I’ve never had a mentor.

I don’t think I’ve missed out. I’ve had heroes. Men and women whose lives I have studied from a distance. People whose example has reached me through books, speeches, biographies, fragments.

Mentorship could be rare, and expensive. Heroes are different. They live their lives in public. They leave behind a trail for anyone willing to look closely.

One of mine has long been Abraham Lincoln.

In my twenties, I was drawn to the myth. The self-taught lawyer. The rise from a log cabin to the White House. The Emancipation Proclamation. The face carved into stone. The man on the currency. The secular saint of American democracy.

But in my forties, I find myself less interested in the monument and more interested in the man. Especially now.

A few years ago, I found myself fired, burnt out, cast adrift, and in my early forties having to begin again. It was humiliating, frightening, and disorienting. The imagined line of my life had broken. Whatever story I had been telling myself about progress, achievement, and becoming had stopped making sense.

Strangely, that is when Lincoln became more useful to me. Not Lincoln the marble figure. Lincoln the failed man.

By his mid forties, Lincoln’s greatness was far from inevitable.

If his biography had ended there, he would not have belonged to history in any meaningful way. He would have been remembered, if at all, as a failed congressman, a disappointed politician, and a competent prairie lawyer who never quite became what he seemed to want to be.

He had known poverty. He had almost no formal schooling. He had taught himself by reading whatever he could find. He had been beaten by his father for reading when there was physical work to be done. He had lost elections. He had backed political projects that collapsed. He had broken an engagement and fallen into a depression so severe that friends feared he might take his own life.

This is the Lincoln who interests me.

Not because suffering is noble in itself. Much of it is simply awful. Not because failure secretly guarantees greatness. It doesn’t. Plenty of people suffer and are simply wounded by it. Plenty of people fail and are made smaller, more bitter, more defended.

What matters is what Lincoln did with the wound.

Joshua Wolf Shenk, in Lincoln’s Melancholy, structures Lincoln’s life in three stages: fear, engagement, and transcendence.

The first stage was fear. Not ordinary fear. Not the useful kind that tells you to step back from danger. Shenk means something closer to the old idea of melancholia: fear and sadness without clear cause, or out of all proportion to the cause.

Lincoln lived with this for much of his life.

At his lowest point, after public failure and private heartbreak had converged, he was not merely disappointed. He was undone. His friends removed knives and razors from his room. He could barely eat or sleep. He later wrote to a friend, “I must get better or die.”

But in that same darkness, another thought remained alive in him. He could not bear the idea of leaving the world no better than if he had never lived. Even in his fear, there was still a claim upon him. He did not yet know what form it would take. He did not yet know where his ambition would land. But some part of him still believed his life had work to do.

That belief did not cure him. It did not make the pain vanish. But it gave him a reason to keep moving.

The second stage was engagement.

This was the long, unglamorous middle of Lincoln’s life. The period when he turned back toward the world without any guarantee that the world would make room for him. He returned to work. He rebuilt his legal career. He recommitted to the woman he had hurt. He tried to restore his honour, not as a public performance, but as a private necessity. He also studied with a seriousness that is almost frightening. Philosophy, science, history, literature, poetry, drama, political thought. To sharpen his reasoning, he read Euclid deep into the night.

This was not self-improvement in the modern sense. It was not optimisation. It was not a routine. It was not a personal brand. It was a man trying to make himself equal to a life he could not yet see.

Viktor Frankl argued that meaning does not always bring calm. Sometimes it creates tension. The tension between who we are and who we are being asked to become. Between what has already been achieved and what remains unfinished. Lincoln lived inside that tension.

He had no clear path back to public life. No guarantee that his ambition would ever find a worthy object. But he kept increasing the ‘tension’. Husband. Father. Lawyer. Reader. Thinker. Citizen.

He did not yet know what his life was for, but he kept preparing himself as though one day it might be asked of him.

Then slavery became the question that called him back.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act threatened to reopen the spread of slavery into new territories, Lincoln found the moral purpose his ambition had been searching for. His private conviction met public crisis. All those years of study, discipline, failure, , humour, grief, and moral seriousness suddenly had somewhere to go.

“If slavery is not wrong,” he later wrote, “nothing is wrong.”

From that point, Lincoln’s ambition changed shape. It did not disappear. He was still ambitious. Fiercely so. But his ambition was no longer merely personal. It had been taken up into something larger than himself.

He could lose a Senate race and still keep working for the cause. He could step aside when his candidacy risked splitting the anti-slavery vote. He could endure disappointment because the work had become more important than his own advancement.

The great transformation in Lincoln was not that he stopped wanting to matter. It was that he found something worthy of that desire.

The third stage was transcendence.

This is the Lincoln we recognise. The Lincoln of the presidency, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the second inaugural address. The Lincoln who seems to belong to history more than to ordinary life.

But this Lincoln did not appear out of nowhere.

Without fear, there is no depth. Without engagement, there is no discipline. Without those long obscure years of study, failure, grief, work, marriage, fatherhood, law, reading, and moral argument, there is no transcendent Lincoln.

The greatness was not separate from the earlier struggle. It was formed by it. His suffering softened him toward human weakness. It made him more patient with frailty, more alert to sorrow, more able to hold contradiction in others because he had lived with contradiction in himself.

But his suffering also hardened something in him. Not his heart, but his resolve. It gave him the capacity to endure. To be misunderstood. To be hated. To carry impossible burdens without turning entirely bitter or vain. That combination is rare.

There is a cheap way to talk about purpose that makes it sound like a branding exercise. Find your why. Follow your passion. Become the best version of yourself. It all sounds clean and marketable and slightly nauseating. Lincoln’s life suggests something harder.

Purpose may not arrive as clarity. It may arrive as burden. It may come only after humiliation has stripped away some of your vanity. It may require years of invisible preparation. It may ask you to keep going long after the old story of your life has failed.

Perhaps that is why heroes matter. Not because we should compare ourselves to them directly. That way lies madness and vanity. There will be no statues of me. My face will not be appearing on currency.

But admiration is not delusion. To admire a life is to ask: what pattern is being revealed here? What did this person do with fear, failure, ambition, sorrow, and responsibility? What can I borrow from their example without pretending to be them?

From Lincoln, I borrow this: a life can look over before it has begun its real work.

The years that feel like delay may be formation. The failures that feel like evidence against you may become part of your education. The wound you would rather not have may become one of the ways you recognise the suffering of others.

The ambition that once made you restless may, if disciplined by moral purpose, become useful.

I still don’t have a mentor. But I have this image of Lincoln in his forties, obscure, disappointed, melancholic, studying by lamplight, trying to become equal to a future he could not yet see. Thats image that helps

Because sometimes the task is not to know exactly where your life is going. Sometimes the task is to stay in formation. To keep working. To keep reading. To keep your promises. To stay close enough to the world that when the right burden appears, you recognise it.

Without fear, Lincoln may never have developed depth. Without engagement, he may never have developed discipline. Without both, there would be no transcendence.

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NEW PODCAST ALERT

In this episode, of the Finding Meaning in Work Podcast, I speak with Suji Sanjeevan, the co founder of BrandScent and Light and Glow

We talked about…

About Suji

Suji Sanjeevan is a fragrance innovator, entrepreneur and co founder of Light and Glo and BrandScent, where science, psychology and storytelling collide to create brands people genuinely remember. With a clinical background and an instinct for consumer behaviour, she has built businesses that challenge the traditional idea of fragrance, transforming scent from a product into a strategic brand tool.

What began at a dining table evolved into national retail, global conversations and partnerships spanning retail, sport, hospitality and corporate. From boardrooms to stadiums, Suji’s work sits at the intersection of emotion, memory and experience, proving that the most powerful brands are not always the loudest, they are the ones people feel.

Alongside entrepreneurship, Suji serves as Chair of the Victorian Small Business Ministerial Council, advocating for founders and the realities of modern business. She is passionate about helping early stage businesses think bigger, refine faster and build brands with real cut through