You don’t need a mentor. Here’s why.
Everybody wants a mentor.
Someone who can help them “get ahead”. Someone who can show them the shortcuts, give them breaks and move them to the front of the line. The truth is, you don’t need a mentor. You need something that is infinitely more important than a mentor.
“You don’t need a mentor, you need to learn how to be mentored.”
Having a mentor is worthless unless you are able to do something with the wisdom you glean. So, how do you learn to be mentored?
First, you have to really understand and internalize this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that, I learn from him.”
If you are going to squeeze the most out of your short time here on this earth, you are going to have to learn from others and not solely rely on your personal experience.
“Some people say experience is the best teacher. I say experience is the teacher of fools. It’s foolish to learn things by experience that you could learn by observing others.”
In my TEDx Talk, I shared 5 1/2 mentors what popped into my life once I stopped trying to find a mentor and started focusing on seeing the mentor in every human.
The second thing you need to know is how to follow. That’s right. How to follow. If you want to lead, you must first know what it is to follow.
Derek Sivers illustrates this point perfectly from the TED stage:
If you want to find a mentor, look around. There are literally BILLIONS around you. Everywhere you turn, there is someone you can learn from, someone who can help you, someone who can teach you something.