I was wrong. And two philosophers made me understand it.
Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus, two brothers, spent their lives studying how one becomes an expert. Their model describes five stages, from novice to expert, and along the way it dismantles the self-made myth. The novice follows rules: turn here, wait for this signal, apply the method in this order. It's reassuring, and it's rigid. The expert, at the other end, no longer thinks in rules at all. They've lived through so many situations that they feel the answer before they can even explain it. Ask why they made that choice, and they'll often say “I don't know, it was obvious.” Between the novice and them, there's no shortcut through intelligence alone, nor through talent alone. There are accumulated situations. Thousands of them.
We tell ourselves expertise is earned alone, through trial and error, by living through everything yourself. Dreyfus shows the opposite. What makes the expert isn't the pain of having crossed it all alone, it's the quantity of cases they've internalized. And a case can be borrowed. The whole point of a mentor, a master, an apprenticeship, a tradition, is exactly that: to let you benefit from situations you don't need to live through one by one to draw the lesson. Taking the path others have cleared isn't cheating. It's the oldest mechanism for passing on expertise there is. We've simply forgotten it, from celebrating those who “made themselves,” when no one, ever, made themselves alone.
The hardest part, for me, was accepting that all that time spent wanting to understand everything by myself hadn't made me better. Just slower. While others, less proud, took the marked path, asked the questions I refused to ask, and climbed the ladder twice as fast. It isn't that they were more gifted. They were less burdened by the idea that every rung had to be earned in pain.
Borrowing other people's path isn't skipping stepsValidation stepA stage in a publication's path (draft → review → approved), with rules that gate each transition.. It's climbing them faster, because someone marked the way.
You still walk the path. You simply walk it with a map. The ego says: do it alone, without a map, to earn the right to be proud. Dreyfus answers: the expert is the one who has absorbed the most situations, no matter where they came from.
So the real question isn't how much of the path I walked alone.
It's how many times I refused the one I was offered.