Mentors are described and depicted often as a late middle age or elderly person who has achieved a higher wisdom, has a calm demeanor and even calmer voice, and an aura of near-perfection through their life experiences.  Some modern day variants include dynamic almost middle age businesspeople or successful entrepreneurs who are active, engaged and dynamic.

There’s a lesser known type that has never been ‘anointed’ the moniker ‘mentor’ because of their socially and economically low-brow status. These are the invisible people who know where the hidden doors are and who have close relationships with the corresponding gatekeepers who jealously guard the mysterious subculture worlds. With respect to personality they are any one or more of the following: quirky, non-conformist, street smart, edgy, rough around the edges, sometimes even anti-social, and rascally.

And they like you. They respect your predictable vanilla way of life and don’t want to change you, only to educate you in ways you’ll never find in books.  They want you to hang with them to be an actual witness and get the vibe of different worlds.

My personal experiences included my introduction to places of NYC like Soho and the East Village during the raw pre-gentrification era, places where the general population dare not tread.  The street education process was intellectual and spiritual in how to go about exploring new worlds and whether to witness, experience or embrace them.  It enabled me to properly understand the mindset of those subcultures, gain understanding and realize that they had more commonalities with the general vanilla population than you can imagine despite their radically different lifestyles.

Eventually you gain the skills to become a chameleon enabling you to move easily between disparate worlds.  It’s a skill to convincingly temporarily transform yourself wherever you go whether it’s high-brow or low-brow. It’s the ability to walk the walk whether on pristine sandy beaches or on the shattered glass back-alley to an underground club. It also provides the skills to better recognize the actual lifestyles people lead and look past initial appearances.

The downside is that psychologically you’re always performing a delicate dance on the periphery. So be careful not to slip into a world that will consume you from which you may not emerge. Many ‘exotic and foreign’ worlds are extraordinarily seductive yet there’s a significant difference between visiting one and living in one.

Additionally and quite importantly, the challenge is to distinguish between these rascally mentors and the dark elements who deliberately want to corrupt you. The former respects your limits and lets you return to your vanilla world whenever you want taking with you lessons learned while the latter becomes needy and desperate insisting that you change your boring vanilla rituals for something new and exciting.

Copyright Indo-Brazilian Associates LLC 2015.  All rights reserved.

Indo-Brazilian Associates LLC is a NYC-based global advisory service and think tank with connections at the highest levels specializing in international investment, political and security risk assessments. International business is increasingly complex featuring a highly mobile professional class in all corners of the globe. We provide you the tools to successfully negotiate cross-culturally in your global business endeavors. Tell us about your challenges.  We'll get you on the "Short List".

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