None of my friends ask me for movie reviews. Recommendations, yes. But not reviews. I like to think it's because I don't criticise any movie. It might be the most mundane, and I'll still tell you 'Yeah, it was alright' if you asked me how it was.

I don't do it intentionally. It's just what I take out of movies, I guess. At worst, it is just another implausible story with lots of loopholes. At best, it will make me relate the plot and the dialogues to what I see and experience in everyday life. There is only room for criticism when there is expectation. If you don't know what to expect, it is highly likely that you don't criticise what you see. That's perhaps why I enjoy movies more when I watch them without having seen the trailers or without knowing who the actors are.

I do the same with books and this has it's advantages.

Here's James Altucher talking about mentors:

"If you want virtual mentors, read 200 books in your field of interest. Every 50 books is worth one mentor.

What if there aren't 200 books?

There are. A book about quantum mechanics is a book about painting butterflies. Everything is connected when you filter with what you love."

Whenever I've been very focused about looking for something, I've struggled to draw parallels where they are either hard to see or don't exist at all. And drawing such parallels is sometimes the most interesting. Like looking at Tesla's new features on display and thinking that it has a potential to do to cars what Amazon did to servers. Or like thinking special events in a relationship are like marketing campaigns.

I once wrote a letter to someone explaining how we weren't looking at things the same way despite working with the same facts as I had created a semi-imaginary world around those facts, weaving them into a more cohesive story than what was true in reality, and was chasing that story.

If you think about it, that's what a mentor or a coach is supposed to do to you. They need to take the available facts and weave them into a semi-imaginary but cohesive story that you can then believe in and chase. This is what product managers do with the products they build. This is what artists do with their art.

And it all begins with connecting seemingly unrelated things by filtering with what you love.