No, You Don’t Need a Mentor: You Need Real Experience

Do you even know what a mentor is??It’s an experienced and trusted advisor.?Do you realize how general that is??I’m starting to get a little pissed off at how people are taking advantage of the term “mentor” in the first place.?It’s one thing to surround yourself with people you can learn from (want to call them mentors? fine).?It’s another to be part of an entire industry that’s now taking this crap too far.?Mentorship programs??WTF is that??Being assigned a mentor??Really??What if that mentor sucks??What is this insane borderline cult of people who are pushing mentorship on the public??It’s no different than these psychotic Facebook ads touting programs that can teach you to scale your business with ease and practically no work.?It’s an illusion.?Before you go out and start seeking a mentor (and God forbid spending money on it) you might want to simply step right into the fire and gain some experience.

Learn by failing, not watching others fail

Any person who’s ever run a business will tell you that failing is one of the biggest?keys to success .?It’s nearly impossible to find a successful person in any walk of life who hasn’t failed an obscene amount of times.?Whether it’s sports, business, entertainment, the biggest names in the world failed miserably before getting their “big breaks.”?And in reality those “big breaks” weren’t breaks at all.?They were a long time coming.?But what good does “shadowing” someone really do??Sure, you get to watch and learn from their experience but it’s?their?experience.?Nothing hits home as hard as when you yourself are the one experiencing the pain.?What do you think is going to teach you better: watching someone get hit in the face or you getting hit in the face??Sure, no one likes to get hit in the face but if you’re the one taking the punches you can be damned sure you’re going to try harder to not get hit the next time around.

Learn by succeeding, not watching others succeed

In the same breath that it’s more important to learn by actually failing rather than watching others fail, it’s just as important to learn by actually succeeding yourself than watching others succeed.?You need to feel what it feels like to accomplish a goal.?You need to see what works and what doesn’t for yourself, not for someone else.?Sometimes the best way to succeed is by learning what?not?to do just as much as it is what?to?do.?However, it’s also important to do more of something when you see that it’s going right, and to keep pushing more of it until it levels off.?It’s nearly impossible to put that into practice without having done it for yourself.

Do you even want a mentor or to just say you have one?

This is a big one that I don’t think enough people even take the time to think about.?I feel like most of the people who have mentors don’t even know why they have one.?They just like to say they have one because they’ve jumped on some bandwagon that only a few people started.?It’s like “well, I’ve done absolutely nothing so far to improve myself or my business, but hey, at least I’ve got a mentor.”?That’s the equivalent of having vanity metrics on social media.?Congrats on having 100,000 empty followers that make you no money and do absolutely nothing for your business or life.?I’m all for having a mentor but it has to be useful to you.?It has to serve a purpose and nothing should extend beyond that purpose.?For those who want to have a mentor, they should be?using?that mentor, not the other way around.

This is all about using your time right

Look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be seeking out the help of others.?Of course not.?I’m not saying you shouldn’t be someone’s apprentice.?That can be an extremely valuable experience.?But the idea of a mentorship “program” just seems quite excessive to me.?What’s more important than anything in this experience is that you’re getting dirty.?That you yourself are in the muck experiencing the things you should be experiencing.?The word “mentor” itself almost feels fake.?It’s as if the experience doesn’t have real life repercussions for you.?And if that’s the case you don’t want to be involving yourself in it.?Having people to look up to is great.?But just?looking?at them isn’t going to get you to where you need to be.