that those who do it are part of a long procession, stretching back through time. He taught him what it looks like to fiercely love science. As Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how.”
And that is something that most young people, and maybe all of us, want to be taught. What most people seek in life, especially when young, is not happiness but an intensity that reaches into the core. We want to be involved in some important pursuit that involves hardship and is worthy of that hardship. The mentors who really lodge in the mind are the ones who were hard on us—or at least were hard on themselves and set the right example—not the ones who were easy on us. They are the ones who balanced unstinting love with high standards and relentless demands on behalf of something they took seriously. We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice.
In this way, a lot of what mentors do is to teach us what excellence looks like, day by day. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness.” Or, as Sir Richard Livingstone put it, “The most indispensable viaticum for the journey of life is a store of adequate ideals, and these are acquired in a very simple way, by living with the best things in the world—the best pictures, the best buildings, the best social or political orders, the best human beings. The way to acquire a good taste in anything, from pictures to architecture, from literature to character, from wine to cigars, is always the same—be familiar with the best specimens of each.”
By thrusting us face-to-face with excellence, mentors also induce a certain humility. They teach us how to humbly submit to the task. The natural tendency is to put oneself at the center of any activity. To ask, How am I doing? That question is fine to ask once. But it becomes paralyzing if you ask it all the time. A pitcher who is thinking about how he is pitching cannot pitch well. His focus is on self, not the task. “In any hard discipline, whether it be gardening, structural engineering, or Russian,” the philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford writes, “one submits to things that have their own intractable ways.”
He illustrates the point by citing Iris Murdoch: “If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.”
Mentors also teach how to deal with error. As you get more experienced, you get a lot better at recognizing your mistakes and understanding, through experience, how to fix them. Mentors give us a sense for how to do the second and fourth and tenth drafts, and, in the process, they give us the freedom to not fear our failures, but to proceed with a confidence that invites them, knowing they can be rectified later on. One of the things good writing mentors do, for example, is to teach you not to be afraid to write badly. Get the first draft out even if it’s awful. Your ego is not at stake.
Finally, mentors teach how to embrace the struggle—that the struggle is the good part.
William James once visited Chautauqua, which, then as now, was a wonderful village in upstate New York built around a summer ideas and music festival. It has the sort of a calm, elevated atmosphere that has been described as the PBS audience at prayer. At first, he was utterly pleased by it. “I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week,” James recalled, “held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.” And yet when he left the village and returned to the real world, he felt a great sense of relief. The order within Chautauqua, he wrote, was “too tame, this culture too second-rate,