how important is it to not to mess up your mind?

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I find that during the years, I came to want to learn from certain people intellectually, although I came to "adapt" from them emotionally as well. This messes up my emotions. I am lesser to know what I want, and what I value.

I am wondering how important it is to protect oneself from being "messed up". How can I learn from someone, a skill or whatever, without "adapting" their opinions, emotions, judgments that can destroy me?

You need to know who you are first, and this usually comes from experience.

I think I tend to think things as black and white. There are good elements and bad elements to all people. I don't know how to train myself thinking that way, especially with superiors or people I feel is better than me.

I feel that it's very impotant not to mess up my mind. I need to be choosy about my choice in movies, books and music, and I need to make sure that they're not "out there", like the Austin Powers movies for example.

Nobody is better than you, although some are better in specific areas. Some of them are worth emulating. "Trying on" different emotions and roles can be good. It can bring out parts of you that you didn't know you had. If it seems to fit, walk around in it for a while before you buy it.

If you feel yourself slipping into a role you don't like, balance it out by hanging with different kinds of people.

To the extent possible, have a balanced diet of different kinds of people in your life. But the good kind, not the toxic kind. For example, I have a severe allergy to fascism. For me, there's no safe dosage. Sociopaths tend to make my head spin, too. In general, people who have been caught in the act of deliberately hurting me are to be avoided in future.

On the other hand, mildly annoying people are good exercise. Such as the excessively perky or dramatic. Or religious people who drip inspirational silliness in every conversation. They mean well, and help me to maintain my tolerance for irrational nonsense and superstition.

I have found out that people that appeal to me and that I believe know something that I do not, tend to be very unappealing after a few months. This is probably just me though. I've wasted a lot of time trying to participate with people who turned out to be complete morons. In retrospect the lesson of knowing how frivolous the experience itself was wasn't even worth the trouble, which is saying quite a lot.