Mentorship

One of the most impactful things to do in your early adult life to seek mentorship. People that know a bit more about how the world works than you, who can guide you on your journey towards bending reality to your will.

Finding good mentors is hard.

There’s not really a playbook for finding. Often times your mentors will be assigned to you through the serendipity of life. Beyond your own choosing. Maybe a successful aunt or uncle. Or a superior at one of your early jobs. Perhaps you meet them through school or university.

More often in our internet world, people get “mentorship” in a parasocial format. You follow them on Twitter or hear them in a podcast and heed their advice, and they don’t know you exist. It’s a one-to-many relationship.

But in my opinion that’s not really mentorship at all. That’s just having role models. Which is very different. Naval Ravikant isn’t your mentor, he’s a role model.

A proper mentorship is a real, active, two-way relationship. It can be formal or informal — in the world of entrepreneurship the concept of ‘formal mentorship’ is more widespread than many other places, which I’m grateful for. When you raise money for a startup you often seek out formal advisors and give them equity in your company in exchange for their advice.

Ultimately, a proper mentorship is what you must seek out. Because there is magic in learning first-hand, pragmatically, from someone who has been where you’re going and can explain the path to get there. Can explain the peaks and valleys they experienced on their way. Can listen to your pitfalls and pains and help you address and act on them.

Mentors can take many different forms. And often the best forms are different than you think.

It’s funny, many young people assume that a good mentor must be someone much older and wiser than you in order to give good, actionable advice. Like Gandalf and Frodo. And there is certainly something special about finding an elder to guide you.

But in my experience, the best mentors are often actually people who are just a few years ahead of you, not decades. My most treasured mentor relationships are with smart, successful startup founders in my space who are only bit further along than I am.

These people can give the best advice because they are the closest to your position. They have recently been where you are, and they’ve found a way beyond. They’ve experience the same challenges as you first-hand. And the freshly know the best (and worst) paths to overcoming those challenges.

Older mentors experienced a different world than you are in today. The older the more different. And in some settings and scenarios this is good, but if you’re looking for actionable, tactical, pragmatic advice about what to do now and how to do it, there can be strong disconnects.

Other times the next best mentors can be people who are at the same stage as you, or people who are a bit further who have failed on the path. You learn a lot from people worrying about the same problems as you — about how they are thinking, what they think differently, how your thougths compare.

And with people who have failed you learn a lot too, because they generally have strong opinions and learnings about what NOT to do. And often times learning from the perspective of risk can be the most helpful, because failure is often the best teacher.

You must fail to learn. You must fail a LOT. You may trust a mentor who has seen nothing but success. But you should never trust a mentor who have never failed. Because they won’t be able to properly warn you about what to avoid.

Lastly, mentorship is not a one way street. In fact, the act of being a mentor can actually be more rewarding than being the mentee. This may sound counterintuitive — how can the person shilling the advice be the one who gains more?

In reality you tend to learn more by teaching. And you tend to receive more by giving. The world is funny in that way, and beautiful. You don’t have to believe in karma to understand it — karma is one of those beliefs that has pretty minimal downside; if you believe that putting out good brings good back (and that putting out bad brings bad back) you are more likely to experience it generally.

So there you have it. Find some mentors. Seek them out actively. And when the time comes, become one.

Peace,

Ramsey