This blog will probably contain more than just tech. Blogs tend to be personal and the author’s ego typically shines through. So it is quite probable my other interests in life will also appear here. I make no secret of my love for mythology, and one of the books I most enjoyed reading was The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. There, he details The Hero’s Journey, also known as the Monomyth. This has, of course, no direct relationship with Machine Learning or Blockchain, but it is all about Journeys, and that is the theme of this blog.
Not all journeys are the same, and Campbell’s monomyth has been supplanted, or so I’ve read (I don’t claim any expertise in this field). But while that may be true in academic research, it is surely not in the realm of popular culture, and we keep seeing its archetypes and structures being used, reused, re-hashed and recombined in countless books and films, the most famous of which are, probably, the Star Wars saga.
All of that to say that today I’m going to talk about an early figure in the monomyth: Mentors. Why, you may ask? Shouldn’t I be getting along with the useful stuff that I keep promising, i.e. some technical material? Indeed I should, I know, but I have been challenged, and I decided to comply. It is also an opportunity to explain why I have a category called The Journey in this blog.
The answer to the latter is that I intend to make a parallel of my journey with the phases of the monomyth. I expect there to be a few meta-posts like this and the previous ones, framing this learning process into an adventure and identifying some stages with key points in the Hero’s Journey. Such posts will typically be categorized as part of The Journey. My first posts referred the Call to Adventure, made a brief allusion to my Refusal of the Call, and then to my accepting the challenge and crossing the Threshold to the adventure world. I have not yet identified a proper Threshold Guardian, but I have a few ideas of what that might be. Right about this time, in the monomyth, the Hero receives help from a Mentor, someone that unveils the rules of the adventure world and gives some sort of supernatural help to guide the hero in the beyond. Popular and obvious mentor figures are Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but if you want to go back to the origins, you’ve got Mentor himself (or rather, Athena disguised as Mentor), where the name for this figure comes from, in the Odyssey; or in the tale of Perseus, Athena again guiding the Hero to where he can find magical objects necessary for his journey.
So, the question is, do I have a mentor in this journey?
I believe I do. At least for some part of it. I’ve been following a course on how to create a blog, and make it successful. I haven’t seriously dabbled in blogs before, and I thought this finally is the time, so I’d better take some guidance. The instructor is John Sonmez, founder of Simple Programmer, who challenged me to write about it. I really don’t like to come out with a post this early, when my blog is still so devoid of content, and sound like I’m making a cheap promotion of someone else’s business. I don’t want to be known as a spammer, after all. But fair is fair, I’m taking something from John’s work and it’s only good karma to help back (about the same way that an ant will help an elephant carry its load, but still… ).
Also, I have been watching John’s videos more regularly as I go, and I find him knowledgeable, approachable and humble despite his success, which counts for much in my book. That turned my initial scepticism into confidence that I can learn many things from him. Signing up for John’s Blog Development Course was a consequence of this, and counts as my initial magic sword, if you like it. I am totally inexperienced in what comes to building a website or a blog. I much prefer working in the back-end and worrying about algorithms and their complexity rather than user experience and complex interactions dictated by random user actions. So I needed something to guide me. This course was convenient and free, being delivered by email over 3 weeks. So it was really a no-brainer. But because John includes homework in each session, it also has something of a motivation for the me to carry on. It all depends on the student, of course, but that is the same with every endeavour you take. Each lesson is short, has a well-defined objective and gives you time to get things done before the next time. It’s also an effective way of getting the task done: if you follow the homeworks, you will have a working published blog midway-through.
In the end, setting up and writing the blog is the easiest part of my project. It is also the scariest, though, and that is why I count it as my threshold. Creating it, publishing it and writing the frank posts talking about my goal has opened my intentions to the world and declared a target, thereby setting up the possibility of public failure. Now, isn’t that an exciting prospect? 😕
Well, it is something to keep me going, to challenge me. This course has given me signposts, boundaries on the road to remind me I don’t need to do it all at once. Persistence, not perfection, is the key.
For now, though, enough talk. I’ll go back to the road. I hope to meet you along the way.