My best mentor is a mechanic - and he never left the sixth grade. By any competency measure, he doesn't have it. But the perspective he brings to me and my life is, bar none, the most helpful.
Interpretation
True wisdom can come from unexpected sources, not just formal education.
This quote highlights the idea that valuable insights and mentorship can come from individuals regardless of their academic background. The speaker values the unique perspective and practical wisdom that their mechanic mentor provides, showcasing that life experiences often offer the deepest lessons, far beyond conventional metrics of competence and education.
In practice
In a graduation speech emphasizing unconventional learning.
Inexperienced personal development teachers always tell you to visualize, but often in a tragically limited way. They tell you to visualize nothing but victory. But high-achievers know that it's even more important to visualize themselves at the point where they want to quit, and then see themselves working through the struggle.
Raise your ambition beyond where you're capable of now. There's nothing about my hometown that said I'd be working with Fortune 50 CEO's, Olympians, at the highest level.
To be gentle and kind, modest and truthful, to be full of faith and integrity, doing no wrong is of God; goodness sheds a halo of loveliness around every person who possesses it, making their countenances beam with light, and their society desirable because of its excellency. They are loved of God, of holy angels, and of all the good earth, while they are hated, envied, admired, and feared by the wicked.
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
'Grace' is basically a death prayer. Not something of sorrow, but of just casting away any fear of death. No relief will come - you really just have to stew in your life until it's time to go. But sometimes, somebody else's faith in you can do wonders.
People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.
A wise man told me don't argue with fools. Cause people from a distance can't tell who is who.
To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.
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