5 Life Lessons I Learned from My Amazing, Diverse, and Sometimes Crazy Mentors
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When a person succeeds, he or she will often point back at a specific mentor in their life: a teacher who believed in them, a parent who was always supportive, or a boss early on in their careers. These stories are often beautiful and touching.
My story is different. I grew up seeing no one in my family nor town whom I wanted to be like. I started traveling very young and met many adults during the first eighteen years of my life but I still found no one in particular to guide me. So I turned to books. I read voraciously. Books were (and still are) my mentors.
Through books, I learned success, love, life lessons, valuable history lessons, and diversity that I would never have had access to in real life. I read the words of Nobel Prize winners, ex-convicts, people who had suffered terribly, and billionaires. Tell me what you’ve read, and I’ll tell you who you are. Books play a huge role in forming young and old minds alike. It is sad for me to hear about a decline in reading today because I know the power of it firsthand.
Here are some of the key lessons my book mentors taught me (and continue to teach me):
1/ True Courage Isn’t Always Rewarded At the Moment But Will Never Be Forgotten. Truth and Justice Always Triumphs in the End
The history books are tainted in blood. Unfair treatment has always occurred. Books taught me about people who went through incredible injustice yet showed pure character. Their testimonies to the wrongs they suffered are priceless lessons for future generations that must never be forgotten.
Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
-Courage: Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
-Injustice: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz and A Young People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
-Hope: The Diary of Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel
