“Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice.”
What's a quest without a Yoda to challenge the hero?
What's a quest without a Yoda to challenge the hero?
"Star Wars" lifted a story line as old as Homer, right down to the sage older adviser for Odysseus, a character named Mentor. For ages since, the stories we tell ourselves about our professional and personal lives leave a role for mentors. Mastery requires finding a master.
Except that Yoda was right. An apprentice is just an apprentice. Yoda had a job to do, training Jedi knights. Eight centuries on he's still at it. Here comes yet another hotshot, young Skywalker. Yoda doesn't need this. When Luke shows up, Yoda thinks, Leia this is not. Yoda plays the fool, toying with this pretty boy who crashed on Dagobah with his pet robot. In the end he agrees to help Luke master the Force. Duty calls.
Mentorship likely will confound me till I reach Yoda's age. In this galaxy, mentors are on bad paper. They mansplain the obvious. Their motives are suspect. They look like Harvey Weinstein. They act like Harvey Weinstein.
And while I've trained a lot of people in a lot of jobs, my work was to teach the ways of journalism or blogging or spreadsheets or databases. A mentor your boss is not. At times I strayed from this mission, though. Once as an editor, I told one of my staffers the way to get ahead faster was to work elsewhere. The staffer left journalism, but not immediately. We're still in touch decades later.
