The Anti-Guru

“A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.” – Alexander Pope

When I was in high school, I took an introductory course on HTML. When I put together my first little website with my email address and a picture, I was quite pleased with myself. “Wow, I’ve really got this Internet thing figured out,” I thought.

It seems silly now, but at the time I thought myself somewhat of a guru, at least among my friends. In my little world of one, I was. But in the world all around me, millions of people were far more skilled than I was. The more I started to learn about it, the more I realized how true that was.

The beautiful thing about knowledge is that the more of it you get, the more you realize how little you actually have. The great risk of guru-dom is that:

If you think of yourself as one, you aren’t, and
If you follow one, you’re getting a fraction of the knowledge available to you.

Be very wary of anyone who calls himself a guru or tries to tell you he has the answer to your problem. Be just as wary of putting faith in someone who everyone else calls a guru.

The appeal of outsourcing your own thought and discovery to someone who promises to make life easier is great. And when everyone around you agrees on the answer it’s even greater. You’ve got all the solutions and I can stop looking for them? Sounds great! But the cost—in the long run—is much greater.

Instead, ask questions like “Why should I listen to you?” and “How do you benefit if I do what you tell me to?”

The information you gain when you seek answers for yourself is only one of the benefits of pursuing them. What you build in the mean time is a sense of self-reliance—a strengthened belief that you can count on yourself to figure things out in a way that’s best for you.

And that’s a valuable thing.

Don’t ever let a guru steal that from you. More importantly, don’t ever become one. The minute you do is the minute you’ve stopped learning.

Are you still learning? How do you avoid the guru-trap?

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Image by: PIX-JOCKEY