The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “If wisdom were offered me on the one condition that I should keep it shut away and not divulge it to anyone, I should reject it. There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.” Think of your workplace as a potluck with each person having their own special recipes and dishes to be shared. In the next chapter, we’ll take that perspective and apply it to the final lesson: how you can give wise counsel to those who seek it.

In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions - do this, not that - because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice - so seductive in its rationality - had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

This is where being a good mentee comes in. You don’t need 100 percent master mentors. Sure, master mentors are great, and if you’ve got some, hang on to them. But all you really need are mentor-capable people from whom you can extract a mentor contribution. It’s surprisingly easy to do. You just have to be the initiator. When you identify someone who you think can serve you as a mentor, find a way to spend some time with the person and direct the conversation to the areas in which you want help. Specifically, ask him not so much to tell you what he’d do as to use his insights and experience to try to help you sort out your own thinking.

I’ve come to believe that wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life—intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty—and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. The really good confidants— the people we go to when we are troubled—are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface

problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they

help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process

of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. All choice involves loss: If you take this job, you don’t take that one. Much of life involves reconciling opposites: I want to be attached, but I also want to be free. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. They prod and lure you along until your own obvious solution emerges into view.” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.248-249)

“Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships, the in- between spaces that are so easy to overlook. How can this friendship or this marriage be nourished and improved? The wise person sees your gifts and potential, even the ones you do not see. Being seen in this way has a tendency to turn down the pressure, offering you some distance from your immediate situation, offering hope.

Getting honest perspectives on your life from people you trust can be very illuminating in your effort to become unstuck. Such trusted observers will almost certainly see things that you can’t.

You may also be able to do something like this yourself by asking, If someone else was telling me this story, what would I think? What would I tell them? This kind of self-distanced reflection can shed new light on old stories.