CT-Rich
Contributor
CT ... one of my quirky personal beliefs is that there are very few social activities. There are social people. Social people will socialize while engaged in whatever activity, while less social people won't. Same activity, same rewarding feeling for the participants, different amounts of 'social'.
I'm pretty sure I didn't express any of that.
I'm going to be honest and admit I don't know how this connects to the topic, but it is interesting because I have never understood the bizarre hang-up people have with fixing brakes. Every time you drive you are literally one wheel-jerk away from killing people but that's fine, nobody has a hang up there. But the idea that, in your garage with all the time in the world to do a very simple job, you might screw something up and that screw up might get someone killed somehow - that hangs people up. In my language we call that very strange.
On the other hand, when as a child I asked my father why we had to do brake jobs ourselves instead of paying someone like we did to change tires, he told the story of taking his car to a shop to have the brakes done, and the car just not working right afterwards, and how he disassembled a brake and found that the shop had put the brake shoes on backwards. I did my first solo brake job at 9 and have never had a shop service the brakes on any car I've owned. So maybe my perspective is atypical.
Sigh. In psychoblather circles they talk about extroversion where people are energized by social interaction/drained by time alone and introversion where people are drained by social interaction/energized by time alone. What that means in practical terms is that when a person wants to renew themselves by engaging in an activity, some will renew more by being social, and others will renew more by breaking away from the pack.
Now I think it's pretty cool to dismiss introverts as nasty boorish people and tell them they should reflect on their attitude. While we are at it we should tell left handed people to get over themselves and just use their right hands like, well, like right people do. I'm just not sure it's productive. Fun, sure, but I don't think they will take the advice. So yes, I agree, we should do that-it'll be tons of fun, like shooting fish in a barrel. However, if you go back to my post, it wasn't really what I was addressing.
You actually called them "Some people are unpleasant to be around, some people are downright ugly, some people just don't have anyone around who could be a quality mentor." unpleasant and downright ugly may well be an alternative definition of boorish...
My premise is that mentor relationships primarily exist within a broader relationship. Family, friendship, whatever. That doesn't mean there is no such thing as a mentor, or that mentors are worthless because they don't charge. It means the advice to seek a mentor is basically wrong. The advice instead should be to build a social circle that shares your interests. Within such a circle mentoring will happen. Outside that circle...it may happen too, but as I and others have pointed out, because the incentive to mentor is the reward of thinking you are helping instead of something like a genuine interest in the person and their safety/development, it can also horribly misfire and the mentored may not be able to recognize bad advice they are given.
Your dad taught you how to fix the brakes on your car... that is great, I did it once or twice myself. Were there other mechanics in your family confirming that he was giving you sound advice? Or did you get a copy of the manual to make sure that when you did it, you did it correctly? I wouldn't think of doing it today becauseI don't have the expert training or the equipment to turn the drums/ disks myself. When getting advice, you need to A) trust the person and B) use some gauge to measure the value of the advice. Otherwise you are going on a trust-me dive.
There is a fantasy of finding a mentor who takes noobs under her wing and helps them for the joy of helping noobs, and does great good. It's just not the most likely scenario.
People actually do like taking Noobs under there wing... spend some time diving and show some initiative and these people will find you. If you don't show the initiciative, they will not show the interest. If you read in the regional forums, you will find clubs and charter boats that you can become involved with. No one will find you unless you show an interest in being found. You can have "dive" Friends where the common link is diving.
You said that both parties must get something out of the relationship. That is true, but both parties don't necessarily need to contribute diving expertise. They one can be a dive partner in the absence of others or maybe the more experienced diver is paying it forward, helping someone like someone helped them.