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Yesterday I asked people who subscribe to my weekly digest to recommend some topics they are would be willing to spend a whole week with.
And I got only a trickle of suggestions.
One suggestion was really interesting. It was from a woman who endeavors to play a ‘best friend’ to me with her suggestions.
Let’s not forget, we are at the zenith of the we-generation.
So in her email she suggests that I look differently. She asks: ‘what can you teach to people who aren’t looking for a teacher anymore? I’m not looking for a mentor anymore, I’m looking for a peer.‘
She says she wouldn’t want to talk to anyone who wants to teach her something. Instead she would be looking for people who are where she is at. ‘I would spend a week talking to other people who are in that place.‘
I think there are a lot of religious songs, poems that say the same thing: don’t walk before me, don’t walk behind me, walk with me.
The problem with what she is suggesting, the problem that she invites the ‘wisdom’ of the masses, the definition of truth where many people agree.
And between you and me, between her and me, that is exactly where humanity is at this stage of the 80-year cycle of the pendulum: if many people agree then it must be right.
What is completely discounted in this worldview, because this is a worldview, is that someone can SEE something you can’t.
Or said slightly differently: if you ONLY associate with people who can see what you see, nothing else is available for you.
The rule of 33%
The rule of 33% I learned from Tai, where you spend 33% of your time with people ahead of you. People who can see what you can’t, for whatever reason they see it and you don’t. 33% with people who see what you see. And 33% with people who see even less than you.
But what do you need to be able and willing to follow the 33% rule?
Humility, that is what you would need. Humility means killing the ego, at least temporarily. What arises is fear…
And for a human, arrogant by nature, humility is the hardest way to be.
Without humility you are stuck. Because your insistence that you know, that you see, that you are something instead of no thing prevents you from moving, prevents you from growing, prevents you from learning.
Humility is also hard because it is not a one and done issue: you need to assume humility, surrender to humility nearly moment to moment. The needle measuring your humility can jump wildly between 10% and 100% at the drop of a hat.
Except if you don’t even know you COULD BE humble… like my ‘best friend’ advisor whom I quote. Humility eludes her. Even the notion of it.
Walking WITH YOU is a style.
And it’s a style to silence the innate human arrogance… because if it isn’t just a style of mentoring, then it has no other value than companionship in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Anyway, here is an article I wrote eight years ago… Go read it, please.
