r/mentors • u/VIGIILANTEE • 4h ago
Offering Seneca's advice for when you don't have a mentor yet: borrow one
Seneca gave a friend a piece of advice that's easy to miss because it sounds almost too simple: if you don't have someone real to learn from yet, pick someone whose character you actually admire, living or dead, known to you personally or only through their work, and keep them in mind as a kind of standard. Not a fantasy, a measuring stick. Before a hard decision, ask what that person would actually do, not as wishful thinking, but as a real check on your own judgment. His reasoning was practical, not sentimental. He said you can't straighten something crooked without a ruler to measure it against. Left alone with just your own instincts, it's easy to drift without noticing, lower the bar slowly, rationalize the shortcut. A mentor, even an imagined one built from someone you respect, gives you something external to measure against when your own judgment is the thing in question. This obviously isn't a replacement for an actual mentor, a real relationship where someone can see your specific situation and push back on you directly beats an imagined one every time. But for the stretch before you find that person, or in the moments a real mentor isn't available, Seneca's version is a workable stopgap, not pretend wisdom, just borrowed standards until you build your own or find someone to learn them from directly. Who's the person you already do this with, even if you've never called it that? Someone whose imagined reaction you check your own choices against.