You need mentors who you can model your behavior after. It will be hard to become great if your only mentors are your family and people in the church. You must expand your collection of inspirational men.
“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another”
Proverbs 27:17
“And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”
2 Timothy 2:2
“Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance.”
Proverbs 1:5
You will almost never reach the majority of your goals by yourself. Every man who was ever great at his craft started by apprenticing under a master of that same craft. He would study and learn from someone who had lived a full life and had hundreds of practical lessons to pass along to him.
Many men think they can be good enough at a craft by teaching themselves, but this is not so.
Very few men are self-taught masters. Men are also confused about what it means to be self-taught. If you are learning math from a book, you are not self taught, the book is your teacher. If you are not taking guitar lessons but you learn by watching videos online or reading articles and books, you are not self-taught. With your ego you tell everyone that you have “taught yourself”, but you have learned your skill from other men.
To be truly self-taught means you extracted unknown knowledge from the ether. For example, the first person to show that you can calculate an unknown length of one side of a triangle by knowing the length of the other two sides was self-taught because he uncovered the underlying principles on new knowledge. By himself he learned what was not previously known, and was therefore self-taught. Another example would be a man who learns how to tie sailing knots by himself with no book. I understand that this is an extreme definition of “self-taught”, but you are reading this because you are an extremist.
The internet has put dozens of mentors at our fingertips.
So even when we cannot find good role models within the church, that does not excuse us from finding them elsewhere. We can find men from every walk of life who are doing everything that we want to do with our own lives. We can virtually model our life after theirs and live the way we believe is correct.
Your father is not enough of a mentor, you will not learn enough from him. The men in your family are not enough for you to learn many of the most important lessons and skills of life. You cannot limit your mentors to those in your church and immediate family. What you need are men who are living impressive lives, are masters at a craft or who are intelligent. You likely do not have many of those kinds of men in your family. In fact, you rarely have those men in your church.
You need to go outside the church to find mentors.
These men are going to help you improve your life on a non-spiritual level. So for this reason you need to go outside the church to find them. There are very few men in the church who are living impressive lives. Most men have used the Bible to try to justify their lack of ambition and subsequent lack of wealth or any manner of an impressive life. Get some mentors.
If you find mentors in the church, you need a large number of them. Do not limit yourself to just a few people. You must diversify your motivation portfolio.
Mantra
You are who you spend time with.
Application
Use the internet to find masters of whatever craft you want to improve at. There are plenty of good mentors online, and you have to pick the ones that best fall in line with the direction your life is taking. You need to be active in your learning and in the ways you gain knowledge about your career path or skill. Throughout the world there are thousands of mentors for music, leadership, training, building, public speaking, thinking and infinitely more topics.
There is no reason why anyone cannot become a master at any craft they want to in the modern world. And there is also no excuse for ignorance or lack of experience in any field. There are endless lessons and lectures online on any subject matter you could possibly think of. The internet has taken away every excuse from man as to why he is not successful or at least skilled in his personal endeavors.
If we truly are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, we need to start spending time with different people.
There is no reason to hang out with losers and to waste our time. We have been given every possible opportunity to improve ourselves, so let us not squander it by allowing the influences of weak men to shift us towards mediocrity.
Unfortunately this is what commonly happens in the church. Very few men in the church are great at anything. Many christian men call themselves righteous because they are not successful. “I’m a good Christian because I’m poor”, or “I’m not a part of those upper class people who think they are better than everyone”. You mean those upper class people who fund the country you live in? How do you know they think they are better than everyone? Could it be that you simply hate them because they have more material possessions than you? That seems like a silly thing to hate someone over.
You do not want to spend time with people who are of that mentality. They can only drag you down, and you are trying to be excellent at something. So get mentors outside the church.
First, decide what skill you want to develop.
Once you know that, you can single out the best men in the world at that craft and learn from them from whatever resources are available. If they have books, lectures or podcasts you can learn from those. Otherwise you can simply learn from observing those mentors in their element. There is no reason why we cannot learn from anyone we want to.
Get some mentors outside the church.
Learn from men who are great.
Model yourself after the best.
Imitate the masters.
Gain immeasurable skill.
Conduct yourself like men.
