. It is often best to set up this move earlier on so that you are emotionally prepared to make it. As the relationship progresses, you can begin to slightly distance yourself from the mentor, perhaps taking note of some of his weaknesses or character flaws, or even finding fault with his most cherished beliefs. Establishing your differences with the mentor is an important part of your self-development, whether he is of the good or bad parent type.

In Spanish they say
al maestro cuchillada
—to the Master goes the knife. It is a fencing expression, referring to the moment when the young and agile pupil becomes skillful enough to cut his Master. But this also refers to the fate of most mentors who inevitably experience the rebellion of their protégés, like the cut from a sword. In our culture, we tend to venerate those who seem rebellious or at least strike the pose. But rebellion has no meaning or power if it occurs without something solid and real to rebel against. The mentor, or father figure, gives you just such a standard from which you can deviate and establish your own identity. You internalize the important and relevant parts of their knowledge, and you apply the knife to what has no bearing on your life. It is the dynamic of changing generations, and sometimes the father figure has to be killed in order for the sons and daughters to have space to discover themselves.

In any event, you will probably have several mentors in your life, like stepping-stones along the way to mastery. At each phase of life you must find the appropriate teachers, getting what you want out of them, moving on, and feeling no shame for this. It is the path your own mentor probably took and it is the way of the world.

STRATEGIES FOR DEEPENING
THE MENTOR DYNAMIC

One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.

—F
RIEDRICH
N
IETZSCHE

Although you must submit to the authority of mentors in order to learn from and absorb their power to the highest degree, this does not mean you remain passive in the process. At certain critical points, you can set and determine the dynamic, personalize it to suit your purposes. The following four strategies are designed to help you exploit the relationship to the fullest and transform the knowledge you gain into creative energy.

1. Choose the mentor according to your needs and inclinations

In 1888 the twenty-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright was an apprentice draftsman at the prestigious Chicago firm of Joseph Lyman Silsbee. He had been there a year and was learning much about the business, but he was getting restless. In his mind he could already envision a totally new style of architecture that would revolutionize the field, but he lacked the experience to set up his own practice. Silsbee was a shrewd businessman who saw that his fortune was tied to staying true to the Victorian style of design that was popular with his clients. Wright cringed at what he was being asked to draw; he was learning antiquated design principles that offended him.

Then, out of the blue, he heard that the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan was looking for a draftsman to help finish the drawings for a particular building. It would be dangerous to leave Silsbee after such a short time and burn his bridge there, but working for Sullivan would be infinitely more stimulating for his personal development as an architect. Sullivan’s firm was at the forefront of designing skyscrapers, utilizing the latest advances in materials and technology.

Wright went on a charm offensive to secure the position. He managed to get a personal interview and showed Sullivan some of the more interesting drawings he had done on his own; he engaged him in a conversation about art and philosophy, knowing Sullivan’s own aesthetic predilections. Sullivan hired him for the job, and a few months later made him an apprentice draftsman in his firm. Wright cultivated a personal relationship with him, eagerly playing the role of the son that Sullivan had never had. With his talent and Sullivan’s blessing, he quickly rose to the position of head draftsman in the firm. Wright became, as he put it, “the pencil in Sullivan’s hand.” In 1893 Sullivan fired him for moonlighting, but by then Wright had learned everything he could and was more than prepared to step out on his own. Sullivan had given him in those five years an education in modern architecture that no one else could have provided.

In 1906 Carl Jung was a promising thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist, renowned for his work in experimental psychology and holding an important position at the famous Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich. But despite the apparent success in his life, he felt insecure. He believed that his interest in the occult and strange psychic phenomena was a weakness he needed to work through. He was frustrated that his treatment of patients was often not effective. He worried that his work had no legitimacy and that he lacked a certain rigor. He began to correspond with the founder of the psychoanalytic field, Sigmund Freud, fifty-one years old at the time. Jung
was ambivalent about Freud—he admired, even worshipped him as a pioneer in the field, but he did not like his emphasis on sex as the determining factor in neurosis. Perhaps his aversion to this aspect of Freudian psychology stemmed from his own prejudices or ignorance, and needed to be overcome by talking it out. In their correspondence they quickly developed a good rapport, and Jung was able to question the Master about matters of psychology he did not fully understand.