WHY YOU NEED MENTORS

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Mentors Matter Because Most Knowledge is Hard to Write Down

Mentorship is incredibly important and it can shave years off your learning curve. While I’m a big fan of self-education, most knowledge isn’t accessible in books or schools. Instead it’s held tacitly by people with experience. This is as true of business as it is of science, art or sports. It’s just really difficult to write a lot of knowledge down.

Why Mentors are Hard to Get

Unfortunately mentorship is a lot less accessible than reading books or going to school. Books and schooling isn’t always free, but at the very most they just require payment. Most mentors won’t even work for money, so they have to like you and want to see you succeed in order to invest time in you.

By all means, if you have something valuable to offer a potential mentor do it. If you’re a world-class artist, and want to help them design something, go for it. If you’re a fantastic programmer, and can build them a quick widget, make it. But it’s misleading to say that this kind of transactional relationship is anything more than a foot in the door. The real benefit to mentors is getting to see you grow.

The Best Mentors are Friends, not “Mentors”

Finally, nobody who will be a mentor to you will explicitly call themselves a mentor, or respond to that title. They’ll just be a friend or colleague who happens to occasionally give you advice. Drawing attention to the nature of the relationship is often unnecessary and potentially damaging.

Good mentors are friends whom you occasionally ask for advice. Even if the flow of advice is mostly one-way, treat them like friends: not objects of worship or status symbols to be associated with. If you’re good at finding mentors, you probably won’t even think of them as mentors, nor will they think of you as a mentee.



By: Oluwapelumi Atanseiye (@pearlumie_)

source: scotthyoung.

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