There is a particular flavor of frustration that comes from looking back at a finished project and realizing that the path you carved to get there was unnecessarily steep, riddled with switchbacks, and littered with the debris of problems you solved that, it turns out, didn’t actually need solving. It is a quiet, humbling moment. You stand at the summit, exhausted, looking over at the well-paved road you could have taken, the one with the gentle slope and the scenic overlooks, and you wonder why on earth you decided to scale the cliff face instead.
The answer, more often than not, lies in the very thing you are most proud of: your intelligence. Being smart is a wonderful asset. It allows you to learn quickly, to connect disparate ideas, and to troubleshoot complex problems with ingenuity. But in the absence of a mentor, this very capability becomes a trap. It convinces you that you don’t need a guide because you can read the map yourself.
And so you begin. You survey the landscape with your keen intellect and you start plotting a course. Because you are smart, you can see the obvious obstacles and you begin to devise clever workarounds. You build your own tools when the ones at hand seem inadequate. You piece together knowledge from books and articles, forming a theoretical framework that seems, at least to you, remarkably sound. The initial progress is intoxicating. You are a pioneer, a self-made expert, blazing a trail through the wilderness of the unknown.
What you fail to see, because no one is there to point it out, is that you are not in a wilderness at all. You are in a well-documented forest, and the path you are so painstakingly clearing is only a few feet away from an established highway. The problems you are solving with such creative brilliance were solved decades ago. The tools you are building from scratch are clunkier, less efficient versions of ones that have been refined over a lifetime of use.
The hard way is not always about making grand, catastrophic errors. More often, it is about the slow bleed of inefficiency. It is spending three days perfecting a solution to a bug that your mentor could have identified as a syntax error in three minutes. It is writing a ten-thousand-word report from scratch when a mentor would have handed you a template they’ve used for years. It is learning the nuances of a negotiation through a painful, costly mistake instead of through a quiet coffee conversation beforehand. Your intelligence lets you solve every single one of these problems eventually, but it also tricks you into believing that the struggle is a necessary part of the learning. In many cases, it is merely a necessary part of the unnecessary struggle.
A mentor acts as a cognitive shortcut, not around the learning, but around the noise. They provide a filter. They look at your brilliant, complex plan and say, “That’s clever, but have you considered this simpler approach?” They don’t just give you answers; they show you which questions are worth asking. They have already internalized the landscape, so they can point out that the dragon you are diligently preparing to slay is actually just a windmill. They save you from your own cleverness, redirecting your energy from inventing solutions to simply applying them. In doing so, they spare you from the most persistent trap of all: the belief that because you can do it the hard way, you should.
