Monkeys all the way up - Adults don't exist
That Idol of yours, the guru you so deeply look up to, probably sucks in most things.
Steve Jobs? Delayed 9 months of medical treatment of pancreatic cancer to try a carrot juice diet and acupuncture.
Mozart? Overspent his income, lived miserably in mountains of debt and regularly wrote letters to friends begging for money.
Friedrich Nietzsche? Lost his virginity in a brothel and caught syphilis. He only saw his work sell 300 copies in his lifetime.
Martin Luther King? Had extra-marital affairs with over 40 different women, including spending his last night alive with 2 women and physically attacking another.
Isaac Newton? Spent 30 years of his life writing 1 million words on the pseudoscience of alchemy. (Hidden for years by his heirs because they were too embarrassed to publish it)
Your mentor, your boss, doctors, lawyers, and politicians are all lost. All of them are fumbling around in life, as if trying to put together a large jigsaw: picking one piece, carefully inspecting it, only to realize that this is not the right one, that whole section is wrong and have to redo half the puzzle... again!
It's monkeys all the way up. Some monkeys just spent more time at the puzzle, got lucky to pick the right piece or inspected the pieces more carefully. Still monkeys though.
In most cases, in my experience, monkeys are only focused on putting together their own jiggsaw and will rarely go out of their way to ruin yours. If a monkey tells you to put two pieces together, that clearly (to you) don't belong together, assume that the monkey is just confused and is soon going to have to redo that section of their puzzle. Therefore, assume ignorance before malice.
That jigsaw is also the only thing separating bakers from lawyers: they have different ones. But, crucially, the dynamics that motivate bakers or electricians are the same as those that motivate lawyers and politicians: they all have to move pieces back and forth, try to fit pieces, realize when they have made a mistake and so on. What this translates to in the real world is that the social dynamics that govern human behaviour are the same for every group of people: we are all mostly self-interested and self-centered, prefer those similar to us than those that are different and so on.
