The little prince or the fox
Posted to LinkedIn on 2026-06-15. The text below is the post as published.
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I thought I was the little prince until I realized I might be the fox. This is a story about becoming a mentor.
Twenty-some years ago, a summer with one learner changed how I understand mentoring. He was brilliant, curious, and away from home and college. I was on my own turf, with real power over his immediate trajectory.
I wanted to honor the asymmetry between us with special care. So I did what felt like integrity: I thought out loud with him. I made interesting mistakes in front of him. I showed him that a person with standing could work at the edge of what they knew without shame.
Shortly after that summer, I took up an internal monologue with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable of the fox in Chapter 21 of Le Petit Prince. Did my role as mentor resemble that of the little prince? He sits in paced patience, allowing the fox to take the risk of getting closer. The fox calls this apprivoiser — “taming” in most translations, though “gentling” is closer. Taming or gentling means creating ties. Patience, proximity, rites. It makes you unique to each other in all the world. Then the fox requests it, knowing the prince will leave, knowing the fox will weep.
For years, I assumed the answer was yes: I was the little prince. Gently inviting the learner closer, incrementally, safely.
At the dawn of my second career, I have reimagined myself as the fox. The one who engineered the conditions. Who understood before my learner did what the ties would mean. Who tended that asymmetric relationship with more care — and more concealed power — than I had ever fully reckoned.
That realization was its own transformation. What mutualized it and made it fully real was learning, years later, that he experienced that summer the same way. I knew the experience was extraordinary. I later learned that he thought so too.
That pivotal summer became a lens I have carried across dozens of mentoring relationships since. He and many others have gone on to do good things with data.
The fox’s secret, delivered at parting: what is essential is invisible to the eye. The weeping and the transformation are the same event.
You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. Not tamed — gentled. But the gentling goes both ways.