Mentors Alive and Dead: What Virgil Abloh Taught Me About Learning in the Age of the Internet
I don’t remember exactly when I first watched Virgil Abloh’s lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design. What I do know is that I think about it at least once a week, and that it remains one of the single pieces of content that has most shaped me — personally and professionally.
The DONDA Era
For me, Virgil Abloh was always surrounded by an aura of creativity. I first became aware of him during the DONDA era — Kanye West’s creative collective. This was the time of The Life of Pablo, when Kanye, Pharrell Williams, Virgil, and a constellation of other creatives were reinventing what merch could be, what a tour could feel like, what hype meant as a cultural force.
They lit the fire of the hypebeast era, and I lived through it as a teenager. I still remember it with admiration. Not for the shoes or the limited drops — for the audacity of treating every medium as a canvas and every product as a creative statement.
But beyond Virgil’s physical work — the collaborations, Off-White, his tenure at Louis Vuitton — I’m a deep admirer of him as a thinker. And there’s one idea from his Harvard lecture that changed how I approach learning entirely.
The Idea: Mentors Don’t Have to Be Alive
Virgil’s argument was disarmingly simple:
You need mentors. You need ongoing dialogues with them. But those mentors don’t have to be your friends. They don’t have to live in your city. They don’t even have to be alive.
When I first heard this, something unlocked.
Growing up, my access to mentors was limited by geography. The people I could learn from were the people I could physically be around — teachers, family, neighbors. Brilliant people, many of them. But a small sample, bounded by the accident of where I happened to live.
Virgil’s reframe dissolved that boundary. A mentor isn’t someone who knows your name. A mentor is someone whose thinking you return to — whose work you study, whose decisions you try to understand, whose voice you carry into rooms they’ll never enter.
By that definition, my grandmother is a mentor. She’s no longer alive, but I still think about how she approached problems — with patience, with stubbornness, with an absolute refusal to be intimidated by things she didn’t yet understand. That’s mentorship. The fact that I can’t call her doesn’t diminish it.
My Collection
Since that lecture, I’ve deliberately built a collection of mentors. Most of them don’t know I exist. Some never will.
For technology and programming: I learned to build with React by watching Sonny Sangha. I learned DevOps from Mischa van den Burg. Countless YouTube tutorials, blog posts, and open-source contributions from strangers who’ll never know the impact they had.
For discipline and resilience: Jocko Willink. His framework for ownership and accountability has influenced how I lead teams and how I handle failure. Not because I want to be a Navy SEAL, but because the principle — “there are no bad teams, only bad leaders” — applies to engineering organizations as directly as it applies to military units.
For creativity and decision-making: Virgil himself. When I face a creative tension — two valid approaches, no obvious right answer — I sometimes ask myself: How would Virgil think about this? Not romantically. Not as hero worship. Just as a practical exercise: based on what I know of his work and his thinking, what analogy can I draw? What pattern can I borrow?
Sometimes the analogy resolves the tension. Sometimes it doesn’t. But the act of consulting a mental model of someone you admire — even someone you’ve never met — is a form of thinking that I find genuinely useful.
The Warning: Don’t Collect Too Many
Here’s the caveat, and it’s important: don’t try to have too many mentors.
The internet is infinite. For every topic, you’ll find two experts who disagree completely. One mentor will tell you to specialize. The next will tell you to generalize. One will say ship fast. The other will say ship right.
If you try to follow everyone, you’ll follow no one. You’ll oscillate between contradictory advice and mistake that oscillation for learning.
My advice: treat your digital mentors the way you’d treat mentors you know in person. Pick a few. Trust them. Go deep. You’ll eventually encounter the other side of every argument — the counterpoint, the trade-off, the nuance — and you’ll realize there’s rarely a clean answer. But the important thing is always to advance: in knowledge, in practice, in building.
It doesn’t have to be easy. It just has to move forward.
The Internet Made This Possible
There’s something magical about the era we’re living in, and I don’t think we appreciate it enough.
A kid in any city in the world can watch the same Harvard lecture I watched. Can learn React from the same tutorials. Can read the same books, study the same open-source codebases, absorb the same mental models from the same brilliant people.
Geography used to determine the ceiling of what you could learn. The internet removed that ceiling. Not perfectly — access, language, and economic barriers still exist — but fundamentally, the constraint shifted from where you are to how curious you are.
Virgil Abloh understood this before most people did. His entire career was built on cross-pollination — architecture influencing fashion, music influencing design, engineering influencing art. He didn’t stay in one lane because the best ideas live at intersections.
An Invitation
This isn’t advice. It’s an invitation.
Find the people — alive or dead, famous or obscure, in your field or outside it — whose thinking makes you feel less alone in the work you’re doing. Study them. Return to them. Let their ideas collide with yours and see what emerges.
Have affection for your mentors. Not in a parasocial, unhealthy way — but in the way you’d have affection for a good book that you keep on your nightstand. Something you return to. Something that reminds you why you started.
Especially now. Especially in this magical era of the internet, where the best teachers in the world are one search away, and the only thing standing between you and their lessons is the decision to press play.
Diego Jiménez Vergara — Builder, student, collector of mentors. Mexico City.