Being at the receiving end of taking advice from those who are about the same level as you hits very different compared to someone who's a bit far ahead of you giving advice.
For the latter, the relatable-ness can be quite ethereal even though it may make perfect sense on the surface. I don't have much of a mentor within physical proximity that I can shadow and learn from in real-time.
So much of my learnings in this domain happened via indirectly over the interwebs selectively downloading information that resonates and then puzzling the pieces with direct experience.
In terms of resonance, I can discern a pattern where mentors sell the dream against the backdrop of the present reality, that is from a mentee's perspective, of course. As paradoxical as it may sound, I don't think anyone can really lock in on the present reality without plugging into one form of dream or another.
Dreams are fuels to live in reality in a specific direction, without them, we might have to accept things as they are.
The gap between the two, i.e dream vs reality, is more subjective than I'd like to admit as previously I thought mentors had some objective map of the territory.
The thing is their reality is my dream and their dream is probably a reality that I've yet to conceptualize, which creates this interesting dynamic of someone five steps ahead tells you to "just do the work" or "stay consistent," they're operating from a baseline that already includes capabilities you're still building.
On the other side of the so, advice from peers carries a different weight. It's raw, unoptimized, still dripping with the struggle. At least for me, hearing a peee at my level saying "this worked for me," gives a lot added substance that I can trace the exact path they took to get there and more or less replicate. It's not a lot of fresh work to do.
Way of the synthesizer
The internet makes us all autodidacts by necessity, which I'm beginning to notice creates this illusion of proximity on the flip side of the coin. I'm absorbing frameworks from people whose context I can't fully inhabit. And maybe that's fine and the work is learning to metabolize wisdom across different altitudes.
What I'm trying to figure out is how much of mentorship is about the advice itself versus the permission structure it creates?
Because sometimes I don't need someone to tell me what to do, just need someone whose mere existence proves a path is possible as that's more than enough to coordinate a system around that for my reality.
And in the absence of that physical proximity, you have to build your own composite mentor. A mixture of internet wisdom, direct experience, and pattern recognition. The downside is it's messier, slower, more prone to dead ends. But it's also weirdly honest. No one's reality gets overly put on a pedestal when you're assembling it yourself from fragments.
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